In this ERC-funded project, Prof. Beatrice de Graaf (Principal Investigator) and an international team of historians examine the formation of a European security culture as the sum of mutually shared visions on ‘enemies of the states’, ‘vital interests’, and corresponding practices between 1815 and 1914. The project compares seven different security regimes in which Europe engaged globally, stretching across the political and commercial domain, affecting urban and maritime environments, and reaching around the world to the Ottoman Empire and China. These highly dynamic regimes were dictated both by threats (anarchists, pirates, smugglers, colonial rebels) and interests (political, moral, economic, maritime, colonial). Mobilising increasing numbers of professional 'agents' from various quarters – including police, judicial authorities and armed forces – they evolved from military interventions into police and judicial regimes and ultimately contributed to the creation of a veritable European security culture. Uncovering and introducing new historical sources, the project thus pioneers a new multidisciplinary approach to the combined history of international relations and internal policy, aiming to ‘historicise security’. 

Project website: www.uu.nl/securing-europe 

• dr. Joep Schenk
• dr. Erik de Lange
• prof. dr. Beatrice de Graaf
• Myrthe van Groningen MA

Together with Dr Jonathan Conlin of the University of Southampton and with the generous support of the Gingko Library (London) and the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (Lisbon) Dr Ozavci is running a workshop/conference/book project, 'The Forgotten Peace?: The Conference of Lausanne and the New Middle East, 1922-23', which is intended to mark the centenary of the conference and the concluding treaty. Despite being “the longest lasting and most successful of the post-First World War settlements” (Keith Jeffrey and Alan Sharp) the Lausanne Conference has received considerably less attention from scholars. The organisers see the upcoming centenary less as an opportunity to provide a “missing” equivalent to existing studies of Versailles, however, and more as an opportunity to transcend traditional diplomatic history, reintroducing non-state actors such as multinational companies, banks, political parties, NGOs and the media. Lausanne shifted borders and unleashed unprecedented population exchanges, but it also changed how capital, goods and information moved between east and west, as well as within the Middle East region. The edited volume that comes from this project will be published by the Gingko Library in 2022.

Other elements of the project include a travelling exhibition built around Guignol à Lausanne (1923), a collection of caricatures by Hungarian Jewish artists Alois Derso and Emery Kelèn, as well as a collaboration with the Musée Historique Lausanne, on a series of exhibitions and outreach events in Lausanne itself.

https://thelausanneproject.com/

• dr. Jonathan Conlin