Article

Youth and internationalism in the twentieth century: an introduction

Details

Citation

Laqua D & Papadogiannis N (2023) Youth and internationalism in the twentieth century: an introduction. Social History.

Abstract
This essay introduces a special issue on the complex and contradictory ways in which young activists and youth organisations encountered and experienced internationalism. It argues for the need to pay greater attention to the ambiguous encounters – involving seemingly benevolent aims but also blind-spots and prejudices – that were created by transnational youth mobilities and by young people’s participation in international ventures. We first consider meanings of ‘youth’ within different twentieth-century contexts and comment on the transnational mobilities in which young people participated. We then outline how youth-based internationalism took different shapes, discussing its left-wing and Christian manifestations in particular, and noting how internationalism was articulated through different forms of collective action. The essay makes a case for combining perspectives from social and transnational history to demonstrate the complex character of internationalism, which different groups of young people experienced as both empowering and exclusionary.

Keywords
youth; internationalism; transnational history, mobility, activism

Journal
Social History: Volume 48, Issue 1

StatusPublished
Publication date31/12/2023
Publication date online31/01/2023
Date accepted by journal09/08/2022
URLhttp://hdl.handle.net/1893/34735
ISSN0307-1022
eISSN1470-1200

People (1)

Dr Nikolaos Papadogiannis

Dr Nikolaos Papadogiannis

Lecturer in European History, History