Eliminating malnutrition, reducing child mortality and decreasing infection rates from diseases such as AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis are key to the Sustainable Development Goals 2 and 3. In this workshop, we’ll discuss what lessons history can bring to bear on these goals. After a brief introductory lecture, we will focus on two set of questions: 1) how has human health changed in the past 150 years and what factors drove these changes in health? and 2) what can the historical attempts to eradicate malaria since WWII reveal about the fight against malaria today? Costa (2015) and Schneider (2018), which is very short, relate to the first question and Webb (2009) to the second.
 
Readings:
 
– Costa, D. L. (2015). Health and the Economy in the United States from 1750 to the Present. Journal of Economic Literature, 53(3), 503–570. (Read pages 503-533 only)
– Schneider, Eric B. (2018) Stunting: past, present, future. Department of Economic History, London School of Economics and Political Science, London, UK
– Webb, James L. A. (2009). Humanity’s Burden: A Global History of Malaria. Chapter 6 Africa Redux, pp. 160-187.

Globally, the agenda „women, pace and security“ has been adopted through UN Security Council resolution 1325 (31 October 2000). With a view to Africa, this workshop looks at how the topic was framed, who the norm entrepreneurs were and how they managed to make this a norm relevant to African countries. In particular attention will be paid to two issues: (1) prevention and protection / sexual abuse and harassment in peace-keeping operations and within the institutions (#MeToo at the UN/AU), and (2) participation / representation of women in conflict management and resolution.
 
Readings:
 
– Progress and Challenges in Implementing the Women, Peace and Security Agenda in the African Union’s Peace and Security Architecture, by Cheryl Hendricks
– The Power of Mixed Messages: Women, Peace, and Security Language in National Action Plans from Africa, by Heidi Hudson
– Rhetoric and real progress on the Women, Peace and Security agenda in Africa, by Sophie Desmidt and Laura Davis
– Powerpoint Slides

The ongoing pandemic demonstrates the irrationality of national responses to it. Usually, the many measures taken separately by nation-states are supported by a wide range of professional expertise. We are faced with unmanageable chaos. That requires critical research about the role of experts (who are most likely operating on government-funds). Based on short articles about this issue, we will thoughtfully ask ourselves what else would be responses.
 
Readings:  
– In 2010, John M. Barry, author of the 2004 book The Great Influenza, wrote a short and critical article for the World Policy Journal, anticipating the threats we are facing today. Read it here.
 
– In the 1970s, the historian Ivan Illich worked on what he labeled „the monopoly of experts.“ He focused on how professional care, e.g., medical recommendations on how to face viral diseases, are disabling their responses‘ alleged beneficiaries. This link leads to the book Disabling Professions. Only the first article by Illich has to be prepared. Read it here.
 
– In 2016, at a conference on Illich’s reception today at Cuernavaca (Mexico) William R. Arney presented the attached (still unpublished) paper, titled The Tyranny of Experts. To read it might help to understand Illich’s provocative statements better. Additionally, the author includes his critical research on the system theory (e.g., the public health system).Read it here.

This workshop concerns the role of digital technologies in achieving the SDGs. Taking into the scope of the digital revolution on social, economic and business change, the analysis tries to answer the question of how digital technologies contribute to economic growth (goal no. 8) and innovation (goal no. 9). During the meeting, we will discuss such topics as digital inequality, AI and labour market, cybersecurity as a public good, digital transformation and the ecosystem for digital innovation.
 
Readings:
 
– Klement, Peter; Zeichner, Frank; Subirana, Brian; Gill, Asif (2020). How Digital Transformation and IoT Can Contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals: An Industrial Internet Consortium and IoT Alliance Australia Joint White Paper.
– Aly, H. (2020), „Digital transformation, development and productivity in developing countries: is artificial intelligence a curse or a blessing?“, Review of Economics and Political Science
– Taddeo, Mariarosaria. (2019). Is Cybersecurity a Public Good?. Minds and Machines. 29. 10.1007/s11023-019-09507-5.

Population growth as a global challenge has vanished from the international political agenda as social scientists and political pundits have found comfort in the idea that technological innovation will enable the planet to accommodate a much larger human presence than hitherto thought possible. In addition, it is widely believed that high fertility has an inverse relationship with wealth meaning once poverty has been alleviated, family sizes will be reduced. This confidence in ‘automatic stabilizers’, based on European experiences, starkly contrast prevalent thinking on global sustainability in general and the need to counter manmade climate change in particular. The Paris Agreement aims to keep global temperatures below 2.0 degrees Celsius within this century, but the UN’s median projected global population in 2100 amount to 11 billion people as opposed to the 5,8 billion people inhabiting the earth at the formation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Climate scientist has observed “we need smaller footprints, but we also need fewer feet”, and while population growth is also linked to ecological degradation such as diminished biodiversity etc., limiting it is not included among the UN’s sustainability goals. Historically this is somewhat surprising as the UN system heavily engaged in these issues until the eighties and even retain a Population Division (https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/TOT/900). In this workshop we shall examine why the global political engagement has changed – and I can reveal right now that this issue is neither benign nor technical! We will look at different discursive platforms serving different political constituencies (prominently featuring right-wing Western religious groups) which have combined to quell global debate on whether to be concerned with rising population numbers. Secondly, we shall discuss how discursive proxies has been invoked to tackle the issue indirectly – a case in point being climate refuges in relation to migration etc. I dare you to join me in a workshop where we shall discuss solutions and possible causalities (or imaginaries thereof) while confronting prevailing political correctness head one with a real risk of slipping out of our intellectual comfort zones!
 
Readings:
 
– Ganivet, E. Growth in human population and consumption both need to be addressed to reach an ecologically sustainable future. Environ Dev Sustain 22, 4979–4998 (2020).
– Diana Coole (2013) Too many bodies? The return and disavowal of the population question. Environmental Politics, 22:2, 195-215.
– Powerpoint Slides

The target of a zero-famine world by 2030 is highly under threat. Despite the promise of global
leaders in 2015 to end hunger, famine rates are on the rise again, fuelled by conflict, climate
change and the threath of an economic downturn. Almost a billion people are chronically
hungry and famine is on the rise again in several African regions, showing that many food
systems are failing especially among the poorest people on the planet. In this workshop we
discuss how we can understand famine and food systems from a combined global, historical and
contemporary perspective.
 
Readings:
 
– Vanhaute, Eric. 2011. “From Famine to Food Crisis: What History Can Teach Us About Local and Global Subsistence Crises.” Journal of Peasant Studies 38 (1): 47–65
– Lourrene Maffra, „Food sovereignty: sustainable solution to world hunger and climate change”
– Via Campensina, Food Sovereignity
– Rights for resilience: food sovereignty, power, and resilience in development practice, by Marygold Walsh-Dilley, Wendy Wolford, James McCarthy

Climate Change has risen high on the agenda of many societies, international organizations and transnational movements across the world. It is both framed and contested as one of the most crucial challenges for the world’s future, which can only be resolved through transnational and transregional cooperative action on multiple scales. Building on scientific advances in research on climate change since the 18th century as well as on projects in the context of colonialism and an expanding global economy, political and scientific efforts to define and combat climate change have in the 20th century gained an unprecedented place in the international arena from the establishment of the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) and the coinage of the concept of global warming in the 1970s, the formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the recognition of the greenhouse gas effect in the 1980s, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and the conclusion of the United Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the adoption of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 to the Paris Agreement in 2016. With the volatile and contested positions e.g. of the US or China, as well as developing countries, in addition to the rise of the Fridays for Future movement it has become evident, how much both the definition of as well as the reaction to climate change is disputed among different societies and generations. Scientist, political elites, and civil society movements are contributing to the debate on how to define climate change and its causes, on how to fight them as well as on how to relate them to other global challenges such as sustainable development. The emergence of climate change as the global problem as we know it today has a longer history, full of contestations and inequalities, reflecting broader dynamics under the global condition, from colonial times into the post-colonial dynamics up to a post-Cold War multipolar future. The workshop focusses on dynamics from the later decades of the 20th century into the present and examines how climate change has been framed as a global problem by different kinds of actors, including scientists, political elites as well as activists participating in the definition of the problem and the agenda, as well as being impacted by them. We argue, that we need to investigate and understand the different positions and interests of actors driving their specific climate change agenda as well as go beyond universal claims on what climate change is and how it can be combatted, in order to be able to make climate change a central theme of global studies.
 
Readings:
 
– Arnall, Alex, Uma Kothari, and Ilan Kelman. „Introduction to politics of climate change: discourses of policy and practice in developing countries.“ The Geographical Journal 180.2 (2014): 98-101.
– Bodansky, Daniel. „The history of the global climate change regime.“ In: Urs Luterbacher, and Detlef F. Sprinz (eds.). International relations and global climate change, Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 2001, pp. 23-40.
– Carey, Mark. „Climate and history: a critical review of historical climatology and climate change historiography.“ Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change 3.3 (2012): 233-249.
 
You might also have a look on the two timelines compiled by the BBC in 2009 and The Guardian in 2019 not only to get a bigger picture on events, innovations, international political dynamics related to the framing of climate change as a global problem, but also to compare and reflect on the different ways how this trajectory is presented.