Rethinking International Communism project awarded a 2021 AHRC Research Network Grant

Congratulations to Tim Rees (History), awarded a 2021 AHRC Research Network Grant alongside former Exeter student Tom Beaumont (Liverpool John Moores) for their Rethinking International Communism project, which will explore the Comintern’s transnational networks between the wars.

Tim summarises the project below:

This network aims to bring historians of the Communist International together with scholars in cognate fields of study to reassess the history of international communism in the era of the two world wars. These are exciting times in Communist studies. One hundred years after the founding of the Communist International (Comintern), historians are putting aside long-held assumptions regarding the organisation and functioning of the Comintern and asking new questions of the Bolshevik-inspired organization, informed by new cultural-inspired agendas, and most notably by the recent trend in transnational history. In a field long dominated by Cold War ideologies and by a monolithic interpretation of international communism, which focused principally upon the political and organizational links binding peripheral national Communist parties to Moscow, these cultural and transnational research agendas are opening up ground-breaking new areas of study. In place of the well-worn debates over the degree or otherwise of Moscow’s control over the apparatus of the Communist International, this research network will extend our understanding of a truly global and multi-centred Communist political movement, one deeply embedded in the political, cultural and social struggles of the era. The ultimate aim of the network is to provide a platform for the dissemination of this new research into the history of international communism, to build new multi-disciplinary research networks, and to foster and support the research of less-established researchers and academics in the field.

The first workshop at Exeter will focus upon a key theme in recent re-examinations of international communist activity: networks of anti-colonial and anti-racism activism and international encounters in the colonial context. At the heart of this workshop will be questions relating to the ambitions, but also the limits, of communist internationalism as individual communists, and the wider organizations and networks to which they belonged, struggled to reconcile seemingly conflicting claims of race, class and gender in the quest for a new politics of revolutionary emancipation. Focusing upon a particularly dynamic area of research in the wider field of communist studies, this workshop will have the broader function of serving as a ‘curtain raiser’ for wider discussions of transnational activism and global political activism which will be further developed in the second workshop and conference. As an internationally renowned centre of research into colonial history and anti-colonial activism, as well as the history of communism, Exeter is ideally placed to host this colloquium.