Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The Great War as a Global War
The State of Peace Conference 2014
Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The Great War as a Global War
The State of Peace Conference 2014
October 1-2, 2014
On June 28 in 1914, Gavrilo Princip killed the Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife during
their visit to Sarajevo. Meant as a symbolic act in support of the creation of a Yugoslavian nation, the
assassination triggered lethal dynamics which affected all continents of the globe in the end. AustriaHungary’s war of retaliation against Serbia was expected to be over in a matter of weeks. However,
the global entanglements of an already highly globalized world witnessed the emergence of what
British historian Eric Hobsbawm called the age of catastrophe.
Within just a few days, the war had spread so widely that it became known as the Great War. Yet still
we are not fully aware of its global reach beyond Europe and Northern America: The First World War
is still narrated as a primarily European war. On the occasion of the 100 year anniversary of the Great
War, scholars from various academic disciplines will discuss the global dimensions of those years of
warfare on the eve of the age of globalisation. In particular, the conference will discuss the global
phenomenon of war enthusiasm at the outbreak of the war and the failure of the international
Socialism to avoid it along several papers. Furthermore, presentations and discussions will focus on
the globally spread British Empire, as well as on North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Doing
that, the conference tries to draw assumptions regarding the question of war and peace then and
now.
The State of Peace Conference will take place at the conference centre of the Austrian Study Centre
for Peace and Conflict Resolution (ASPR) at Schlaining Castle. The conference is organised by ASPR in
close cooperation with its partner institutions from the Conflict, Peace and Democracy Cluster
(CPDC): the Centre for Peace Research and Peace Education (ZFF) at the University of Klagenfurt, the
Institute for Conflict Research (IKF) as well as the Democracy Centre Vienna.
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Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The Great War as a Global War
The State of Peace Conference 2014
Program
Wednesday, 1 October
9.00 - 9.30
Introduction by Maximilian Lakitsch (Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution,
Stadtschlaining)
Introductory statements by participants
9.30 - 11.30
Panel: War enthusiasm, propaganda, mobilization
How History Repeats Itself: Military Alliances and War Propaganda then and now
Ronald Tuschl (European Peace University, Stadtschlaining)
The European Public War Enthusiasm of 1914
Maximilian Konrad (Cluster of Excellence: Asia and Europe in a Global Context, Heidelberg University)
Chair: Susanne Reitmair (Democracy Center Vienna)
12.00 - 14.00
Panel: Socialism, Internationalism and the First World War
Internationalism and Socialism in Iran before World War I
Ramin Thagian (Department of Development Studies, University of Vienna)
Social Imperialism as Trasformismo in the United States and Germany: The Socialist Labor
Movement, Bourgeois Social Reform, and the Collapse of Working Class Internationalism, 18711914
Ingar Solty (Social Science and Humanities Research Council, York University Toronto)
Chair: Claudia Brunner (Center for Peace Research and Peace Education, University of Klagenfurt)
14.00 - 15.30
Lunch at Hotel Schlaining Castle
15.30 - 17.30
Panel: Center and Periphery
Crises and Change: World War I and the Dynamics of Central Europe
Izabela Dahl (Department of History, University of Gothenburg)
Götterdämmerung: Globalizing Peripheries in the Great War
Christian E. Rieck (Global Governance Institute Brussels), Angela Abmeier (Department of History,
Humboldt University Berlin)
Chair: Walter Fend (Institute of Conflict Research, Vienna)
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Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The Great War as a Global War
The State of Peace Conference 2014
17.45 - 19.00
Guided castle tour
19.30
Dinner at a local wine tavern “Burgheuriger”
Thursday, 2 October
9.00 - 11.00
Panel: The British Empire in World War I
John Buchan’s Global War
Charles Jones (Centre of Latin American Studies, University of Cambridge)
The Impact of World War 1 on British Malaya: The Battle of Penang
Abdullah Asilatul (Department of History, Kuala Lumpur University)
Chair: Susanne Reitmair (Democracy Center Vienna)
11.30 - 13.30
Panel: Central Asia in World War I
1914-2014 from the Afghan Perspective
Ali Safi (Afghanistan Development and Peace Research Organization, Kabul)
The Indian Perspective on the Great War
Aarushi Prakash (South Asia Forum for Human Rights, New Delhi)
Chair: Walter Fend (Institute of Conflict Research, Vienna)
13.30 - 15.00
Lunch at Hotel Schlaining Castle
15.00 - 17.00
Panel: The Middle East and North Africa in World War I
The Great War in Northern Africa
Tyma Kraitt (Peace researcher and journalist, Vienna)
Iran and the Ottoman Empire in the First World War
Eric Hooglund (Centre of Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University)
Chair: Maximilian Lakitsch (Austrian Study Centre for Peace and Conflict Resolution, Stadtschlaining)
17.30 - 19.30
Final discussion
Chair: Claudia Brunner (Center for Peace Research and Peace Education, University of Klagenfurt)
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Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The Great War as a Global War
The State of Peace Conference 2014
Contributors
Asilatul Hanaa Abdullah is a lecturer for Malaysian at Kuala Lumpur University. Aasilatul holds a
master’s degree in history from International Islamic University Malaysia. She has been teaching
Malaysian History in various private colleges in Malaysia since 2008.
Angela Abmeier is a historian at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Her PhD was funded by a
scholarship from the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and was supervised by Heinrich August Winkler, one
of Germany’s most distinguished contemporary historians. Before, she studied at Humboldt and at
the University of Cambridge in the UK.
Claudia Brunner has studied political science and gender studies at Vienna University and Paris 1
Panthéon-Sorbonne. She was member of the PhD program ‘gender as a category of knowledge’ at
Humboldt-University Berlin from 2005 to 2008, and worked at its center for transdisciplinary gender
studies in 2009. Since 2010, she has been an assistant professor at the centre for peace studies and
peace education at Klagenfurt University. Brunner’s work was awarded with the Christiane Rajewsky
Award in 2011 and the Caroline von Humboldt Award in 2012. Her research interests are located at
the intersections of peace studies, gender studies, sociology of knowledge, feminist international
relations, post- and decolonial studies, and political theory.
Izabela A. Dahl is historian and cultural scientist at the Department for Northern European Studies at
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She achieved her doctoral degree 2011. Her research concerns
migration history with a special focus on Jewish history and history of anti-Semitism, national
memory culture(s) and international relations. The chosen research topics are analysed from a social
historical perspective. By September 2014, Izabela will be post-doc researcher at the Department of
History at the University of Gothenburg
Eric Hooglund is editor of the scholarly journal Middle East Critique since 1995 and professor
emeritus of the Centre of Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University. Prior to Lund University, he taught
Middle East Politics at Bates and Bowdoin colleges in Maine, Ohio State University, the University of
California at Berkeley, St. Antony’s College of Oxford University, Shiraz University in Iran, and Middle
East Technical University in Turkey. He also has worked on Middle East issues for several nongovernmental organizations, including the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the National
Security Archive, the Middle East Institute, and the Institute for Palestine Studies.
Charles Jones was educated at Cambridge. Following postdoctoral appointments at the University of
London he taught International Political Economy at the University of Warwick (1977-1997) before
moving to Cambridge in 1998 to teach international relations theory at the Centre of International
Studies. In 2000 he became director of the Centre of Latin American Studies at Cambridge., serving
two (non-concurrent) terms up to his retirement in 2014.
Maximilian Konrad studied history, law and European Studies in Heidelberg and the London School
of Economics. He has been working at the Heidelberg Cluster of Excellence: Asia and Europe in a
Global Context, and has published on British and Russian Colonial History in South and Central Asia.
He is currently employed as a research assistant at the University of Heidelberg.
Tyma Kraitt, born in Baghdad, studied philosophy at the University of Vienna. She is a freelance
journalist with a focus on the MENA region and was editor-in-chief of the Austrian magazine
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Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The Great War as a Global War
The State of Peace Conference 2014
“International”. She is co-publisher of the anthology “Syrien: Hintergründe, Analysen, Berichte”
(Promedia 2013) .
Maximilian Lakitsch has been a researcher at the ASPR since 2012. He used to work for a Lebanese
NGO empowering Palestinians in Lebanon. From 2011 to 2012 he was employed as project officer
and researcher for the Society for Austro-Arab Relations. Besides his expertise in the field of
development aid, his theoretic work covers Conflict Theory, Peacebuilding, Religious Conflicts and
the Middle East. Maximilian holds a Master´s degree in Theology as well as in Philosophy from the
University of Graz, and an MA in International Relations from the University of Krems. He wrote his
PhD thesis about violence in the modern state at the University of Graz and the American University
of Beirut.
Aarushi Prakash is a research scholar of Peace Studies and Conflict Resolution. Her main areas of
research are nuclear disarmament and arms control in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea
(DPRK) . She has published on peace and war journalism scenario in the Balochistan province of
Pakistan. She is currently working with a Human Rights group in India primarily with focus on
Women, Peace and Security issues of South Asia
Christian E. Rieck is a Senior Analyst in the Peace and Security section of the Global Governance
Institute in Brussels. He has a background in international relations and area studies, with studies at
Oxford and Berlin, and with previous assignments at the Leibniz Institute for Global and Area Studies
in Hamburg and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung in Berlin. He teaches at different universities, mostly
at the interface between contemporary history and international relations.
Ali Safi is a peace researcher from Afghanistan. He holds a master degree in peace and conflict
studies from European Peace University. He has been conducting field research in Afghanistan for the
Center for Security and Governance Group (CSG) and for Vienna Institute for International Dialogue
and Cooperation (VIDC). He was a special correspondent for McClatchy Newspapers’ Kabul bureau.
Trained as a physician, he has extensive experience reporting on conflict and tragedy throughout
Afghanistan, where he’s worked with some of the world’s leading media, including the BBC, Time
Magazine, the Guardian, The Times of London, and Germany’s ZDF TV, as well as the International
Crisis Group. Safi was the producer of the BBC Radio team that won the 2010 Amnesty International
Award for Investigative Journalism.
Ingar Solty is a PhD candidate at York University in Toronto in Canada and has recently joined the
Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada-funded research project The European
Question in an Era of Economic and Political Crises directed by Stephen Gill. His research focusses on
the interrelations of the economic, political and ideological spheres. Solty is an editor at “Das
Argument: Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften”, a Fellow of the Berlin Institute for
Critical Theory and a co-founding member of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s North-Atlantic Left
Dialogue.
Ramin Taghian studied history with a focus on the modern Middle East and social movements. He is
part of the research cluster of the Appear consortium project "Conflict, Participation, and
Development in Palestine" of the "Centre for Development Studies", Birzeit University, Ramallah, and
the "Department of Development Studies", University of Vienna. He published about socialist
movements with a focus on Iran.
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Bellicose Entanglements 1914: The Great War as a Global War
The State of Peace Conference 2014
Ronald H. Tuschl studied Political Science, Contemporary History, International Relations and Human
Rights at the University of Innsbruck. He started his first research experience as a scholarship servitor
at the Peace Research Institute Frankfurt (PRIF) in Germany and continued his work as Secretary
General, Postdoctoral Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the European Peace University (EPU) in
Stadtschlaining/Austria from 1996 to 2013. He was coordinator of the StoP Conference from 2000 –
2010. He also served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Innsbruck and at the University of
Vienna.
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