Workshop "Beyond Versailles: Governance, Legitimacy, and the Formation of New Polities after the Great War"

The centenary has brought new attention to the First World War, reigniting long-established debates about the origins of the war and about who was to blame for a calamity that engulfed the globe. But renewed fascination with the war has only accentuated the discrepancy between the extraordinary depth of our knowledge about the international July Crisis of 1914 and our much more limited understanding of the conflict’s multiple transnational outcomes after 1918. While a plethora of new books is currently stimulating the debate on the Great War on an unprecedented scale (even if the conclusions are not always entirely new), the postwar years remain seriously under-illuminated, and the research that has taken place is still very much segmented into individual national historiographies and disparate methodological approaches.

This workshop seeks to present new research on the postwar years and provide a platform for international and interdisciplinary scholarly exchange to researchers at different stages in their academic careers, with a particular eye toward facilitating discussion among early-career researchers pursuing similar interests. The workshop organizers have strong research experience in this field and are both currently working on monographs that explore the contingencies and conflicts of peacemaking and state-building after the Great War.