International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries ― Exorbitant Expectations

International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries is the first volume to explore broadly the historical relationship between international organizations and the media. Beginning in the early nineteenth century and coming up to the 1990s, the volume shows how people around the globe largely learned about international organizations and their activities through the media and images created by journalists, publicists, and filmmakers in texts, sound bites, and pictures.

The book examines how interactions with the media are a formative component of international organizations. At the same time, it questions some of the basic assumptions about how media promoted or enabled international governance. Written by leading scholars in the field from Europe, North America, and Australasia, and including case studies from all regions of the world, it covers a wide range of issues from humanitarianism and environmentalism to Hollywood and debates about international information orders.

Bringing together two burgeoning yet largely unconnected strands of research – the history of international organizations and international media histories – this book is essential reading for scholars of international history and those interested in the development and impact of media over time.

Jonas Brendebach is a PhD researcher in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute (EUI). He studied at the Humboldt University of Berlin and University of Cambridge. He was a visiting doctoral student at Columbia University and will complete his dissertation in 2017.

Martin Herzer is a PhD researcher in the Department of History and Civilization at the European University Institute (EUI). He was a visiting doctoral student at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a teaching fellow at the Centre d’Histoire at Sciences Po Paris.

Heidi Tworek is assistant professor of international history at the University of British Columbia. She has co-edited three special issues on the history of communications and is co-editor of The Routledge Companion on the Makers of Global Business (2018). She manages the United Nations History Project (www.unhistoryproject.org).