ABSTRACT

International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries is the first volume to explore 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.

chapter 1|16 pages

Introduction

chapter 4|21 pages

The limits of peace propaganda

The Information Section of the League of Nations and its Tokyo office

chapter 5|26 pages

Internationalist exhibitionism

The League of Nations at the New York World's Fair, 1939–1940

chapter 6|21 pages

Making their own internationalism

Algerian media and a few others the League of Nations ignored, 1919–1943

chapter 8|24 pages

Towards a new international communication order?

UNESCO, development, and "national communication policies" in the 1960s and 1970s

chapter 9|22 pages

Singing and painting global awareness

International years and human rights at the United Nations

chapter 10|28 pages

A wave of interest and action for planet Earth?

How UNEP spoke for the environment from Stockholm to Rio