On 11 January 2026, the GLO project ran a panel at the 139th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago. The session was entitled “International Organizations and the People: Legitimacy, Representation, and (Mis)Trust in the 20th Century”. Chaired by GLO PI Daniel Laqua, it featured contributions from team members Anne-Isabelle Richard, Dan Gorman and Gordon Barrett, who shared findings from their work on the project thus far. Through a series of examples, the session illustrated how popular support for international organisations varied across time and space. Speakers discussed the hopes, ambitions and frustrations that various that various groups associated with the prospect of new (or revised) forms of global or regional governance.
The discussion was divided into three thematic segments. In the first part, panellists provided a series of national examples regarding popular responses to the League of Nations. Examples ranged from efforts to mobilize support for the League in different national contexts to the criticisms of anticolonial movements. Alternative interwar projects, including those envisaging regional cooperation rather than global governance, also figured in the conversation. In the second part, the panel shifted to the post-1945 world. Here, speakers considered a variety of cases, for instance Chinese engagement with the UN around the time of its formation, but also the impact of decolonization on civil society engagement with regional or global organizations. In the final part, we shifted to different forms of hostility to international organisations as well as historical debates about global governance reform – including the hope by some of its advocates that the latter might overcome mistrust towards international organisation).
Both the conversations amongst panel members and the dialogue with audience members were highly stimulating, providing plenty of food for thought for future stages of the project. The GLO team will continue its dialogue in Chicago as the project will run a workshop at the University of Chicago, dedicated to “The International Dynamics of Democratic Backsliding” (based on a call for papers issued in 2025). A post-workshop report on this event will follow on our blog.
