Liisa Helena Malkki

The most general animating principle of this study is a theoretical and historical concern to understand how the social imagination of a "common humanity" and "mankind," on the one hand, and "world community" and "world order," on the other, have undergone radical transformations since the end of the Second World War. The historical part of this project excavates three very different (and now largely forgotten) cosmopolitical projects of world-making: liberal internationalism; world federalism and other one-world movements; and Cold War logics of world order. The ethnographic part is based on contemporary humanitarian practices and visions of the human and world order among ICRC medical professionals.