Bogdan C Iacob
Biographic Data
| ID | 526303 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Bogdan C Iacob |
| GIVEN NAMES | Bogdan C |
| FAMILY NAME | Iacob |
| SIGNATURE | IACOB B C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Romanian Academy |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0735-6272 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 34 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 26 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Reframing Anti-Soviet Defiance
The article reframes Albania’s and Romania’s defiance of the Soviet Union by situating it within global debates about sovereignty. We use the latter as an umbrella term that encompasses concepts such as equality in international relations, economic self-reliance and self-determination against hegemony. During the 1950s and 1960s, these notions gained popularity across the globe because of decolonisation, non-alignment and the dynamics of dissent …
Socialist medicine and postcolonial governance
The hospital in Gharyan, Libya, operated by Romanian staff from 1975 until the late 1980s was a space of entangled medical governance: it relied on an expat community that adapted socialist public health to postcolonial conditions, and it was a centre of postcolonial sovereignty and agency that tested Romanian modernity and challenged the personnel's constructions of the self (professional, civilisational, ethnic, etc.). This article employs the …
Overcoming Whiteness? Romanian Humanitarianism in Sub-Saharan Africa During the 1960s
In Romania, as throughout state socialist Europe, medical assistance showcased anti-colonial solidarity with newly independent African peoples. The humanism of experts, illuminated through bilateral relations or in campaigns coordinated by international organizations, supposedly revealed their status as better Whites: anti-racist Europeans, considerate of the needs of local populations, and altruistically supportive of their freedom and progress.…
Off white
Central and Eastern Europe has long been seen in the West as an ‘off white’ European periphery. Yet its nationalist movements have worked towards a full belonging in a white Europe, or have claimed themselves to be superior defenders of the white West. This volume demonstrates the centrality of white supremacy for over two centuries in the region’s nation-building, social hierarchies, ethnic homogenisation, and global interconnections. Such insig…
Malariology and decolonization
The article de-centres the global history of disease by examining the agency of Eastern European expertise at international organizations and during decolonization. It challenges accounts of anti-malaria policies at the League of Nations Health Organization and at the World Health Organization written from a Western, particularly North American perspective, or on the basis of local reactions to Western interventions. The contribution proposes an …
Peripheral Nerve
In January 1958 the Council of Ministers of the Romanian People's Republic launched a worldwide effort to showcase Romania's progress in health care. The decision reflected the Communist regime's medical Cold War diplomacy and was also a result of growing interest in what outside Eastern Europe was called “socialized medicine,” that is, a state-funded and organized health care system with equal and universal access for all citizens. Among the gov…
A Babel in Bucharest
The article explores three interconnected perspectives on young people from the Third World enrolled in Romanian universities. The first is the relationship between Romania’s engagement with the post-colonial world and the provision of higher education to African, Asian and Latin American students. The second is the impact of students’ political agency on Romanian society and foreign policy. Third, the author shows the resilience of racial discri…
Paradoxes of Socialist Solidarity
Paradoxes of Socialist Solidarity
L’aide médicale apportée par les pays d’Europe de l’Est à la République populaire démocratique de Corée et à la République démocratique du Vietnam témoigne de leur volonté de se tailler un rôle mondial en exportant la “modernité socialiste” dans le cadre de la construction des États postcoloniaux. La contribution analyse les expériences parallèles des équipes médicales roumaines et tchécoslovaques dans les deux États d’Asie de l’Est pour souligne…
Liberal anti-Communism and historical commissions in Romania and Moldova
Liberal Anti-communism and historical commissions in Romania and Moldova
Cet article examine la dynamique transnationale qui a caractérisé la création, l’activité et les retombées des commissions d’historiens créées en Roumanie et en Moldavie pour gérer le passé communiste. Il analyse leurs membres, leurs approches historiographiques, leurs liens transfrontaliers et leur enracinement dans des discours de justice internationale. Les factions anti-communistes libérales au sein des deux organes ont combiné les outils glo…
The great cauldron
The great cauldron: a history of southeastern Europe The great cauldron: a history of southeastern Europe. By Marie-Janine Calic. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 2019. 724pp. Index. £24.60. Isbn978 0 67498 392 2. Available as e-book. Bogdan C Iacob Bogdan C Iacob Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark and the Romanian Academy Corresponding author: [email protected] Search for other works by this autho…
Agents of Decolonization? Romanian Activities in Mozambique’s Oil and Healthcare Sectors, 1976–1984
The criminalisation of communism in the European political space after the Cold War
Until recently, post-socialist memory politics in eastern Europe has been analysed in the national context or, at most, in comparative perspective. The present work goes beyond this methodological orthodoxy by situating the initiatives to criminalize the communist past in a transnational framework. It links these political projects to the process of European integration and it emphasizes cross-border mobilizations of actors from former socialist …
Title of the website
Socialism Goes Global is the virtual platform of the major international project “Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third Worlds’” (hereafter SGG), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (in the United Kingdom), with support from the University of Exeter. SGG addresses both how socialist states in Europe crafted a global role for themselves in the post-war period, and how these international engagem…
Balkan counter-circulation
This chapter examines how the Balkans was shaped as an object for area studies during the Cold War in a process that crossed the East–West as well as North–South divides. It was, to a large extent, promoted by international organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The chapter examines how Southeast European scholars created a specialized organization and a milieu of interaction that gene…
State Socialist Experts in Transnational Perspective. East European Circulation of Knowledge during the Cold War (1950s–1980s)
State socialist experts were at the center of Eastern Europe’s internationalization from the mid-1950s until 1989. They acted as intermediaries between their states and other national, regional, and international environments. The contributions integrate national milieus within broader frameworks mostly circumscribed by inter- and nongovernmental specialized organizations (the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe; the United Nations Educ…
Dilemmas of humanitarian aid in the twentieth century
Dilemmas of humanitarian aid in the twentieth century is a comprehensive historical account of humanitarianism from the mid-nineteenth century to the 2000s. It situates developments in international aid, assistance and relief in various parts of the world within larger, enduring themes. As the editor, Johannes Paulmann, underlines, ‘some of the dilemmas of modern humanitarianism have been inherent in humanitarian practice for more than a century’…
Together but Apart
The article analyzes the involvement of Southeast European historians in unesco’s History of Humanity: Scientific and Cultural Development, the second attempt of the organization at drafting a world history. It is a case study of a successful epistemic internationalization of regional and national narratives from the Balkans on a global stage. It is argued that this story is premised on the activity of the International Association of Southeast E…
Humanitarians at war
The International Red Cross conference was held in Toronto in 1952. The event signalled the postwar consolidation of the International Committee of the Red Cross' (ICRC) status as a high-profile independent humanitarian organization based in Geneva with an all-Swiss leadership. The situation was best described by ICRC president Paul Ruegger: ‘Today the position of the ICRC, after the Geneva diplomatic conference and since September 1948 in Stockh…
Beyond the divide
Beyond the divide: entangled histories of Cold War Europe. Edited by Simo Mikkonen and Pia Koivunen. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. 2015. 336 pp. £75.00. ISBN 978 1 78238 866 1. Since the mid-2000s, Cold War history and the study of state socialism have experienced a transnational turn. Researchers are increasingly interested in the flows of people, ideas and goods across East–West frontiers, as well as in the networks (institutional and interper…
Étudier à l'Est
Étudier à l'Est: expériences de diplômés africains. [Studying in the East: the experience of African students]. Edited by Monique de Saint Martin, Grazia Scarfò Ghellab and Kamal Mellakh. Paris: Karthala. 2015. 300pp. €25.00. ISBN 978 2 81111 463 3. ‘Studying in the East’ is the product of an expanding field: the research of interactions between socialist eastern Europe and the global South in the aftermath of decolonization. The book deals with …
Out of ashes
In 2000, Indian public intellectual Shiv Visvanathan wondered in an editorial: ‘How does one look at the twentieth century?’ (p. 775). American—German historian Konrad Jarausch gives a wonderfully eloquent and comprehensive answer to this question in Out of ashes. His book tells the story of Europe's tortuous journey through modernity, from catastrophe to restoring civility. Like authors before him, Jarausch details Europeans’ infatuation with id…
History's debris. The many pasts in the post-1989 present
The article is a reassessment of the aftermaths of the events of 1989 in (South-) Eastern Europe. It supplements the well-worn debate pitting civil vs. uncivil society with examinations of the role nationalism has played in the formerly socialist bloc and of the (self-) identification practices within the region's societies. Here I map the various postcommunist legacies that have affected the region's countries. Grand explanations of the upheaval…
Remembrance, History, and Justice
The twentieth century has left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, or collective/individual guilt syndromes that were often the premises for and the specters haunting the process of democratization in the various societies that emerged out of these profoundly de-structuring contexts. The present manuscript is a state of the art reassessment and analysis of how the interplay betw…
Dilemmas of humanitarian aid in the twentieth century
Dilemmas of humanitarian aid in the twentieth century is a comprehensive historical account of humanitarianism from the mid-nineteenth century to the 2000s. It situates developments in international aid, assistance and relief in various parts of the world within larger, enduring themes. As the editor, Johannes Paulmann, underlines, ‘some of the dilemmas of modern humanitarianism have been inherent in humanitarian practice for more than a century’…
The criminalisation of communism in the European political space after the Cold War
Until recently, post-socialist memory politics in eastern Europe has been analysed in the national context or, at most, in comparative perspective. The present work goes beyond this methodological orthodoxy by situating the initiatives to criminalize the communist past in a transnational framework. It links these political projects to the process of European integration and it emphasizes cross-border mobilizations of actors from former socialist …
The great cauldron
The great cauldron: a history of southeastern Europe The great cauldron: a history of southeastern Europe. By Marie-Janine Calic. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 2019. 724pp. Index. £24.60. Isbn978 0 67498 392 2. Available as e-book. Bogdan C Iacob Bogdan C Iacob Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark and the Romanian Academy Corresponding author: [email protected] Search for other works by this autho…
Humanitarians at war
The International Red Cross conference was held in Toronto in 1952. The event signalled the postwar consolidation of the International Committee of the Red Cross' (ICRC) status as a high-profile independent humanitarian organization based in Geneva with an all-Swiss leadership. The situation was best described by ICRC president Paul Ruegger: ‘Today the position of the ICRC, after the Geneva diplomatic conference and since September 1948 in Stockh…
A Babel in Bucharest
The article explores three interconnected perspectives on young people from the Third World enrolled in Romanian universities. The first is the relationship between Romania’s engagement with the post-colonial world and the provision of higher education to African, Asian and Latin American students. The second is the impact of students’ political agency on Romanian society and foreign policy. Third, the author shows the resilience of racial discri…
Liberal Anti-communism and historical commissions in Romania and Moldova
Cet article examine la dynamique transnationale qui a caractérisé la création, l’activité et les retombées des commissions d’historiens créées en Roumanie et en Moldavie pour gérer le passé communiste. Il analyse leurs membres, leurs approches historiographiques, leurs liens transfrontaliers et leur enracinement dans des discours de justice internationale. Les factions anti-communistes libérales au sein des deux organes ont combiné les outils glo…
Stalin and Europe
Is It Transnational? A New Perspective in the Study of Communism
This article presents a comprehensive review of the transnational perspective in the study of communism and the implications of this methodological turn for the transformation of the field itself. While advancing new topics and interpretative standpoints with a view to expanding the scope of such an initiative in current scholarship, the author argues that the transnational approach is important on several levels. First, it helps to de-localize a…
Comunism şi represiune în România. Istoria tematică a unui fraticid naţional
The End and the Beginning
A fresh interpretation of the contexts, meanings, and consequences of the revolutions of 1989, coupled with state of the art reassessment of the significance and consequences of the events associated with the demise of communist regimes. The book provides an analysis that takes into account the complexities of the Soviet bloc, the events' impact upon Europe, and their re-interpretation within a larger global context. Departs from static ways of a…
Is It Transnational? A New Perspective in the Study of Communism
This article presents a comprehensive review of the transnational perspective in the study of communism and the implications of this methodological turn for the transformation of the field itself. While advancing new topics and interpretative standpoints with a view to expanding the scope of such an initiative in current scholarship, the author argues that the transnational approach is important on several levels. First, it helps to de-localize a…
Remembrance, History, and Justice
The twentieth century has left behind a painful and complicated legacy of massive trauma, monstrous crimes, radical social engineering, or collective/individual guilt syndromes that were often the premises for and the specters haunting the process of democratization in the various societies that emerged out of these profoundly de-structuring contexts. The present manuscript is a state of the art reassessment and analysis of how the interplay betw…
Stalin and Europe
Beyond the divide
Beyond the divide: entangled histories of Cold War Europe. Edited by Simo Mikkonen and Pia Koivunen. New York and Oxford: Berghahn. 2015. 336 pp. £75.00. ISBN 978 1 78238 866 1. Since the mid-2000s, Cold War history and the study of state socialism have experienced a transnational turn. Researchers are increasingly interested in the flows of people, ideas and goods across East–West frontiers, as well as in the networks (institutional and interper…
Étudier à l'Est
Étudier à l'Est: expériences de diplômés africains. [Studying in the East: the experience of African students]. Edited by Monique de Saint Martin, Grazia Scarfò Ghellab and Kamal Mellakh. Paris: Karthala. 2015. 300pp. €25.00. ISBN 978 2 81111 463 3. ‘Studying in the East’ is the product of an expanding field: the research of interactions between socialist eastern Europe and the global South in the aftermath of decolonization. The book deals with …
Out of ashes
In 2000, Indian public intellectual Shiv Visvanathan wondered in an editorial: ‘How does one look at the twentieth century?’ (p. 775). American—German historian Konrad Jarausch gives a wonderfully eloquent and comprehensive answer to this question in Out of ashes. His book tells the story of Europe's tortuous journey through modernity, from catastrophe to restoring civility. Like authors before him, Jarausch details Europeans’ infatuation with id…
History's debris. The many pasts in the post-1989 present
The article is a reassessment of the aftermaths of the events of 1989 in (South-) Eastern Europe. It supplements the well-worn debate pitting civil vs. uncivil society with examinations of the role nationalism has played in the formerly socialist bloc and of the (self-) identification practices within the region's societies. Here I map the various postcommunist legacies that have affected the region's countries. Grand explanations of the upheaval…
Humanitarians at war
The International Red Cross conference was held in Toronto in 1952. The event signalled the postwar consolidation of the International Committee of the Red Cross' (ICRC) status as a high-profile independent humanitarian organization based in Geneva with an all-Swiss leadership. The situation was best described by ICRC president Paul Ruegger: ‘Today the position of the ICRC, after the Geneva diplomatic conference and since September 1948 in Stockh…
Balkan counter-circulation
This chapter examines how the Balkans was shaped as an object for area studies during the Cold War in a process that crossed the East–West as well as North–South divides. It was, to a large extent, promoted by international organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The chapter examines how Southeast European scholars created a specialized organization and a milieu of interaction that gene…
State Socialist Experts in Transnational Perspective. East European Circulation of Knowledge during the Cold War (1950s–1980s)
State socialist experts were at the center of Eastern Europe’s internationalization from the mid-1950s until 1989. They acted as intermediaries between their states and other national, regional, and international environments. The contributions integrate national milieus within broader frameworks mostly circumscribed by inter- and nongovernmental specialized organizations (the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe; the United Nations Educ…
Dilemmas of humanitarian aid in the twentieth century
Dilemmas of humanitarian aid in the twentieth century is a comprehensive historical account of humanitarianism from the mid-nineteenth century to the 2000s. It situates developments in international aid, assistance and relief in various parts of the world within larger, enduring themes. As the editor, Johannes Paulmann, underlines, ‘some of the dilemmas of modern humanitarianism have been inherent in humanitarian practice for more than a century’…
Together but Apart
The article analyzes the involvement of Southeast European historians in unesco’s History of Humanity: Scientific and Cultural Development, the second attempt of the organization at drafting a world history. It is a case study of a successful epistemic internationalization of regional and national narratives from the Balkans on a global stage. It is argued that this story is premised on the activity of the International Association of Southeast E…
Agents of Decolonization? Romanian Activities in Mozambique’s Oil and Healthcare Sectors, 1976–1984
The criminalisation of communism in the European political space after the Cold War
Until recently, post-socialist memory politics in eastern Europe has been analysed in the national context or, at most, in comparative perspective. The present work goes beyond this methodological orthodoxy by situating the initiatives to criminalize the communist past in a transnational framework. It links these political projects to the process of European integration and it emphasizes cross-border mobilizations of actors from former socialist …
Title of the website
Socialism Goes Global is the virtual platform of the major international project “Socialism Goes Global: Cold War Connections between the ‘Second’ and ‘Third Worlds’” (hereafter SGG), funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (in the United Kingdom), with support from the University of Exeter. SGG addresses both how socialist states in Europe crafted a global role for themselves in the post-war period, and how these international engagem…
Liberal anti-Communism and historical commissions in Romania and Moldova
Liberal Anti-communism and historical commissions in Romania and Moldova
Cet article examine la dynamique transnationale qui a caractérisé la création, l’activité et les retombées des commissions d’historiens créées en Roumanie et en Moldavie pour gérer le passé communiste. Il analyse leurs membres, leurs approches historiographiques, leurs liens transfrontaliers et leur enracinement dans des discours de justice internationale. Les factions anti-communistes libérales au sein des deux organes ont combiné les outils glo…
The great cauldron
The great cauldron: a history of southeastern Europe The great cauldron: a history of southeastern Europe. By Marie-Janine Calic. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. 2019. 724pp. Index. £24.60. Isbn978 0 67498 392 2. Available as e-book. Bogdan C Iacob Bogdan C Iacob Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, Denmark and the Romanian Academy Corresponding author: [email protected] Search for other works by this autho…
Paradoxes of Socialist Solidarity
Paradoxes of Socialist Solidarity
L’aide médicale apportée par les pays d’Europe de l’Est à la République populaire démocratique de Corée et à la République démocratique du Vietnam témoigne de leur volonté de se tailler un rôle mondial en exportant la “modernité socialiste” dans le cadre de la construction des États postcoloniaux. La contribution analyse les expériences parallèles des équipes médicales roumaines et tchécoslovaques dans les deux États d’Asie de l’Est pour souligne…
Malariology and decolonization
The article de-centres the global history of disease by examining the agency of Eastern European expertise at international organizations and during decolonization. It challenges accounts of anti-malaria policies at the League of Nations Health Organization and at the World Health Organization written from a Western, particularly North American perspective, or on the basis of local reactions to Western interventions. The contribution proposes an …
Peripheral Nerve
In January 1958 the Council of Ministers of the Romanian People's Republic launched a worldwide effort to showcase Romania's progress in health care. The decision reflected the Communist regime's medical Cold War diplomacy and was also a result of growing interest in what outside Eastern Europe was called “socialized medicine,” that is, a state-funded and organized health care system with equal and universal access for all citizens. Among the gov…
A Babel in Bucharest
The article explores three interconnected perspectives on young people from the Third World enrolled in Romanian universities. The first is the relationship between Romania’s engagement with the post-colonial world and the provision of higher education to African, Asian and Latin American students. The second is the impact of students’ political agency on Romanian society and foreign policy. Third, the author shows the resilience of racial discri…
Political science (20 works) · Law (17 works) · History (14 works) · Politics (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics (11 works) · History (11 works) · Law (10 works) · Communism (7 works) · Eastern European Communism and Reforms (7 works)