New transnational and global historical approaches are transforming our understanding of 1848, from brief national upheavals that failed, to a longer period of parallel and synchronous revolutionary cycles, characterised by global interconnections. In the case of Scandinavia, this demands that we no longer define 1848 through a French template of barricades and republican upheavals that quickly ended in dictatorship. This paper demonstrates how quite different versions of 1848 emerge when we break with traditional narratives centred on nations and states. By following radical actors, their practices, and networks I argue that from the viewpoint of Scandinavian radicalism, “1848” was something different from what a French revolutionary template has led us to believe. The paper places the events in Scandinavian spaces (both in colonies and imperial metropoles) in the centre of a “long 1848” that ran from 1846 to 1852. In this story, Scandinavia is no longer merely a periphery to other revolutionary spaces. What emerges is a Scandinavian revolutionary cycle in which radicals engaged in political and social struggles related to democracy, social and gender equality, slavery, nation building, and empire. Following global entanglements of revolutionary spaces, the paper also shows how the Scandinavian 1848 extended well beyond the geopolitical borders of Scandinavia, to further spaces both within Europe and across the Atlantic. It argues that these entanglements were often the product of radicals’ imperial imaginations that did not rely on the concept of nation states.

Colonial radical activism was by its very nature a transnational and transcontinental, even global, endeavour and histories of colonialism and decolonisation now substantially reflect this.  But there is still much to do to unpack the global intellectual history of colonial radical activism in practice.  Using the case study of mid-twentieth century West Africa, I argue that modes of activism such as journalism, conferencing and trade unionism, as ‘technologies of dissent’, not only confronted colonial rule politically, but fundamentally challenged contemporary chronologies and geographies.  The everyday tools of activism – journals, mass meetings etc. – invoked alternative pasts, presents and futures to intervene and disrupt colonial temporalities.  In this way, colonial radicals were not just anti-colonialists; their dissent went beyond decolonisation, challenging global social and economic hierarchies based on chronopolitical and spatial differentiation.  By examining archival traces, from Sierra Leonean newspaper articles to World Trade Union Conference reports, we can see how colonial radical activists in their everyday practice rejected the separation of the time-space of the colonised world from that of Europe and modernity.  This was not the abstract theoretical formulation of individual well-documented intellectuals, but the collective endeavour of many, who used these technologies of dissent to advocate for change.  By challenging the chrono and geopolitical norms of their day, they made the intellectual framework which underpinned and enabled the colonial project visible, and by doing so, demonstrated the possibility of dismantling it.

The international arena was a fundamental space for the legitimising projection of the Franco regime, which, from the second half of the 1950s and its progressive integration into transnational economic organisations, adapted its political language to the parameters of modernisation, efficiency and development. However, this scenario was also used by the anti-Franco opposition to open up an alternative information space in collaboration with left-wing organisations in order to show the repressive nature of the dictatorship. Given the importance of the international space as a space of confrontation and denunciation, this proposal aims to analyse the communicative strategies of the anti-Francoist opposition in Europe. Through newspapers, magazines, conferences and international acts of solidarity, we will examine the media agency of anti-Francoism when it came to breaking the silence abroad, understood as a mobilising resource and a means of raising public awareness. To this end, we will focus on student youth as a case study, allowing us to analyse their role in internationalising the anti-Francoist struggle among the new generations of Europeans. In this respect, we will analyse the role of young students in exile during the 1960s and 1970s, who went mainly, but not only, to Paris. From there, we will explore the links maintained with the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France (UNEF) and, after the crisis of the French student union in 1968, with parties and organisations of the French left. For all this, we will explore internal documentation and publications of the UNEF and French left-wing organisations, mainly the Parti Socialiste Unifiéand the Ligue Communiste, given their close links with Spanish university youth political organisations. Ultimately, theproposal aims to focus on the agency of militancy from below in generating international solidarity networks and the importance of Paris as a meeting place and space for cultural and political exchange.