This paper explores how global intellectual history can serve as a critical method for rewriting the histories of internationalism. Far from being neutral, the historical discipline has been deeply involved in the construction and maintenance of empire, and even after formal decolonization, the study of intellectual history has largely preserved a Eurocentric vision of the world. In the last twenty years, scholars have challenged these entrenched narratives by showing that modernity—characterized by the rise of capitalism, the nation-state, and internationalist ideas—was a co-constructed, global process. By decentering Europe, this approach allows historians to rethink the intellectual and political exchanges that shaped internationalism and to highlight the contributions of colonized and marginalized peoples in shaping modern ideas of political freedom, equality, and justice. Through this lens, anti-colonial thinkers and movements appear not as isolated or reactive phenomena, but as central to the development of modern political thought, particularly in their efforts to theorize and realize alternative forms of internationalism beyond the imperialist framework.

Building on this methodological shift, the paper will address Joan Scott’s question of not just where marginalized peoples are in the historical record, but how and why they were systematically excluded. By positioning global intellectual history as a critical tool, this paper argues that we must not only expose the intellectual roots of eurocentrism but also interrogate how imperialist frameworks continue to shape contemporary international relations and global hierarchies. Ultimately, the paper will advocate for a historiographical agenda that confronts how imperial ideas of racial and civilizational superiority, along with the notion of the inherent higher value of Western lives, not only persisted through the twentieth century but have been continually reconstituted in our present moment; while recovering radical potential of anti-colonial, socialist, and feminist internationalisms as forces that sought to redefine global solidarities in opposition to empire.

Electronic communication systems were technologies born-imperial – as were the international organizations founded to govern them. From the mid-19th century on, imperial interests drove the international expansion of communication networks, from cabled telegraphy and telephony to wireless radio: ushering in a wave of imperial globalization, graphed onto (and expanding) the cartographies of colonial empire.

Critiques of imperial globalization’s asymmetries arose near-simultaneously with the growth of these networks. Press workers, engineers, and civic leaders across the Global South –particularly in Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East – critiqued the Western axes of information’s globalization and flocked to various kinds of international organizations to petition reform. From institutions of technocratic governance like the International Telecommunication Union, to professional press organizations like the Press Congress of the World, as well as the UN’s Hu-man Rights Council and Unesco, subaltern critiques of communications inequality accelerated across the 20th century, struggling to posit communications sovereignty and equity as pre-conditions for ethical and sustainable globalisation.

Reflecting on this history, this paper will suggest that new, global histories of communications governance provide three main analytical opportunities to reinterpret the relationship between the history of internationalism(s) and the history of imperial globalisations. First: attending to electronic communications and the institutions that governed them help us reinterpret international organisations both as facilitators of imperial globalisations, but also as fora that came to be used or reappropriated to grapple with the asymmetries that such interconnection had wrought. Second, this history helps us to decouple global histories’ overweening preoccupation with the history of connection and flows to see how both international organizations and the technologies of globalisation became vectors of steep disconnection and dispossession. Finally, by chronicling a wide range of Global South actors both within and beyond the state (including journalists, en-gineers, and public intellectuals), this story highlights how internationalist impulses operated across scales, often working at cross-purposes, both reconciling and stalemating in ways that tended to exacerbate information inequality on a North/South axis.

Even years into what has been termed the ‘archival turn’, historians have been surprisingly un-interested in turning the archives of international organisations into not just their tool but also their object and focus of study. Although anthropologists and cultural historians have long been thinking about archives as sites of power and the construction of knowledge (especially in early modern settings) – and although histories of particular international organisations are being produced in ever-growing numbers, the two have not been put into sustained enough conversation.

The sociologist Max Weber proposed that states’ ‘bureaucratic authority’ was grounded in norms and regulations, and constituted through a body of written records. Like state archives, those of international organisations often have designated archivists whose job it is to create and main-tain order, police access and, frequently, write the organisation’s official history. In recent decades, these archives have also, like the state archives, been wrestling with the storage of multimedia records, digitisation, and access.

This paper will examine the histories of the archives of key international organisations created in the mid-20th century – UNRRA, WHO, UNESCO – and show how thinking about the history of archives involves identifying debates about the ownership, legacy, value and use of records, and pinpointing crucial encounters in the history of competing ideas of internationalisms. Such histories shed light not just on how information was managed. It can help us understand much bigger questions about American-led internationalism and the operation of post-war international organisations and bureaucracies.

The International Geophysical Year (IGY) was billed as a genuinely global undertaking, one that would ambitiously build and expand on the long-term legacy of the two International Polar Years, held in 1882–83 and 1932–33, respectively. It was to be global in scope, aiming to gather readings and study a wide range of geophysical phenomena stretching from pole to pole and from the sea floor up to near-Earth orbit. In doing so, the IGY would bring together the world’s geoscientific communities under the coordination and leadership of a special committee International Council of Scientific Unions (ICSU), involving individuals and organisations with a wide range of disciplinary orientations coming together in an undertaking that would transcend the Cold War politics then shaping the contours of international scientific exchange and cooperation. Across these multiple dimensions and in its ambitions and rhetoric, the IGY was a prime example of post-Second World War scientific internationalism in action on a global scale.

Just as discussion of scientific internationalism has invariably tended to primarily consider and to therefore centre the ‘Global North’, so too has the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year invariably been seen through a similar lens despite its global pretensions - and dimensions. This paper aims to therefore reconsider the scientific internationalisms at play in the IGY from the vantage point of multiple actors from its ‘Western Pacific Region’, especially the ways the IGY intersected and interacted with the range of political actors, agendas, currents, and cross-currents present there. From ideological divides, contested legitimacies, and asymmetries to colonial, anti-colonial, and post-colonial agendas, the Western Pacific provides an ideal case through which to discuss key dynamics running through the IGY as a ‘global’ exercise in scientific internationalism.