Jour Fixe with Dorottya Szikra on 11.12.2024

As the last event of our Jour Fixe series in 2024, Prof. Dorottya Szikra from the Institute for Sociology, Centre for Social Sciences (Budapest, Hungary) held a lecture on "Social Policy in Autocratizing Context. Inclusionary and Exclusionary Processes" on December 11. Her presentation and the subsequent discussion with over 20 colleagues focussed on social policy reforms in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, and India.

Abstract: Illiberal parties’ grasp on power has relied on economic and social policy as much as on the demise of checks and balances and the distortion of electoral rules. Research has so far overlooked the ways in which these parties attract formerly neglected social groups with their welfarist approach. This lack of attention is not only important in scientific terms but has political consequences. Democratic forces are often blind to realize what illiberal and autocratic leaders offer in material terms to masses. This presentation summarizes a decade of comparative research into the social policies of populist, illiberal and autocratizing rulers. Utilizing examples from the procedures, content and discourses of welfare reforms in Russia, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, and India, we show how illiberal and authoritarian incumbents shape their welfare states in different geopolitical settings, and build up popularity through social policy programs.

Literature:

• Tomasz Inglot, Dorottya Szikra, Cristina Raț (2022): Mothers, Families or Children? Family Policy in Poland, Hungary, and Romania, 1945-2020. University of Pittsburgh Press. [Link]
• Dorottya Szikra, Kerem Gabriel Öktem (2023): An illiberal welfare state emerging? Welfare efforts and trajectories under democratic backsliding in Hungary and Turkey. In: Journal of European Social Policy. Sage. [Link]
• Dorota Szelewa, Dorottya Szikra (2024): Fighting Gender Equality under the Pandemic. The Case of Polish and Hungarian Anti-Gender Equality and Anti-LGBTQ+ Policies under the COVID-19 Crisis. In: PArtecipazione e COnflitto. [Link]

 

Dorottya Szikra is Research Professor and Head of Department at the Centre for Social Sciences, Budapest, and Visiting Professor at the Department of Gender Studies, CEU Vienna. She is teaching Welfare State and Gender under Undemocratic Rule and Critical Theory on Policy and Practice in 2023/2024. She is the country-lead of the ERC project WelfareExperiences analyzing how different welfare systems can affect people's mental health and chances of returning to work.

Szikra is also associated with CEU Democracy Institute where she led a CIVICA reseach project entitled Welfare, Democracy, and Populism under the COVID-19 Crisis (WELDECO). Szikra's main research field is welfare state and family policy development in Central and Eastern Europe. Between 2016 and 2020 she acted as the co-chair of the European Social Policy Analysis Network (ESPAnet). She has acted as a member of the editorial boards of various journals, including the European Journal of Social Security, the Hungarian on-line journal socio.hu and since 2020 the Journal of European Social Policy. Since 2021 she has served as a member of the EC commissioned High-Level Group on the future of social protection and of the welfare state in the EU.

Contact:
Dr. Kerem Gabriel Öktem
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
E-Mail: oektem@uni-bremen.de

Jour Fixe with Prof. Sara Niedzwiecki on Wednesday, June 19, 2024

As the last event of our CRC 1342 Jour Fixe lecture series in the summer semester, Sara Niedzwiecki from the University of California, Santa Cruz, gave a lecture on "Immigrants and the Welfare State in Latin America. Barriers to access" on June 19, 2024. The lecture was not only attended by numerous colleagues on site, but could also be followed via video conference format.

Abstract:

Countries in the Global South experienced a massive increase in immigration in the past decade, with more migrants ending up there than in the Global North. Within South America, over seven million Venezuelans have left their country since 2015, leading to an extraordinary scale of intraregional migration. During these same years, and due to the expansion of social programs, millions of citizens in the region accessed basic income and better-quality healthcare, many for the first time. This talk studies these dual trends and analyzes whether social policies effectively incorporate immigrants. Failing to provide newcomers with a basic standard of living produces social exclusion. It shows that immigrants have more impediments to accessing the welfare state than citizens, even for universal public health, but especially for targeted social assistance. This derives from a combination of political elites’ views around the degree to which immigrants “deserve” access to different types of policies. The research focuses on the barriers that immigrants face to accessing social policy in middle-income South American countries with high rates of immigration—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Colombia. Barriers to access are measured through qualitative coding of social assistance, social pensions, and public healthcare that build on legal documents, information requests, and secondary literature from 1990 to 2023, and public officials’ views are measured through in-depth interviews. In analyzing barriers to accessing social policy, this study contributes to the literatures on comparative welfare states and immigration, as well as comparative social policy in middle income countries. 

Sara Niedzwiecki is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She studies social policy, subnational politics, and immigration in Latin America. Sara is the author of Uneven Social Policies: The Politics of Subnational Variation in Latin America (2018, Cambridge University Press), which was awarded LASA's Donna Lee Van Cott Book Award from The Political Institutions Section and the International Public Policy Association's IPPA Book Award. She also co-authored Measuring Regional Authority: A Postfunctionalist Theory of Governance (Oxford University Press, 2016). Sara has authored and co-authored articles in Comparative Political Studies, Electoral Studies, Latin American Politics and Society, Studies in Comparative International Development, Regional and Federal Studies, PS: Political Science and Politics, International Political Science Review, among other peer-reviewed journals. During 2020-2021 academic year, Sara was a fellow at the University of Notre Dame’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies where she worked on a new project on social policy and immigration in South America.

Website: saraniedzwiecki.com

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Delia González de Reufels
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaft / FB 08
Universitäts-Boulevard 13
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-67200
E-Mail: dgr@uni-bremen.de

Prof. Natalia Sobrevilla Perea, University of Kent

As part of the CRC 1342’s Jour Fixe, Prof. Natalia Sobrevilla Perea from the University of Kent presented her research on the social care network in the nineteenth century Peruvian army on 12th of July. In her presentation she gave insights into her forthcoming book "Armed citizens and citizens in arms, the military and the creation of Peru (1800-1870)" (Cambridge University Press).

She explained her findings, based on her historical research in different archives, on how the Peruvian army was the first state institution to provide specific social care networks regarding health care, retirement, survivors pensions as well as veteran’s pay. After the lecture, Natalia Sobrevilla Perea discussed with colleagues and students the origins, structures and processes that lead up to this unique development.

Natalia Sobrevilla Perea is Professor of Latin American History at the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Kent. Her research interests include state formation and political culture in the Andes from the end of the colonial period throughout the nineteenth century, as well as issues of identity, race and ethnicity, and military culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in South America.

Publications:

Sobrevilla Perea, N. (2023) ‘The Abolition of Slavery in the South American Republics’, Slavery and Abolition. Taylor & Francis, pp. 90-108. doi: 10.1080/0144039X.2022.2122814.

Eastman, S. and Sobrevilla Perea, N. (2022) Independence and Nation-Building in Latin America. Race and Identity in the Crucible of War. New York, United States: Routledge. Available at: https://www.routledge.com/Independence-and-Nation-Building-in-Latin-America-Race-and-Identity-in/Eastman-Perea/p/book/9780367820718.

Sobrevilla Perea, N. (2023) ‘Emerging States’, in Posada-Carbo, E., Innes, J., and Philp, M. (eds) Re-imagining Democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1780-1870. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Available at: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/re-imagining-democracy-in-latin-america-and-the-caribbean-1780-1870-9780197631577?cc=fi&lang=en&#.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Delia González de Reufels
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaft / FB 08
Universitäts-Boulevard 13
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-67200
E-Mail: dgr@uni-bremen.de

Conference Report

In the aftermath of the Second World War, Winston Churchill advised in classic fashion: ‘Never let a good crisis go to waste’, and thus pointed to the potential any crisis entails. This was not lost on the attendees and presenters of the international conference "Economic Crises and Social Policy in the Twentieth Century" on December 1st and 2nd, 2022 which was organised by professors. Delia González de Reufels and Cornelius Torp as part of the CRC project B11.

At the centre of the conference were the two most important worldwide recession phases of the twentieth century: the Great Depression of the late 1920s and 1930s and the crisis-ridden period spanning the oil price shock of the early 1970s to the Asian financial crisis and the economic turmoil in Latin America at the end of the millennium. These shocks generated important impulses in social policy and the conference sought to shed light on these developments. This raised several important questions a to whether economic shocks were ever truly global in nature. And to what extent does the memory of previous crises shape responses to new economic downturns? Finally, what is their relationship to social policy? These overarching questions shaped the presentations and discussions that followed.

The first session focused on the interplay of crises, inequality, and social reform. Phillip Rehm started by explaining the nexus of how crises effect societal risk perception and welfare-state creation. His model linked ‘risk flips’ during a crisis to the increased preference for social programmes. Paul Dutton then demonstrated the ways historians can shed new light on unequal population health outcomes by seeing beyond the myopic fixation with medical care as the sole determinant of health.

Martin Daunton, Jason Scott Smith, and Daniel Béland presented in the second session which engaged with the Great Depression of the 1930s and its aftermath in Britain, the United States and Canada respectively. Topics as varied as tax-system rationalisation, spending on public-works programmes and the different impacts of centralisation vis-á-vis federalism on the implementation of social policies were covered to show the responses of anglophone countries to deep economic crises and the instruments they implemented.

In the third session, Klaus Petersen and Ángela Vergara underlined in their presentations the trajectories of Denmark and Latin America from the Great Depression of the 1930s, to the oil shocks of the 1970s and, in Latin America, the resulting debt crisis in the 1980s. By exploring both internal and external influences, they illuminated the discourses that allowed different forms of social policy to take root.

The presenters of fourth session on social policy reform explained employment policy reform from a comparative perspective in Asia, focussing on South Korea and Japan, and looked at labour and welfare in response to crisis in Australia. Juyoung An called for researchers to pay close attention to union strategy in order to understand divergent social policy outcomes while Gaby Ramia demonstrated the peculiarity of Australia’s ‘wage-earners’ welfare state’.

Drawing the first day to a close, Carmelo Mesa-Lago presented in his key note lecture his findings on pension privatisation in eleven Latin American countries between 1980 and 2020. He showed that, except for those countries who considered increased capitalisation of pension funds, none of the benefits that privatisation had promised, from adequacy and coverage, to concentration, materialised. This implies a serve crisis of pensions in these countries.

On the second day of the conference, Paolo Mattera, Raquel Varela and Paul Stubbs illustrated the impacts economic crises had on the development of the welfare state during the 1970s in Southern Europe and South-Eastern Europe. Mattera showed that Italian political actors opted to align domestic fiscal policy to decisions taken by other European countries, while Stubbs highlighted that the Yugoslavian government favoured the narrative of non-alignment. Finally, Varela demonstrated that important national shifts such as the Carnation Revolution in Portugal were decisive for the field of social policy.

In the following session, Cecilia Rossel and Andrés Solimano presented their work on two countries in the Southern Cone: Uruguay and Chile. Rossel showed how the banking crisis in Uruguay in the early 2000s led to a substantial change in social policy to address the shift of social assistance preferences. Here data indicated that this financial crisis led to a reconsideration of the principles of the 1989 ‘Washington Consensus’. Andrés Solimano’s work similarly drew attention to the complex relationship between increasing socio-economic inequality in Latin America during the period of stabilisation on the one hand, privatisation and liberalisation and the response by means of social policies on the other.

Social policy development in the face of crisis in Asia, the title of the seventh panel, was illustrated by the example of China where according to Aiqun Hu, social security reforms were made in a response to the employment crisis in China during the 1970s. This research tells the story of how the impact of an economic crisis was addressed in the field of social policy in the context of a system of state planned economy.

After an inspiring conference a lively debate completed the second day of the CRC conference. This discussion highlighted the need to evaluate ‘crises’ on both a theoretical and empirical level. The detailed historic reconstruction and analysis of the repercussions of economic crises on social policy needs to include a trans- and cross-national as well as a historical perspective. is an important endeavour that the participants emphasised as being far from completed. Future work could therefore enrich the field by focusing on more regions as for example African countries. Different aspects like gender and the categories of work distinguishing for example between formal and informal labour are aspects that could be worth looking at in more detail in further debates. The conference nevertheless demonstrated that the link between economic crises and social policy is a rich and fundamentally important topic of research a with the potential to enlighten the overarching CRC interest in exploring the global dynamics of social policy.

 

 

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Delia González de Reufels
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaft / FB 08
Universitäts-Boulevard 13
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-67200
E-Mail: dgr@uni-bremen.de

Prof. Dr. Cornelius Torp

On the 5th and 6th of May, the B01 project held a workshop at the University of Bremen.

They were joined by members of the project’s expert network GIST (Group Inclusion and Social Policies over Time), an international group of social policy scholars from South Korea, China, Kenya, South Africa, Morocco, Iran, Uruguay, Mexico, USA, Australia, Russia, and Sweden.

A central aim of the project is to compare the temporal sequence of inclusion into social security schemes in 20 countries around the world. The project aims to explore national social security legislation to find out what groups were covered by social security in what temporal sequence. The purpose of the workshop was to draw conclusions from the comparative assessment of group constructions (in laws on old-age security, survivors' pensions and unemployment insurance) for exploring the legitimation patterns for the inclusion and exclusion of groups. Moreover, the network planned its publication strategy and laid down next steps for future projects and cooperation.

Contact:
Dr. Johanna Kuhlmann

The volume is a central result of project B01 in the first funding phase and has now been reviewed by both the sociologist Ulf Tranow and the historian Johannes Nagel.

In his book "Kausale Mechanismen und Process Tracing - Perspektiven der qualitativen Politikforschung" (Causal Mechanisms and Process Tracing - Perspectives on Qualitative Political Research), Frank Nullmeier shows how political research can be systematically approached by means of process tracing and how political processes can be better understood and explained in detail by means of causal mechanisms. Nullmeier first examines the history and theoretical foundations of the concept of causal mechanisms and, building on this, presents a refinement to a theory of causal mechanisms. Furthermore, he explains how mechanisms already identified in the social science literature can be used to explain political developments. Finally, the book offers a guideline on how to proceed with process tracing, which researchers and students can use to analyse independent political processes.

Ulf Tranow, sociologist and Akademischer Oberrat at the Institute for Social Sciences at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, has read Nullmeier's book and written a detailed review for Soziopolis. Tranow summarises the chapters concisely, contextualises them within the literature and praises Nullmeier's integration of theory and empiricism: "It is worth reading both for those who want to familiarise themselves with the theoretical foundations of the mechanism concept and for those who are looking for a more application-oriented approach to mechanism-based individual case research."

Tranow has only one critical remark about Nullmeier's book: "... hardly any complex mechanisms are presented and discussed in the book", although these are necessary for explaining individual events in the social sciences. According to Tranow, Nullmeier is sceptical that a comprehensive compilation of complex mechanisms is possible on the basis of the current state of research. However, Tranow disagrees: "[N]ot only empirical research, but above all social theory lends itself to using it to compile complex mechanisms for a practical research toolbox ... The reappraisal of social theories by transferring their underlying causal models into the systematics and terminology of the mechanisms approach could be a big step towards making this explanatory programme attractive for empirical research."

Ulf Tranow: "To explain why by explaining how". Rezension zu "Kausale Mechanismen und Process Tracing. Perspektiven der qualitativen Politikforschung" von Frank Nullmeier. In: Soziopolis – Gesellschaft beobachten. 10.10.2022, https://www.soziopolis.de/to-explain-why-by-explaining-how.html

Johannes Nagel from the Department Global- und Verflechtungsgeschichte at Bielefeld University has read "Kausale Mechanismen und Process Tracing" from a historian's perspective and reviewed it for H-Soz-Kult. Nagel recommends reading the book to historians "... who are open to theory-based explanation and do not limit themselves to loosely commenting on source material with borrowed social science terminology, but want to proceed in a methodologically consistent manner". He praises the section on the history of theory as a "... concise overview of debates in bordering disciplines that one would otherwise have to read up on via various literature". Nullmeier's systematisation of causal mechanisms is very valuable for empirical historical research, Nagel notes, as it is helpful for applying theory and operationalising one's own projects: "The methodological explanations encourage one to think about how working on the material and explaining in individual case analysis are connected."

Johannes Nagel: Rezension zu: Nullmeier, Frank: Kausale Mechanismen und Process Tracing. Perspektiven der qualitativen Politikforschung. Frankfurt am Main 2021: ISBN 9783593512075, , In: H-Soz-Kult, 10.10.2022, https://www.hsozkult.de/publicationreview/id/reb-128189

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Frank Nullmeier
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58576
E-Mail: frank.nullmeier@uni-bremen.de

What social policies did Eastern and Western Europe pursue during the Cold War? What influence had the competition between the systems? How did the transformation phase proceed from 1989 onwards? These were questions addressed at the 4th Hermann Weber Con

For the West, the communist welfare state represented a central challenge in the competition of systems. In the competition of systems, socio-political superiority was also supposed to be demonstrated. The end of the Cold War and the end of the pressure to legitimise against the other system were in turn reasons for the welfare state reforms in the 1990s and 2000s in East and West, which were also discussed at the conference.

Six CRC 1342 researchers took part in the conference:

• Herbert Obinger explained the basics of the relationship between the Cold War, communism and social policy
• Carina Schmitt and Maria Ignatova-Pfarr gave a presentation on Bulgaria's pension policy during the Cold War
• Delia González des Reufels gave a presentation on the social policy of the last Chilean military dictatorship during the Cold War
• Cornalius Torp gave a presentation on pension policy in East and West Germany during the Cold War
• Lukas Grawe gave a presentation on the legitimisation of pronatalist family policy in the GDR.

The 4th Hermann Weber Conference took place in Berlin from 8 to 10 June 2022. The organisers were the research group "The 'activating welfare state' - a political and social history of German social policy, 1979-2017" at the SOCIUM of the University of Bremen, funded by the Federal Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs, and the Jahrbuch für Historische Kommunismusforschung. The conference was financially supported by the Gerda-und-Hermann-Weber-Stiftung.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Delia González de Reufels
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaft / FB 08
Universitäts-Boulevard 13
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-67200
E-Mail: dgr@uni-bremen.de

Dr. Lukas Grawe
Maria Ignatova-Pfarr
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 3
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-57057
E-Mail: ignatova@uni-bremen.de

Prof. Dr. Herbert Obinger
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 5
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58567
E-Mail: herbert.obinger@uni-bremen.de

Prof. Dr. Carina Schmitt
Feldkirchenstraße 21
96045 Bamberg
Phone: 0951-863 2734
E-Mail: carina.schmitt@uni-bamberg.de

Prof. Dr. Cornelius Torp

In "Causal Mechanisms in the Global Development of Social Policies" Johanna Kuhlmann and Frank Nullmeier present a novel, modular approach to explaining developments in social policy.

Causal Mechanisms in the Global Development of Social Policies, edited by Johanna Kuhlmann and Frank Nullmeier, is the eighth volume in the Global Dynamics of Social Policy series. The series is funded by CRC 1342 and edited by Lorraine Frisina Doetter, Delia González de Reufels, Kerstin Martens and Marianne Sandvad Ulriksen.

The new volume on causal mechanisms summarises key results of Project Area B from the first funding phase of CRC 1342: From 2018 to 2021, nine projects conducted case studies and qualitative analyses to investigate the interplay of international linkages with local conditions and the resulting social policy dynamics in countries, groups of countries and major world regions.

In doing so, Project Area B has developed the concept of causal mechanisms, which enables explanations of social policy developments that can complement, deepen and in some cases even correct the established approaches of research.

Mechanisms and "process tracing" are not new in political science. However, Kuhlmann and Nullmeier present a modular approach to causal mechanisms that combines 1) elementary causal mechanisms at the level of individual and collective actors with 2) complex causal mechanisms consisting of a sequence of activities that can in turn be explained by elementary causal mechanisms.

"[B]y distinguishing between elementary and complex causal mechanisms, policy processes can be disentangled into individual steps and sequences that lead to a certain effect, which can thus be analysed in more detail," Kuhlmann and Nullmeier write in the introductory chapter of their book.

By combining process and actor orientation as well as modularisation, the concept of causal mechanisms opens up new perspectives for the entire field of social policy research, both in macro-quantitative, comparative social policy research and in case study-centred work on individual countries or social policy programmes.

The individual chapters of the edited volume analyse social policy in very different countries around the globe in both individual and comparative case studies. The volume is divided into four parts dealing with social policy in Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. In addition, the chapters cover various areas of social policy, including old-age provision, health, unemployment, occupational injury, long-term care and social assistance.

---

Causal Mechanisms in the Global Development of Social Policies is part of the Global Dynamics of Social Policy series, published by Palgrave Macmillan. All volumes are available for free download (open access).

Contact:
Dr. Johanna Kuhlmann
Prof. Dr. Frank Nullmeier
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58576
E-Mail: frank.nullmeier@uni-bremen.de

The seventh volume of the Palgrave Macmillan series "Global Dynamics of Social Policy" highlights in 39 essays how inter- and transnational influences have affected social policy in a wide range of countries around the world.

The edited volume "International Impacts on Social Policy - Short Histories in Global Perspective" was published by Frank Nullmeier, Delia González de Reufels and Herbert Obinger and illustrates the importance of inter- and transnational influences for the development of public social policy worldwide. The book consists of 39 case studies that are divided into four sections analysing the importance of (1) violence, (2) international organisations, (3) trade relations and economic crises, and (4) ideas, networks of experts and migration. The contributions illustrate important parts of the results produced by the CRC 1342 and its 15 projects in the period from 2018 to 2021.

Like the entire Global Dynamics of Social Policy series, this volume is published in open access format to make the research results of the CRC 1342 easily accessible to the scientific community in all parts of the world.

The entire volume as well as the individual contributions can be downloaded free of charge from the Palgrave Macmillan/Springer website:

Frank Nullmeier, Delia González de Reufels, Herbert Obinger (eds.)(2022): International Impacts on Social Policy - Short Histories in Global Perspective, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Delia González de Reufels
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaft / FB 08
Universitäts-Boulevard 13
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-67200
E-Mail: dgr@uni-bremen.de

Prof. Dr. Frank Nullmeier
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 7
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58576
E-Mail: frank.nullmeier@uni-bremen.de

Prof. Dr. Herbert Obinger
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy
Mary-Somerville-Straße 5
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-58567
E-Mail: herbert.obinger@uni-bremen.de

Delia Gonzalez des Reufels and Simon Gerards presented their findings to the Association of European Latin American Historians in Paris.

The AHILA Congress took place in Paris from 23-27 August 2021, at which Delia González de Reufels and Simon Gerards Iglesias from project B02 presented and discussed their research findings in a separate panel on the history of social policy in Latin America. Under the title "Los vínculos de las políticas sociales estatales en Amércia Latina y sus representaciones mediáticas, siglos XIX y XX", the two-day panel brought together established historians who spoke about their projects on the history of public social policy and its representation in the media.

The focus was on the policy fields of work, education, health and housing, and their historical development as well as special social policy instruments were examined. The contributions examined both the nation-state conditions in the countries Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Uruguay and the processes of transnational exchange, the transfer of knowledge and ideas. The importance of gender for the historical analysis of social policy was highlighted, as was the role of photography and the medium of film and television. Claudia Agostoni from the UNAM in Mexico, Washington Dener Santos Cunha from the Universidade do Estado do Rio do Janeiro in Brazil and Maria Rosa Gudiños from the Universidad Nacional Pedagógica in Mexico as well as eight young Latin American historians gave presentations that also discussed the research problems and the particular challenges of empirical research.

Delia González de Reufels focused on the role of the Chilean armed forces in the development of social policy since the late 19th century and the links between "warfare and welfare" in this pioneering country of Latin American social policy. Simon Gerards Iglesias presented his dissertation project on Argentina's relations with the International Labour Organisation (ILO) and underlined the importance of transnational knowledge production for the formation of social policy. Martín Cortina Escudero, who is researching in the SFB sub-project B03, presented his findings on the importance of the colonial past for the formation of social policy, as did

Teresa Huhle, who left SFB 1342 this spring, who spoke about the connection between education and health using the example of Uruguayan "open-air schools".

The AHILA (Asocicación de Historiadores Latinomaericanistas) is the association of European historians of Latin America that emerged from the meetings of European Americanists at the end of the 1970s, in the middle of the Cold War. From the beginning, it also included Latin Americans living in Europe and European historians who taught and researched Latin American history beyond the so-called Iron Curtain. The AHILA Congress takes place every three years.

Contact:
Prof. Dr. Delia González de Reufels
CRC 1342: Global Dynamics of Social Policy, Institut für Geschichtswissenschaft / FB 08
Universitäts-Boulevard 13
28359 Bremen
Phone: +49 421 218-67200
E-Mail: dgr@uni-bremen.de