From Local to Global, from Physical to Digital: Data-Driven Approaches to the Study of Transnational Political Networks
Agustin Cosovschi Research Associate at the Institute of contemporary history, Ljubljana
Brokers-of-NAM deals with the biographies of five actors that played an essential role in the making and promotion of nonalignment as a global political proyect in the postwar period: Veljko Vlahović in Yugoslavia, Oscar Waiss in Chile, U Kyaw Nyein in Burma, Kamal Jumblatt in Lebanon, and Vassos Lyssarides in Cyprus. Besides studying the life and actions of these actors, the project seeks to use their biographies as a vantage to study the transnational political networks they themselves contributed to creating. Drawing on archival sources, memoires, and the political press, we seek to identify the individuals and the organizations that were involved in these networks and analyze how they interacted over time, creating a broad tissue of political contacts that allowed for the global diffusion of ideas of neutralism, anticolonialism, and national and social emancipation.
In my presentation, I will discuss the advantages, as well as the many challenges and uncertainties, of studying these phenomena through data-driven approaches. I will discuss other projects that have made significant contributions to the subject and to the development of relevant methodological frameworks for the topic and I will share our initial reflections in the process of developing a data model for the project, providing some examples with data coming primarily from Yugoslav sources.
Programme 2026 | #digitalhistory | Contact : seminardigitalhistory@gmail.com