Julia Shatz - University of California, Berkeley

The ‘Glocalization’ of Governance: Child Welfare in Interwar Palestine

In 1900, Swedish social theorist Ellen Key predicted that the twentieth century would be “the century of the child.”(1) Indeed, developments in the fields of psychology, sociology, and education throughout the twentieth century rendered the child the primary object of national discourses and target of social reform. Moreover, the twentieth century saw the rise of international organizations dedicated to the aid of children across the world – a phenomenon crystalized in the League of Nations’ 1924 declaration of a new subject of governance: the global child.(2)

Beyond discourse and social theories, what did the “century of the child” mean for specific localities on the ground? How was the “the global child” realized, if at all? My dissertation considers these questions through explorations child welfare initiatives in interwar Palestine. By looking at the transnational networks of personnel, ideas, and capital that established an ad-hoc system of child welfare governance in Palestine, I argue that a politics of care around children became global through embedded local processes. This politics of care, which had genealogies in nineteenth and early twentieth-century empires, typified a newly internationalized form of colonial governance that would extend beyond the era of decolonization.

My paper will focus on the interplay between the global and the local – what Roland Robertson termed “glocalization”(3) – in the arena of humanitarian and welfare governance. Much of the focus of the works of Robertson and similar scholars has been on the globalizing economy or the globalization of ideas and discourse. My paper asks the extent to which we can employ this framework to understand twentieth-century institutions, politics, and subjectivity. Moreover, my paper will look at the historiographic and conceptual stakes of writing global and transnational histories through the lens of local contexts. Is it possible to re-localize the global? What new knowledge of globalization do we glean by looking from the ground up? Can we re-imagine the Middle East as a generator, rather than recipient, of globalization? Through examples of infant health clinics, orphan relief, and juvenile rehabilitation, my paper shows the importance of rooting global history in the specificities of local stories.

1 Ellen Key, Barnets århundrade (The Century of the Child), Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 1900 (trans. 1909).
2 League of Nations (Child Welfare Committee), Declaration on the Rights of the Child, Geneva, 1924.
3 Roland Robertson, Globalization: Social Theory and Global Culture, (London: Sage Press), 1992.

Please send any questions or comments to: bighist@berkeley.edu