Author-Meets-Critics: Church diplomacy caught between the Cold War and Decolonization

HUM:Global Talk! Academic colloquium

At this open event, the author Dino Knudsen will first present his extended chapter, Contemporary Church Diplomacy: The Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, in the upcoming volume A History of the Desire for Christian Unity: Ecumenism in the Churches, 19th–21st Century.* Then three distinguished scholars in transnational history, church diplomacy, and African church history – Haakon A. Ikonomou, Mattias Sommer Bostrup and Niels Kastfelt – will offer their comments. Finally, the floor will be open for discussion chaired by Tine Reeh. All are welcome!

Knudsen has studied the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, the foreign policy think tank and diplomatic arm of the World Council of Churches (WCC), a global ecumenical organization of Christian churches. Contributions of religious organizations to modern diplomacy and international relations are often neglected in contemporary scholarship, but Knudsen’s research demonstrates how the WCC pioneered East-West cultural exchange and served as an informal platform for East-West dialogue and trust-building. Moreover, during the 1960s, the WCC became an important actor in decolonization, reorienting itself from an initial Eurocentric position to even supporting armed liberation struggles in Southern Africa.

Bios

• Mattias Sommer Bostrup is an assistant professor at Aarhus University, specializing in religious, missionary, and church history, including the transnational character and inherent pluralism of Lutheranism in Northern Europe.
• Haakon A. Ikonomou is a tenure track assistant professor of history at University of Copenhagen, specializing in international organizations, international bureaucracy and diplomacy, including prosopographical, biographical, institutional, social and digital history approaches.
• Niels Kastfelt is an associate professor emeritus at University of Copenhagen, specializing in non-European and African church history, historiography, and theory of history.
• Dino Knudsen is an assistant professor of global political studies at Malmö University, specializing in transnational private-state networks in the 20th Century. Knudsen has published several books, including on anti-Communist labor networks in the Marshall Plan and on global elite diplomacy and governance in the 1970s.

The event is sponsored by the Centre for Modern European Studies – An Öresund Network of Lund University, Malmö University and the University of Copenhagen. Co-organisers are the Section of Church History and HUM:Global, both University of Copenhagen.

*Alberto Melloni and Luca Ferracci (eds.): A History of the Desire for Christian Unity: Ecumenism in the Churches, 19th–21st Century, volume II of a history of ecumenism published in early 2025 by Brill in English and Italian.