The League Against Imperialism (LAI) was an unprecedented attempt to change the world. Traces of this organization’s brief existence flicker in the memoirs of postcolonial leaders and in police records – remembered as a moment of possibility, and as an existential threat. Founded with the support of the Communist International (1919-1943) at the initiative of the German communist Willi Münzenberg, the LAI was inaugurated at the Brussels Congress (February 1927), and included hundreds of delegates from Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas with the aim of building a united front against imperialism. Several organizers and attendees were communists, and many more were socialists, trade unionists, nationalists or pacifists. The broad membership included famous writers and artists, as well as active or former members of legislatures in the UK, France, Belgium, Germany, France, Mexico, and elsewhere.
The Brussels Congress was an exceptional event. This undertaking included a wide range of anti-colonial and left-wing personalities. Building on the work of the Congress of the Peoples of the East (Baku, 1920) but working on a significantly expanded geographic scale, Brussels has long been considered a precursor to the 1955 Bandung Conference. Several organisations that would mark the political history in various regions for years to come were represented in Brussels, including the Indian National Congress, the Kuomintang, Étoile Nord-Africaine, the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (APRA), the Syrian-Palestinian Congress, the Perimpunan Indonesia, and the African National Congress of South Africa. While some kept working with the LAI after the congress, others’ paths diverged. Yet the 1927 Brussels Congress remained as a remarkable moment in history, where actors from across the world formulated a global anticolonial vision. Its meeting minutes and newspapers are filled with men and women who founded nation-states, new literary movements, and influential international organizations, among them Jawaharlal Nehru, Diego Rivera, Bertrand Russell, Romain Rolland, Roger Baldwin, Ellen Wilkinson, Albert Einstein, Jomo Kenyatta, Shakib Arslan, and Madame Sun Yat-sen. New research in the last decade has traced the LAI’s history from its origins in a Communist International initiative through its attempts to render new political subjects and forms in the aftermath of the First World War.
2027 will mark the centenary of the founding of the League Against Imperialism (LAI). On this occasion, we invite scholars to join us for a conference for a critical appraisal of this organization’s history and legacy, as well as the many often contradictory narratives of which it has become a part in the last decade of burgeoning academic interest. We welcome reappraisals of the place of the LAI in diverse histographies, new research on the LAI, and underexplored elements of its vast archive.
The conference will take place in Amsterdam on May 13-14, 2027 and we invite contributors to submit 300-word abstracts to brussels1927@gmail.com on any aspect of the LAI, including but not limited to:
Pre-histories of the LAI’s politics, networks, and concepts
Lives and legacies of the 1927 Brussels Congress’s participants
Local, national, or regional histories of LAI
Intellectual histories of LAI-linked projects, concepts, and visions
Post-Brussels trajectory of the LAI, including other congresses such as Frankfurt, 1929
Transnational relations between the LAI and European, Asian, African, Caribbean, Latin American, and Pacific actors, including various socialist and communist parties, trade unions, art and cultural movements etc.
Deadline for Abstracts:
March 1, 2026
Organizers:
Disha Jani, University of Bielefeld
Burak Sayım, University of Basel
Scientific Committee:
Hakim Adi, LSE
Marnix Beyen, University of. Antwerp
Esmat Elhalaby, University of Toronto
Anne Garland Mahler, University of Virginia
Priyamvada Gopal, University of Cambridge
Daniel Laqua, University of Nottingham
Frederik Petersson, Stockholm University
Jihane Sfeir, Université Libre de Bruxelles
Henk de Smaele, University of Antwerp
Carolien Stolte, Leiden University