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International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Exorbitant Expectations. Edited by Jonas Brendebach, Martin Herzer, & Heidi J.S. Tworek. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2018. 242 pp. ISBN: 9781138303089.
Leave it to historians of international organizations to provide useful insights into the entanglement of international organizations and mechanisms of communication since the nineteenth century. Indeed, in many ways, the field of Communication Studies itself was born out of the assumptions, anxieties, and delusions of liberal internationalism traced in this collection. However, International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Exorbitant Expectations, a volume of nine well-researched essays and an introduction, knows a diminishing amount about Communication Studies and so the promise of interdisciplinary dialogue held in its title must continue to take place in the field of Communication Studies. It's too bad, because Communication Studies has something to offer, not just something to learn from these scholars. Not least, a more complex definition of communication; the editors rely on Harold Lasswell's model of effective communication, now more than 70 years old.
The book promises to reach across the divide, to bring together two "burgeoning yet largely unconnected strands of research: the history of international organizations and international media histories" (p. 6), yet includes not one scholar based in a department of Communication Studies. References to a few historians of communication may be found scattered in the footnotes but not one is granted to grand theories of communication and globalization from the likes of Armand Mattelart, Harold Innis, or Dwayne Winseck. One feels as though one has entered a parallel universe in which the political economy of communication has not been conceptualized.
Nevertheless, the volume contains much new and valuable research about empire and communication-from the more obscure Central Commission for the Navigation of...