Martin Ottovay Jørgensen

Research

My research project centres on the international military operations of the United Nations in the Gaza Strip (1956-1967) and Cyprus (1967) and seeks to analyse how the ‘local’ connects with the ‘global’ in a period defined by the formal end of imperialism and the onset of the Cold War. In other words I focus on how the local populations and the encounters with the UN soldiers in these two post-conflict societies as parts of the Cold War imperial frontier were and are connected to international politics and global processes and vice versa. Working with privileged archival material I have also found it necessary to use oral history interviews to supplement and enrich the everyday stories found in the archives as well as take part in the much needed fruitful dialogue between modern historical discourse and memory. 

Research Interests

- International Military Operations

- History and Memory in Post-Conflict Societies

- Imperial History

- Global Cold War history

- Middle East and South East Mediterranean History

- Uses of History outside Academic History

Profile

My interests in international military operations reflect my own experiences in the Danish army and a deployment to Kosovo in 2003 while the transnational approach in some sense is also a reflection of my own family background. On my mothers’ side the past five generations spread across Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia, Montenegro and Australia on the backdrop of the two world wars as well as local and global migration processes. My father’s side is, however, much concentrated in a small region of Denmark and thus tied up in the de-peasantisation processes and industrialisation processes over the past 6 generations.

Publications

Koldkrigsrationalernes fiasko i Sydamerika. Book review of Hal Brands’ ”Latin America’s Cold War”, Det ny Clarté, Vol. 7, No. 21, 2013. (peer reviewed)

 

With Marianne Rostgaard: “Academic History and the Future of the Past: Contesting the Current Paradigm of Global Governance and Western Temporal and Spatial Epistemologies through Memories and International History From Below by example of the UN peacekeeping operation in the Gaza Strip, 1956-1967”, Academic Minutes, Vol. 5, Special Issue, 2012. (peer reviewed)

Can be found at : http://www.akademiskkvarter.hum.aau.dk/pdf/AM2012/Marianne_Martin_Academic_G.pdf 

 

“Dag Hammarskjöld og Afrika”. Book review of Susan Williams’ ‘Who Killed Hammarskjöld?: The UN, the Cold War, and White Supremacy in Africa’, Det ny Clarté, Vol. 6, No. 20, 2012. (peer reviewed)

 

“Udviklingbegrebet og udviklingbistandens koloniale forbindelse: En kommentar til Mikkel Flohrs indlæg”, Det ny Clarté, Vol. 6, No. 20, 2012. (peer reviewed)

Papers for workshops, conferences and seminars

‘Heaven in a grain of sand’ : The current paradigm of global governance as understood via the case of the United Nations Emergency Force”. Paper presented at CHI, CEPS and CCC Global History Workshop at Aalborg University, Aalborg, Denmark. September 2012