Pledge: An interdisciplinary workshop on the history and politics of a persistent security device.
University of Marburg, 21-22 November 2019.

Nina Boy and Christian Wenzel are organizing a two-day workshop next year and have issued a call for abstracts. The deadline for submissions is 15 February 2019. For more information, please see the event page.

From the Greek symbolon to mortgage, warranty, bail, and seal, the pledge calls up an age-old history of securing or crediting an expectation, relation, or undertaking that is curiously absent from the modern disciplinary landscape … Casting a wide net, the workshop aims to take a first step towards a cross-sectional account of the history and politics of the pledge and its continuing relevance today. If from Antiquity to the early modern period, the pledge of hostages, for example, was a key feature of international peace treaties and everyday diplomacy, the present form of the financial system essentially relies on the pledge of collateral. This comprehensive perspective shall serve to detect the peculiarities of distinct forms of pledge, as well as form a basis to collectively explore how these can inform the theorization of security.

 

Nina Boy and Christian Wenzel