Laboratories of Cooperation: UNRRA’s Conferences

In this paper I will consider the format and purposes of the conferences organised by the biggest and most impactful international organisation created during the Second World War: the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). UNRRA’s many conferences, ranging from small meetings with scientific advisers to big diplomatic gatherings that debated and ratified UNRRA’s policy, provide plenty of reasons why historians of science should pay more attention to the history of conferences. Conferences in all their variety have a long history as meetings of informed minds with the aims to recalibrate terms, solve problems, achieve professional coherence and define who is a member of the club. UNRRA, as a formally ‘technical’ organisation, adapted the format of scientific conferences to solve intractable political problems, while at the same time drawing on older ideas about political congresses to create and steer technical consensus. One of the purposes of this paper therefore will be to point to the dual traffic of ideas and influences, between the political and scientific realms, shaping the mid-20th century conferences of international organisations such as UNRRA.