About the project

This PhD project will focus on the interwar period. Following the experiences of economic warfare during the First World War, blockades and sanctions became tools wielded by the League of Nations (LoN) and by others on behalf of an ‘international community’ to combat infractions of international law. Examples include sanctions levied against Japan following its invasion of Manchuria and against Italy following that of Ethiopia, as well as the multinational non-intervention committee set up to isolate both camps in the Spanish Civil War. Your PhD will focus on the interaction between the international level (and the development of thinking on the ethics and efficacy of using sanctions and blockades in the interest, however defined, of political aims) and one or more concrete case studies of interwar blockades. You will focus on the operation of blockades, their interaction with economic, diplomatic/legal and military measures taken by the belligerents, criteria for success or failure, and their economic, social, political and/or cultural impacts. You will also analyse what lessons contemporaries drew from these sanctions and blockades, both at state and international levels.

Samuël Kruizinga will be your PhD supervisor.

Candidates are asked the following qualifications

• a completed Master's degree in history, or a related discipline;
• solid knowledge of European and/or international history in the period 1914-1945;
• excellent research skills demonstrated by a completed Master’s thesis;
• solid knowledge of quantitative and/or qualitative research methods;
• (passive) language skills that allow you to read source materials relevant to your research;
• a strong cooperative attitude and willingness to engage in collaborative research;
• enthusiasm for communicating academic research to non-academic audiences;
• excellent command of English.

Please note that if you already hold a doctorate/PhD or are working towards obtaining a similar degree elsewhere, you will not be admitted to a doctoral programme at the UvA.