Éditions Alphil – Swiss University Press
Intellectual Cooperation
Scientific Relations and Cultural Diplomacy at the League of Nations (1919–1939)
This companion website to the book, published in 2026, provides access to an interactive version of the intellectual cooperation network as well as high-resolution illustrations.
Unfortunately, the book is in French, and there is currently no English edition; this page can serve as a quick introduction to help English readers understand its content.
Data Visualization
The Network of Intellectual Cooperation
Explore the network derived from the archives of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation through the interactive visualization below:
You are free to explore the network, zoom in, select individuals, compute graph metrics, modify the layout, change colours, and more. The data used to produce this visualization are also available on GitHub (button above) and may be freely reused.
Chapter 1
A Different History of Intellectual Cooperation
Following an introduction to the book and a historiographical overview, the first chapter explains how the archives of the League of Nations were indexed in order to construct the network of intellectual cooperation.
The Documents of Intellectual Cooperation
Figure 1.1 — Examples of archival documents.
Figure 1.2 — Distribution of files by subject.
Figure 1.4 — Indexing of individuals by category.
The Archives as a Network of Documents and Actors
Figure 1.6 — Network of individuals indexed in archival files.
Figure 1.7 — Network connecting individuals appearing in the same archival file.
Figure 1.8 — Bipartite network of archival files and actors in the ICIC collection (1919–1927).
Figure 1.9 — Ego networks of Henri Bergson and Hendrik Lorentz.
Figure 1.10 — Network of the intellectual cooperation archives, 1919–1927.
Chapter 2
Scientific and Cultural Questions Reach the League of Nations
This chapter shows how various initiatives promoting the coordination of scientific, cultural, and educational affairs gradually found their way onto the political agenda of the League of Nations. Despite effective networking, the efforts of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, acting on behalf of the Union of International Associations, proved unsuccessful. Nevertheless, they laid the groundwork for other political figures to take up these issues in the Assembly with greater success.
Paul Otlet, Henri La Fontaine and the League of Nations
Figure 2.1 — Network of Otlet and La Fontaine in the ICIC archives.
Chapter 3
The Beginnings of Intellectual Cooperation
From its creation onward, the new International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) organized itself and gradually built a small ecosystem of partner institutions around it. Its activities developed along several lines, ranging from academic relations and intellectual property to bibliographic coordination and artistic and literary affairs.
The International Bureaux Section: Connecting Pre-war Internationalism to the New Multilateral Order
Figure 3.1 — Classification of international organizations recorded in 1919.
Thematic Subcommittees
Figure 3.3 — Organizational chart of intellectual cooperation, 1922–1926.
University Relations
Figure 3.4 — University relations (network).
Bibliography
Figure 3.6 — Bibliography (network).
Intellectual Property
Figure 3.8 — Intellectual property (network).
Arts and Letters
Figure 3.10 — Arts and letters (network).
Youth Questions
Figure 3.12 — Youth questions (network).
Socio-economic Files and Ad Hoc Issues
Figure 3.14 — Socio-economic and ad hoc issues (network).
National Committees on Intellectual Cooperation
Figure 3.16 — Map of the national committees.
Chapter 4
When France Enters the Field of Cultural and Scientific Relations
By offering the League of Nations an International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), based in Paris, the French government secured for itself a pivotal position in the cultural diplomacy of the interwar period. This development profoundly altered the balance within the ICIC and marked the beginning of its rapid bureaucratization.
The Organization of the IIIC
Figure 4.3 — Organizational chart of intellectual cooperation, 1926–1931.
Maintaining Contact with the "Community": States and National Committees
Figure 4.5 — IIIC correspondence with the national committees.
Chapter 5
The Actors of Intellectual Cooperation
Stepping away from the chronological narrative of the book, this chapter offers a prosopographical study of the members of the Committee. Far from being a representative body reflecting the nations assembled in the League, the ICIC was an elite microcosm whose composition was constantly negotiated. In the second part of the chapter, network analysis brings to light a number of secondary actors who, although neither leading scientific figures nor prominent politicians, formed the essential machinery of intellectual cooperation.
Do Great Minds Meet? A Prosopography of the ICIC Experts
Figure 5.1 — Attendance table of ICIC members.
Figure 5.2 — Evolution of attendance rates.
Figure 5.3 — Evolution of the proportion of political figures within the ICIC.
Figure 5.4 — Evolution of the proportion of women within the ICIC.
Figure 5.5 — Evolution of the proportion of members from Western Europe within the ICIC.
Figure 5.7 — Evolution of the proportion of members from Asia within the ICIC.
Figure 5.8 — Evolution of the proportion of members from Latin America within the ICIC.
Figure 5.9 — Evolution of the proportion of representatives of the "Latin cultural sphere."
Figure 5.10 — Evolution of the proportion of representatives of the "Germanic cultural sphere."
Behind the Leading Scholars: Another Face of the ICIC
Figure 5.13 — Evolution of the composition of participants across the 21 sessions of the ICIC.
The Actors in the Intellectual Cooperation Archival Network
Figure 5.15 — Results of two centrality measures computed on the same graph.
Direct Neighborhood Measure: Degree Centrality
Figure 5.16 — Weighted centrality.
Identifying Intersections: Betweenness Centrality
Figure 5.18 — Betweenness centrality.
Figure 5.20 — Comparison between weighted degree and betweenness.
Chapter 6
Mapping the Institution, Changing Scale
The archives on intellectual cooperation reveal the administrative machinery behind the symbolic and bureaucratic structure that was the League of Nations. By examining the network of exchanges from an institutional perspective, we can attempt to understand the hierarchical relationship between the various bodies and actors.
The "Institutional Topography" of the Archives of Intellectual Cooperation
Figure 6.1 — The intellectual cooperation network projected onto its institutional topography.
Figure 6.2 — Distribution of centrality measures in the institutional topography.
Figure 6.3 — Spotlight on the International Bureaux section.
Figure 6.5 — Archives network at the meso-organizational level.
C’est l’écoulement du temps qui fait le réseau
Figure 6.6 — Year-by-year evolution of the network of intellectual cooperation archives.
A Fixed Framework for Understanding the Evolution of Relationships
Figure 6.8 — Evolution of the archival network, as reflected in the institutional topography.
The structure, a "signature"
Figure 6.9 — Comparison of the 9 thematic sets on institutional topography.
Figure 6.11 — Categorization of Otlet and La Fontaine’s co-occurrents.
Understanding the Periphery
Figure 6.13 — External actors connected to the ICIC.
Figure 6.14 — External actors connected to the Section's secretariat.
Chapter 7
The 1930s: Crisis, Reform, and Independence
Continuing the chronological narrative of the book, this final chapter covers developments in intellectual cooperation during the second half of its existence, a period marked by economic crisis and the rise of totalitarian regimes. The ICIC partially resumed control of the Paris Institute but realized too late that the Institute was likely its lifeline in the event of the League of Nations’ dissolution.
A now permanent organization that safeguards French interests
Figure 7.3 — Organizational chart of intellectual cooperation, 1931–1939.
The bureaucratisation of intellectual cooperation through its organizational charts
Figure 7.4 — Organizational charts of the League of Nations.
Figure 7.5 — Complete organizational chart of the League of Nations.
Figure 7.6 — Organizational charts of the Intellectual Cooperation Organization.
Figure 7.7 — The evolution of the ICO's structure.
Further reading
About Intellectual Cooperation
Online Archives
The archives of intellectual cooperation are divided between the United Nations collections in Geneva (archives of the League of Nations, and thus of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation) and those of UNESCO in Paris (archives of the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation). These two collections have been digitized and are available online:
- United Nations Library and Archives, Geneva | The UN Geneva Archives portal can be found at the following address: archives.ungeneva.org, In particular, it includes the collection of the International Bureaux and Intellectual Cooperation Section.
- UNESCO Library and Archives, Paris | The UNESCO Archives portal can be found at unesco.org/en/archives, where users can access the collection of the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation.
- A bibliography containing more than 400 recent titles on intellectual cooperation (books, articles, conference papers, etc.). It is frequently updated on this page or directly in a Zotero group that users can subscribe to in order to access all these references directly within the bibliographic software.
- The Book of Abstracts of the conference, which contains texts describing the presentations given by the historians who participated in the event, reflecting the state of research on intellectual cooperation one century after its inception.
- The complete PDF of the book Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations, published by the United Nations following the conference. It also includes videos featuring several authors and a podcast in which the editors present the book.
- Grandjean Martin et Laqua Daniel (dir.), Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations: Shaping Cultural and Political Relations, Geneva : United Nations, 2025, 233 p.
- Grandjean Martin, « The International Bureaux and Intellectual Cooperation Section », in League of Nations Secretariat Research Guide, Geneva : United Nations, 2023.
- Grandjean Martin (dir.), Centenary of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations, Geneva : United Nations Library and Archives, University of Lausanne, 2022, 94 p.
- Grandjean Martin, « The Paris/Geneva Divide. A Network Analysis of the Archives of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations », in Carbó-Catalan Elisabet et Roig-Sanz Diana (dir.), Culture as Soft Power. Bridging Cultural Relations, Intellectual Cooperation, and Cultural Diplomacy, Berlin : De Gruyter, 2022, p. 65‑98.
- Grandjean Martin, « A Representative Organization?: Ibero-American Networks in the Committee on Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations (1922-1939) », in Roig Sanz Diana et Subira Jaume (dir.), Cultural Organizations, Networks and Mediators in Contemporary Ibero-America, Routledge, 2020, p. 65‑89.
- Grandjean Martin, Les réseaux de la coopération intellectuelle. La Société des Nations comme actrice des échanges scientifiques et culturels dans l'entre-deux-guerres, Lausanne : Université de Lausanne, 2018, 600 p.
Centenary of Intellectual Cooperation
To mark the centenary of the founding of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (2022), an international conference was held at the United Nations in Geneva, leading to the creation of a website that brings together useful resources for studying these issues :