Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies - History

History

The Graduate Institute of International Studies was founded in 1927 due in large part to the efforts of scholar–diplomats William Rappard and Paul Mantoux, who both worked as senior officials in the Palais Wilson building of the League of Nations headquarters.

Unsurprisingly, the history of IHEID is intimately linked to that of the many international organizations based in Geneva. The Institute's original mandate was based on a close working relationship with both the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization. It was agreed that in exchange for training staff and delegates, the Institute would receive intellectual resources and diplomatic expertise (guest lecturers, etc.) from the aforementioned organizations. According to its statutes, HEI was "an institution intended to provide students of all nations the means of undertaking and pursuing international studies, most notably of a historic, judicial, economic, political and social nature."

The institute managed to attract a number of eminent faculty and lecturers, particularly from countries mired in oppressive Nazi regimes, e.g., Hans Wehberg and Georges Scelle for law, Maurice Bourquin for diplomatic history, and the rising young Swiss jurist, Paul Guggenheim. Indeed, it is said that William Rappard had observed, ironically, that the two men to whom the Institute owed its greatest debt were Mussolini and Hitler. Subsequently more noted scholars would join the Institute's faculty. Hans Kelsen, the well-known theorist and philosopher of law, Guglielmo Ferrero, Italian historian, and Carl Burckhardt, scholar and diplomat all called the Graduate Institute home. Other arrivals, similarly seeking refuge from dictatorships, included the eminent free market economy historian, Ludwig von Mises, and another economist, Wilhelm Ropke, who greatly influenced German postwar liberal economic policy as well as the development of the theory of a social market system.

After a number of years, the Institute had developed a system whereby cours temporaires were given by prominent intellectuals on a week, semester, or yearlong basis. These cours temporaires were the intellectual showcase of the Institute, attracting such names as Raymond Aron, René Cassin, Luigi Einaudi, John Kenneth Galbraith, G. P. Gooch, Gottfried Haberler, Friedrich von Hayek, Hersch Lauterpacht, Lord McNair, Gunnar Myrdal, Harold Nicolson, Philip Noel Baker, Pierre Renouvin, Lionel Robbins, Jean de Salis, Count Carlo Sforza, and Jacob Viner.

Another cours temporaire professor, Montagu Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, Sir Alfred Zimmern, left a particularly lasting mark on the Institute. As early as 1924, while serving on the staff of the International Council for intellectual Cooperation in Paris, Zimmern began organizing international affairs summer schools under the auspices of the University of Geneva, 'Zimmern schools', as they became known. The initiative operated in parallel with the early planning for the launch of the Graduate Institute and the experience acquired by the former helped to shape the latter.

Despite its small size, (before the 1980s the faculty never exceeded 25 members), the Institute boasts four faculty members who have received Nobel Prizes for economics - Gunnar Myrdal, Friedrich von Hayek, Maurice Allais, and Robert Mundell.

For a period of almost thirty years (1927–1954) HEI was funded predominantly through the support of the Rockefeller Foundation. Since then the Canton of Geneva and the Swiss Federal Council bear most of the costs associated with the Institute. This transfer of financial responsibility coincided with the 1955 arrival of William Rappard's successor as Director of the Institute, Lausanne historian Jacques Freymond. Freymond inaugurated a period of great expansion, increasing the range of subjects taught and the number of both students and faculty, a process that continued well after his retirement in 1978. Under Freymond's tenure, HEI hosted many international colloquia that discussed preconditions for east-west negotiations, relations with China and its rising influence in world affairs, European integration, techniques and results of politico-socioeconomic forecasting (the famous early Club of Rome reports, and the Futuribles project led by Bertrand de Jouvenel), the causes and possible antidotes to terrorism, Pugwash Conference concerns and much more. Freymond's term also saw many landmark publications, including the Treatise on international law by Professor Paul Guggenheim and the six-volume compilation of historical documents relating to the Communist International.

The Graduate Institute of Development Studies (GIDS, French: Institut universitaire d’études du développement, IUED) was a graduate school focusing on development studies. Created in 1961 by Jacques Freymond as the Institut Africain de Genève (African Institute of Geneva), GIDS' stated goal was to promote teaching and research concerning international development and to encourage students from the Global South. The GIDS trained several generations of development activists in Switzerland and in the world (including at PhD level after 1995) and was at the center of a huge international network. Very active in concrete development projects, the GIDS was also known in the francophone world for proposing an alternative and a critical view of development aid and world affairs, as well as for its journal, the Cahiers de l'IUED. It was also among the pioneer institutions in Europe for the intellectual development of the sustainable development perspective.