Colloquium | Diana Georgescu (London) | Child Ambassadors: International Youth Camps and Cultural Diplomacy in the Global Cold War (1960s-1980s)

This talk forms part of the research colloquium of the Chair in Southeast and East European History at UR.

Abstract: The presentation explores the widespread practice of international youth exchanges animated by internationalist ideals for insights into the role of cultural diplomacy during the late Cold War. To circumvent bipolar approaches to the Cold War in terms of US – Soviet competition, the analysis takes a ‘pericentric approach,’ focusing on a seemingly peripheral actor, the Romanian Pioneers, the children’s organization of the Romanian Communist Party during Nicolae Ceaușescu’s rule (1965-1989). The talk follows the thousands of twelve- to fourteen-year-old Romanian ambassadors who participated in (leftist) international children’s camps in the Soviet bloc and Western Europe from the 1960s to the 1980s. Examining interrelated East-East and East-West youth exchanges, it engages with debates within the history of childhood and youth, internationalism, cultural diplomacy and the Cold War.

Diana Georgescu is Lecturer in Transnational/Comparative Southeast European Studies at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. She is a visiting fellow at the ScienceCampus throughout July 2025.

About Diana: My academic and biographical trajectory is inextricably tied to the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the renewed scholarly interest in the region’s history, culture, and society. I grew up in Romania and I pursued the interdisciplinary study of Eastern and Southeastern Europe in postgraduate programmes in Europe and the United States. I earned my doctoral degree in History at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. Before beginning at UCL SSEES in September 2015, I returned to Europe as a Max Weber Postdoctoral Fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. My academic career spans not only continents, but also disciplines. The turn to history and the social sciences began with my exploration of gender and national regimes in Eastern European history in post-graduate programmes in Gender Studies at the Central European University in Budapest. This shift followed an early training in literary, cultural, and film studies at the Faculty of Foreign Languages of the University of Bucharest.

My archival and oral history research in Romania, the US, and the UK has been supported by grants from the U.S. Fulbright Programme, Max Weber Programme at the European University Institute, the Council for European Studies at Columbia University, the Social Science Research Council, New York, the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC, and the New Europe College in Bucharest.

My most recent research project explores international youth exchanges during the late Cold War, aiming to contribute to the literature on transnational flows of people, ideas, and ideologies in the contemporary world. Starting inquiry from the boom in international youth exchanges in Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania, the book will examine how youth exchanges expanded beyond the Soviet Bloc to include collaborations with Western European and so-called “Third World” countries in Africa, Asia, or Latin America. This project joins a growing literature on the deployment of “soft power” during the Cold War, positioning itself at the intersection of research on socialist youth and works on travel and tourism.