Kasper Braskén

Transnational social movements, global history, international communism, Weimar Germany, anti-fascism and resistance, the history of international fascism, radicalisation, racism. 

Kasper Braskén (PhD) has specialized on the history of international communism and the history of anti-fascism in European, transatlantic and global politics and social movements. Braskén has been visiting researcher at the Free University Berlin, Royal Holloway University of London, and Zentrum für Zeithistorische Forschung (ZZF), Potsdam, Germany.

His research is based on extensive archival research in especially German, Russian, British and US archives.

He is author of The International Workers' Relief, Communism, and Transnational Solidarity: Willi Münzenberg in Weimar Germany (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) and co-editor of both Anti-Fascism in the Nordic Countries: New Perspectives, Comparisons and Transnational Connections (Routledge, 2019) and Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective: Transnational Networks, Exile Communities, and Radical Internationalism (Routledge, 2021).

Braskén is currently working in the research project "Finland-Swedish Antifascism" (Den finlandssvenska antifascismen) that analyses the history of anti-fascism in Finland from the 1920s to the 1940s. The project investigates how anti-fascism was developed as a movement and idea within the Swedish speaking minority in Finland, and more generally analyse the relation between ethnic minorities and anti-fascism. Braskén will in the project examine the transnational connections established between the Swedish speaking anti-fascists in Finland, the Nordic Countries and to the transnational anti-fascist centres in Berlin, Paris and Vienna. The project is headed by Anders Ahlbäck and it was awarded 400.000 € by the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (SLS) in November 2017. 

Braskén is editorial board member of the international journal Twentieth Century Communism and since December 2020 the book reviews editor of the journal.

Braskén has peer reviewed original research articles for the journals Global Networks (Wiley), Contemporary European History (Cambridge UP), Scandinavian Journal of History (Routledge); and Fascism: Journal of Comparative Fascist Studies (Brill). Moroever, he has reviewed books in European History Quarterly, History: The Journal of the Historical Association, American Historical Review, Twentieth Century Communism, Historisk Tidskrift för Finland, Finsk Tidskrift, International Newsletter of Communist Studies, and H-Net (H-Socialisms).

ONGOING & FORTHCOMING RESEARCH:

- Co-editor of a forthcoming special issue on ‘Anti-Fascism in Southern Africa 1919-2019’, South African Historical Journal, (together with Jonathan Hyslop and Neil Roos): https://networks.h-net.org/node/28765/discussions/6115232/cfp-special-issue-south-african-historical-journal-‘anti-fascism  

- Co-editor of forthcoming edited volume: Anti-fascism and Ethnic Minorities: Political and Cultural Forms of Resistance in Central and Eastern Europe, ca 1920–1950: https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/6935115/cfp-anti-fascism-and-ethnic-minorities-political-and-cultural

-  Book under contract with Routledge: Anti-Fascism: A Global History, (with Nigel Copsey), a co-authored monograph on key moments in the global history of anti-fascism from the 1920s to the present day.

Global history; revolutions; protest movements, international communism, antifascism, fascism