Immanuel Harisch receives the 2023 Walter Markov Prize of the European Network in Universal and Global History (ENIUGH) for his outstanding dissertation entitled "Great Hopes, False Promises. African Trade Unions in the World of Organized Labor. Institutions, Networks, and Mobilities during the Cold War 1950s and 1960s."

Based on an extensive corpus of sources from trade union and party archives in six countries, this study of global labor history is dedicated to the extraordinary upsurge of international trade union activity from the late 1950s to the late 1960s in the context of African decolonization and global system competition during the Cold War. In particular, the central importance of trade union education is emphasized. The extremely broad scope of investigation, ranging from Uganda to Guinea, from East Germany to Ghana, from Nigeria to Angola and Congo-Léopoldville, makes visible the high hopes of personal actors from various individual unions, national union headquarters, and international union federations, as well as the aspirations of politicians, union officials, and refugees on a global scale.

As a former Prae-Doc of the Research Platform Mobile Cultures and Societies and DSHCS fellow, the final phase of the dissertation was funded by a three-month DSHCS fellowship.