Workplace Justice

With Martin Conway and Camilo Erlichman on social justice and rethinking Europe’s 20th century

What does social justice mean in a European context—and how has that meaning evolved through dictatorship, democracy, and division? In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, Radka Šustrová speaks with historians Martin Conway and Camilo Erlichman about their new co-edited volume, Social Justice in 20th Century Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2024). Together, they explore the conceptual, political, and disciplinary challenges of writing a history of social justice—and how this approach unsettles classical narratives of 20th-century Europe. From labour and gender to postwar reconstruction and European integration, the episode offers a rich historical perspective on justice as both a contested idea and a lived practice.

Martin Conway is Professor of Contemporary European History at the University of Oxford. A leading scholar of postwar Europe, his research focuses on democracy, political change, and social transformation in the 20th Century. He is the author of Europe’s Democratic Age: Western Europe, 1945–1968 (Princeton University Press, 2020), a significant reinterpretation of the democratic transition in the postwar West.

Camilo Erlichman is an Assistant Professor of History at Maastricht University and co-founder of the Occupation Studies Research Network. His work explores occupation regimes, postwar transitions, and institutional change in Europe. He has published widely on the Allied occupation of Germany and contributes to broader debates on governance, legitimacy, and social justice in modern European history.

Listen to the episode here.

With Steven L. B. Jensen on rethinking social rights and a global lens on justice and human rights

In the episode of the Transformative Podcast, Radka Šustrová speaks with historian and human rights scholar Steven L. B. Jensen, senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights. Drawing on his recent keynote at the rountable titled “European Strategies for Strengthening Social Partnership and Labour Rights” in Vienna and his influential work on the global history of human rights, Steven Jensen explores how economic and social rights were fought for—particularly by socialist states and Global South actors—on the international stage after 1945. From Cold War diplomacy to the institutional battles within the United Nations and International Labour Organisation, this conversation highlights the legacies of internationalism, the enduring relevance of “the social,” and the global dimensions of justice.

Steven L. B. Jensen is a senior researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights. His work focuses on the historical development of international human rights, human rights diplomacy, and the intersection of global health and rights. He is the author of The Making of International Human Rights: The 1960s, Decolonization, and the Reconstruction of Global Values (Cambridge, 2016) and co-editor of Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (Cambridge, 2022). His current research includes a political history of economic and social rights after 1945.

Listen to the episode here.

Radka Šustrová in Conversation on the Transformative Podcast

In February 2025, Radka Šustrová spoke with Rosamund Johnston about the welfare states and social justice in 20th-century central Europe. Studying social justice reveals the promises that regimes—liberal or otherwise—make to their citizens, as well as how citizens interpret and respond to these promises. Yet, to what extent can we meaningfully use the term social justice to analyze societies that excluded entire groups—most notoriously Jews and Roma in territories occupied by the Nazis during World War II?

Focusing on this very period, and drawing on the example of the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, Radka Šustrová discusses not only how welfare institutions (alongside culture, literature, and media) historically reinforced nationalist projects, but also how deeply illiberal concepts of social justice have often been. In this episode of the Transformative Podcast, she further reflects on how these wartime legacies shaped the postwar welfare states celebrated in Central Europe on both sides of the Iron Curtain.

Listen the 61 episode of the Transformative Podcast here.