Kasper Braskén is Academy Research Fellow in Political History at the University of Helsinki. He is the Principal Investigator of the research project “Locating Global Protest against the Extreme Right: Anti-Fascism, Anti-Racism and Internationalism in Multiethnic Metropoles” (LGP) funded by the Research Council of Finland (Project number 355478; 2023–2027). 

In my research I have specialised in 20th century history with a main focus on transnational and global history, left internationalism, international communism, ethnic minorities, and anti-fascist movements in European and global contexts. 

In 2014 I completed my PhD in general history at Abo Akademi University, Finland. The study was based on extensive archival research in Moscow and Berlin and examines the concept of transnational solidarity in the international communist movement. It was published as The International Workers’ Relief, Communism, and Transnational Solidarity: Willi Münzenberg in Weimar Germany (Palgrave Studies in the History of Social Movements, 2015).

Since 2014 I have focused on the transnational and global history of anti-fascism and fascism, specialising on international anti-fascist movements and networks, cultural politics, and the intellectual history of anti-fascism in the 20th century. International academic mobility has been a vital part of my academic journey. I have previously been visiting researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin, Royal Holloway University of London, University of Cape Town, Queen Mary University of London, and The New School for Social Research, NYC. 

I am a founding member of the "Anti-Fascism Studies Network: History, Culture & Memory (AFSN)”, hosted by the University of Manchester:  https://www.humanities.manchester.ac.uk/research/centres-institutes/networks/anti-fascism-studies-network/

I am chief editor (together with Margarite Poulos) of Twentieth Century Communism: a journal of international history and co-editor of the The Helsinki Notebooks - an academic journal founded by the LGP project that unites scholars, activists, and cultural practitioners in rigorous, comparative analysis of resistance to far-right politics, examining its historical, strategic, and future dimensions at intersections with colonial legacies, racism, gendered oppression, and state violence.

“Locating Global Protest against the Extreme Right: Anti-Fascism, Anti-Racism and Internationalism in Multiethnic Metropoles”, funded by the Research Council of Finland (Project number 355478; 2023–2027).

My ongoing research analyses global anti-fascist and anti-racist protests in Cape Town, London, New York City and Chicago between the 1930s and the 1950s. Through the lens of global urban history I look at the formation of interracial, interethnic and internationalist protest practices in anti-fascist spaces that in significant ways extended across class, gender, color and cultural lines in segregated city spaces. 

I am interested in anti-fascist spatial claims in urban environments and the territorialisation of anti-fascist politics in multiethnic global cities. Although the Axis powers were defeated in 1945, the continued resistance against European/Western colonial rule, white supremacy, racial injustice and apartheid was in the 1950s framed as a crucial continuation of interwar anti-fascism. 

The project studies the alliances and conflicts that emerged within and between ethnic minorities, left and progressive movements, and emphasises the role of women active in anti-fascist movements, campaigns, rallies, demonstrations, congresses, and cultural events organized in the project’s four multiethnic metropoles around the anglophone Atlantic. The project has organised a conference on "Anti-Fascist London" at the Bishops Gate Institute, London, in April 2024, and an international conference on "Imagining the Anti-Fascist City: Contested Geographies of Resistance and Solidarity” in June 2025 in Helsinki. 

Project website: https://www.helsinki.fi/en/projects/anti-fascism-anti-racism-and-internationalism-multiethnic-metropoles

Profile at the University of Helsinki: https://researchportal.helsinki.fi/en/persons/kasper-brasken/

Co-editor of the edited volumes and special issues: 

Anti-Fascism and Ethnic Minorities: History and Memory in Central and Eastern Europe (Routledge, 2024)

Special issue: "Anti-fascist resistance fighters, intersectionality and memory", Twentieth Century Communism 25, 2023

Special Issue: South African Historical Journal: Anti-Fascism in Southern Africa, vol. 74 (1) 2022. 

Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective: Transnational Networks, Exile Communities, and Radical Internationalism (Routledge, 2021)

Anti-Fascism in the Nordic Countries: New Perspectives, Comparisons and Transnational Connections (Routledge, 2019)

 

Select articles and chapters: 

(with Anders Ahlbäck, Matias Kaihovirta and Ylva Perera), ‘The cohesive and dividing power of anti-fascism: Language and class among Finland-Swedes in the 1920s–1940s’, in Anders Ahlbäck & Kasper Braskén (eds.) Anti-Fascism and Ethnic Minorities: History and Memory in Central and Eastern Europe (London: Routledge, 2024), p. 75–91.

‘A Dire Warning to All Ethnic Minorities in Europe? Fascist Repression in South Tyrol and the Formation of Swedish-Speaking Anti-fascism in Finland’, in Jože Pirjevec, Egon Pelikan, Sabrina P. Ramet (eds.), Anti-Fascism in European History. From the 1920s to Today (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2023), p. 235–252.

‘International Communism and Transnational Solidarity in the Context of the First Russian Art Exhibition’, in Isabel Wünsche & Miriam Leimer (eds.) 100 Years On: Revisiting the First Russian Art Exhibition of 1922 (Wien: Böhlau, 2022), 45–53.

‘South African Anti-Fascism and the Nazi Foreign Office: Antisemitism, Anti-communism and the Surveillance of the Third Reich’s International Enemies’, South African Historical Journal, vol 74, 1 (2022), p. 30–54. https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2022.2027005 

(with Jonathan Hyslop and Neil Roos), ‘Political and Intellectual Lineages of Southern African Anti-Fascism’, South African Historical Journal, vol. 74, 1 (2022), p. 1–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2022.2077418

‘“Aid the Victims of German Fascism!” Transatlantic Networks and the Rise of Anti-Nazism in the USA, 1933–1935’, in Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey and David Featherstone (eds.) Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective. Transnational Networks, Exile Communities, and Radical Internationalism (London: Routledge, 2021), p. 197–217. https://doi.org/10.4324/978042905835

‘“Make Scandinavia a Bulwark against Fascism!” Hitler’s Seizure of Power and the Transnational Anti-fascist Movement in the Nordic Countries’, in Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey & David Featherstone (eds.), Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective. Transnational Networks, Exile Communities, and Radical Internationalism (London: Routledge, 2021), p. 96–114. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429058356 

(with David Featherstone & Nigel Copsey), ‘Introduction: Towards a Global History of Anti-Fascism’, in Kasper Braskén, Nigel Copsey & David Featherstone (eds.) Anti-Fascism in a Global Perspective. Transnational Networks, Exile Communities, and Radical Internationalism (London: Routledge, 2021), p. 1–20. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429058356

‘“Whether Black or White–United in the Fight!” Connecting the Resistance against Colonialism, Racism, and Fascism in the European Metropoles, 1926–1936,’ Twentieth Century Communism: A Journal of International History, No. 18 (2020), p. 126–149. https://doi.org/10.3898/175864320829334834

‘Communist Anti-Fascism and Transnational Fascism: Comparisons, Transfers, Entanglements’, Arnd Bauerkämper & Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe (eds.), Fascism without Borders: Transnational Connections and Cooperation between Movements and Regimes in Europe from 1918 to 1945 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2017), p. 288–311.

(with Bernhard H. Bayerlein and Holger Weiss), ‘Transnational and Global Perspectives on International Communist Solidarity Organizations’, Holger Weiss (eds.), International Communism and Transnational Solidarity: Radical Networks, Mass Movements and Global Politics, 1919–1939 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), p. 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004324824_002

‘In Pursuit of Global International Solidarity? The Transnational Networks of the International Workers’ Relief, 1921–1935’, Holger Weiss (red.), International Communism and Transnational Solidarity: Radical Networks, Mass Movements and Global Politics, 1919–1939 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), p. 130–16. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004324824_005

’The British Miners’ and General Strike of 1926: Problems and Practices of Radical International Solidarity’, in Holger Weiss (ed.), International Communism and Transnational Solidarity: Radical Networks, Mass Movements and Global Politics, 1919–1939 (Leiden: Brill, 2017), pp. 168–190. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004324824_006

’Celebrating October: The Transnational Commemorations of the Tenth Anniversary of the Soviet Union in Weimar Germany’, in Jean-François Fayet, Valérie Gorin, & Stefanie Prezioso (eds.), Echoes of October: International Commemorations of the Bolshevik Revolution 1918–1990 (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2017), pp. 76–105.

‘Making Anti-Fascism Transnational: The Origins of Communist and Socialist Articulations of Resistance in Europe, 1923–1924’, Contemporary European History, 4 (2016), p. 573–596. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0960777316000424