Created by the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 along with the League of Nations, the ILO will complete its hundred years of existence in 2019. The Century Project has been created to prepare this anniversary by significantly improving the knowledge of ILO's long and varied history and its role in specific historical moments. It will encourage ILO's staff members and constituents to see their current work and activities in a historical context and improve ILO's visibility by sharing its history with a broad general public.

The Century Project's major goal is to encourage new perspectives on the ILO's history which go beyond the traditional institutional narrative. It will do so by asking new questions, broadening the geographic focus and using various methodologies and sources. In the rapidly globalizing world of the post-Cold War era, transnational history has become a major trend in historiography. This explains why the ILO in recent years has attracted the increasing interest of the academic community. The organization's unique tripartite governance structure (employers' and workers' organizations along with government representatives) makes the ILO an even more compelling case-study for researchers working with a transnational perspective. The Century Project can therefore benefit today from a very favourable research and knowledge development climate.

ILO's activities and ideas are inseparable from their historical context. The dual objectives of research undertaken in the framework of the Century Project are to show how the historical context has influenced the ILO's work and, on the other hand, to help understand how much the organization has contributed to social, economical and political developments over the past 100 years.

Opening new perspectives also means asking new questions. What was the ILO's role in political transitions, especially changes to democratic political systems? How did the ILO try to meet its objective of contributing to the regulation of labour conditions from a global perspective in an ever changing political and socio-economical environment? How can we understand the interaction between the national and the international sphere or the complex interplay of identities and representations? How did the ILO interact with other global actors and social movements? Opening new perspectives also requires changing the vantage point and moving away from a Western-centric approach focused on Europe and North-America. The Century Project seeks to close the research gap and encourage historical research on, and equally importantly in, Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Finally, adopting new perspectives will require methodological creativity and inter-disciplinary flexibility. The nature of the ILO not only encourages scholars in traditional historical fields, such as labour history, social history, political history, intellectual history or gender history, to have a transnational approach, it also encompasses several disciplines such as economics, law and sociology. Whereas traditional institutional history relies heavily on published documents, the Century Project encourages and supports research based on a large variety of archival materials including regional archives and oral archives.

Although the Century Project will be managed by a team in the ILO, it will be composed of many collaborations. The goal of the Project is to coordinate and support a dynamic international network of academic and institutional collaborators, who will not only gather new information, but also reach out and share this knowledge with a larger public.