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The article explores the impact of the end of the Cold War on resolving conflicts and political changes in various regions. It discusses examples such as the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, South Africa's transition to democracy, and the paramilitary ceasefires in Northern Ireland. The article acknowledges the complexity and controversy surrounding these issues, presenting different perspectives on the role of external parties and the timing of peace processes. It specifically highlights the connection between the end of the Cold War and the political changes in South Africa, emphasizing the significant impact it had on the country's transition to democracy. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the accessibility of archival materials in Russia related to the Cold War and the liberation struggle in Southern Africa. The Russian State Archive of the Modern History and the Foreign Policy Archive of the Russian Federation house important documents on Moscow's relations with South Africa and political organizations in that country. The article also mentions the publication of a comprehensive collection of archive documents on Russia-Africa ties and a book on the history of Soviet Union's relations with South Africa. The author disagrees with some interpretations in these works and highlights the importance of a joint Russian-South African project on historical memory about solidarity in the fight against Apartheid. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the consequences of the Cold War for the African National Congress (ANC) and its allegiances. It highlights the historical roots of the ANC's commitments, tracing back to its founding in 1912. The article also explores the ANC's realignment and its alliance with the Soviet Union, as well as the criticism of the ANC's post-apartheid policies. It argues that the ANC's commitment to using state power for social emancipation has persisted beyond the Cold War. The article concludes by suggesting that the transition to a new South Africa will be a prolonged and challenging process. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the connections between the end of apartheid in South Africa and the end of the Cold War. It discusses the African National Congress (ANC)'s victory in the 1994 elections and Nelson Mandela becoming the first black president of South Africa as significant moments in Africa's decolonization. The article examines different interpretations of the relationship between the Cold War and the struggle against apartheid, including the ANC's historical ties to China and Russia. It also mentions various scholars and their research on the complexities of the Cold War's impact on southern Africa. The article concludes by discussing different perspectives on when and how the Cold War ended in the region and highlights the enduring legacies of the anti-imperialist struggle in the region's politics and foreign policy alignments. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the relationship between the end of the Cold War and the end of apartheid in South Africa. It highlights that while many analysts at the time did not anticipate the rapid and peaceful end of both the Cold War and apartheid, these two world historical events unfolded close in time to each other. The article explores the connections between the two processes, including the impact of international pressures, the weakening of the South African government and the ANC, and the disappearance of military support for the ANC. It also emphasizes the importance of events in Namibia in influencing the end of apartheid in South Africa. The article acknowledges that the relationship between the ending of the Cold War and the ending of apartheid remains unclear and calls for further research to provide a comprehensive understanding of these interconnected events. [Extracted from the article]

This article discusses the end of the Cold War in Southern Africa and its impact on the Apartheid Government's nuclear weapons program. The program was developed as a strategic deterrent against perceived communist threats in the region. However, with the changing political landscape, including the end of hostilities in Angola and the rise of progressive leaders like FW de Klerk, the program was deemed unnecessary and a burden. In 1989, de Klerk ordered the termination of the program and the dismantling of the nuclear arsenal. This decision, along with South Africa's subsequent commitment to nuclear non-proliferation, played a significant role in the country's transition to democracy and its emergence as a leader in promoting disarmament. [Extracted from the article]

In recent years, a flurry of books that explore the history and theory of liberalism have appeared. Nevertheless, there has been surprisingly little scholarship examining the history of 'Cold War liberalism' — one of the most important instantiations of twentieth-century liberalism — as a phenomenon in and of itself, and the work that has been done has mostly focused on a small coterie of American and Western European intellectuals. This essay is a first step attempt to articulate a broader history of Cold War liberalism, tracing the ideology's origins and influence from the 1910s until the 1980s. We focus on three distinct elements of the history of Cold War liberalism: its embrace of anti-democratic politics and how this informed the creation of the national security state; its linking of reform to the imperatives of national security; and its decline and transformation in the 1970s and 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 1951, the American Midwest experienced one of its worst floods in its history up to that point, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in damages and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of people. While ostensibly a national issue, the natural disaster also drew the attention of hundreds of German citizens who donated to the relief effort. In the letters accompanying their donations, these Germans emphasized that they wanted to submit a token of their gratitude to the American people and begin to pay back a fraction of what they felt they owed for American humanitarian assistance in the immediate postwar era. Though the American government did not solicit these donations, it saw value in help publicising the donations and their letters. Locked in a propaganda battle with the Soviet Union, American authorities promoted these donations not only as evidence of German-American friendship, but also as evidence that their humanitarian policy at the dawn of the Cold War had achieved significant cultural, political, and diplomatic goals throughout Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poland was the second-to-last country in the Soviet bloc to establish official relations with the PLO – only doing this in March 1976. However, mutual contacts date back to the late 1960s, when Polish military intelligence forged a top-secret relationship with the PLO based around the arms trade. Using a variety of archival sources, this paper seeks to re-assess the relationship between Warsaw and the PLO within the broader framework of Polish policy towards the Middle East from the time of the Six-Day War to the time of opening of the PLO Office in Warsaw in 1976. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1949, Washington and London launched the inaugural Cold War covert action in the Soviet bloc against Albania. Regarded internally as a 'test case', the CIA and MI6 used food and material aid in Operation BGFiend/Valuable to subvert Enver Hoxha's regime, supplementing print and radio propaganda. The US, in particular, attempted to weaponise covert aid, inverting the defensive qualities of its overt counterpart. Although Western officials believed in aid's potential at the outset, tactical and geopolitical challenges damaged its reputation as an effective subversive weapon. This had a long-term impact as aid was discarded in later covert action operations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite an increased interest in the diplomatic history of India – chiefly supplemented by the opening up of Indian diplomatic records – the Latin American region has received marginal attention. Interestingly, the archival sources based in India throw an altogether fresh perspective on diplomatic engagements between India and Latin America during the Cold War period. This Research Note places the Cuban Revolution in perspective to examine how developments in Cuba kept Indian diplomats and leaders engrossed. Through India's understanding of Castro's Cuba, the Note captures ideological and pragmatic considerations defining the responses to each other's overtures during such an important turn in history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union aspired to transform overseas academic institutions according to their political goals. Their attempts to impose certain values, disciplines, structures, and personnel were foiled by sabotage and indigenous traditions on the part of the local academic elite, particularly professors. The article illustrates futile revisions by both the United States and the Soviet Union at Ethiopian higher educational institutions and discusses the Cultural Cold War in terms of realism, constructivism, Americanisation, Sovietisation and response theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) played a key role in handling the Hungarian refugee crisis of 1956. It was this body, established in 1951, that organised the registration and transport of some 200,000 Hungarian refugees in Austria and Yugoslavia. This paper examines this international migration organisation in the 1950s based on the archives of the ICEM and the UN Secretariat, as well as on US, British and French foreign policy documents. It focuses on the workings of the ICEM concerning the Hungarian refugee crisis and its influence upon the subsequent history of the organisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the early Cold War, it was difficult for American intelligence to penetrate the Iron Curtain but a potential solution soon arose: émigré intelligence groups such as the Magyar Harcosok Bajtársi Közössége (MHBK) or 'Association of Hungarian Veterans'. This group, however, turned out to be an intelligence 'paper mill'. Attempts at trans-Atlantic cooperation with the MHBK and similar groups failed as they lost most of their good sources and were penetrated by communist security services. By the mid-1950s, US intelligence cut these groups off, took over their good sources, and established a source registry to prevent recurrence of the problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In "Freedom on the Offensive: Human Rights, Democracy Promotion, and US Interventionism in the Late Cold War" by William Michael Schmidli, the author explores how Ronald Reagan repurposed Jimmy Carter's human rights rhetoric to advance US foreign policy goals during the late Cold War. Reagan used democracy promotion as a means to combat communism and promote neoliberal economics, prioritizing political and civil rights over social and economic rights. Schmidli examines Reagan's strategies in various contexts, including Nicaragua, and discusses the challenges and criticisms faced by the administration. The book offers a thought-provoking analysis of Reagan's approach to human rights and its implications for US interventionism. [Extracted from the article]

This paper analyses the image of Taiwan (the Republic of China) in the Polish communist press in the mid-1950s. It focuses on the news coverage related to the two Polish cargo ships – the Praca and the Prezydent Gottwald – which were detained by the Taiwanese authorities in 1953 and 1954, respectively. Based on the press narratives and supported by declassified government documents, the paper analyses the impact of the Cold War conflicts and divisions on the detention of Polish ships and its coverage by the Polish communist media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1950s and 1960s, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU) protested nuclear weapons testing, called for nuclear and conventional disarmament, and simultaneously embraced the promises of atomic energy. The ICFTU also, particularly through its atomic energy committee, pressed the United Nations (UN), the International Labour Organization (ILO) and the new International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for stronger worker protections and union input at atomic energy sites. Such efforts revealed how a non-governmental organization (NGO) attempted to shape international narratives and standards regarding nuclear weapons and atomic energy, revealing a complex approach to the use of the atom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the disparities that exist between the original English versions and the translated Chinese versions of Patrick Hurley's 'Five-Point Proposal' and argues that by studying additional primary sources, these differences can reveal insights into the political manoeuvring of both parties on the verge of the Cold War and their efforts to mould their own historical accounts. By analysing all available versions of the proposal, the article examines two primary sets of textual discrepancies and their potential implications for interpreting the motives of the Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The analysis emphasises the importance of taking into account the translation process and the translators' contributions to creating these disparities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Cold War the United States and the Soviet Union aspired to transform overseas academic institutions according to their political goals. Their attempts to impose certain values, disciplines, structures, and personnel were foiled by sabotage and indigenous traditions on the part of the local academic elite, particularly professors. The article illustrates futile revisions by both the United States and the Soviet Union at Ethiopian higher educational institutions and discusses the Cultural Cold War in terms of realism, constructivism, Americanisation, Sovietisation and response theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines a lesser-known episode of the Cold War in Asia, namely Japan's mediation in the Konfrontasi crisis between Indonesia and Malaysia, focusing on Prime Minister Satō's appointment of a special envoy, Kawashima Shōjirō, in spring 1965. Drawing on multi-archival research in Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, it shows how Japan's envoy diplomacy initiative was shaped by unilateralism, partisanship and a brazen diplomatic style that defied 'low-profile' expectations and revealed regional leadership aspirations. Kawashima's (eventually unsuccessful) endeavour played out as a remarkably 'interventionist' initiative, mirroring domestic tensions over the definition of Japan's post-war role in Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that in the late 1970s the human rights movement recognised children as subjects in their own right, giving them their own voice. The author questions the claims that until recently the dominant view of victims and their suffering was adult-centric and that human rights and humanitarianism were two unrelated paradigms. In studying this process, the author offers a historiographical contribution that centres on the value of children as a way of gaining new insights into the Cold War and history in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Creole', or domestically birthed, anticommunisms came in many different flavours and are in need of deeper investigation to understand how they responded to local conditions. This study examines one case from Ecuador where political leaders eagerly manipulated an anticommunist agenda to advance their own partisan prospects in ways that were distinct from the United States government's global geopolitical concerns. Conservatives had their own motivations, which sometimes paralleled with and at other times came into conflict with those of larger political powers. These 'creole anticommunisms' could be more aggressive than those of United States officials, even as they served other purposes. [q]TQ3[/q] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a similar vein, Rich does not fully account for how Protestantism informed the CPRA's dual vision of and role in social change in post-colonial Congo. However, Protestant aid in Congo, according to Rich, must also be seen in light of a broader rise in humanitarian concern after decolonisation and during the Cold War. In effect, Rich revises the history of (Protestant) aid in Congo by making institutions - rather than particular individuals or interventions - the protagonists. [Extracted from the article]

After 1945, the Iron Curtain cut off half of the hinterland of Germany's largest seaport, Hamburg. Located in the middle of Europe, the city found itself at the periphery of the Federal Republic and Western Europe. The political and economic elites of the city-state conceived the Policy of the Elbe to deal with this situation. Its proponents pursued apolitical strategies to reconnect it to Eastern Europe despite political obstacles and against national foreign policy principles. This article sheds light on the ideas and practices of a city forced to redefine its position in Cold War Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Their chapter focuses on the evolution of Yugoslavia's foreign policy, tracing Yugoslavia's role as an aggressive regional player during the 1940s to its transition into a reliable partner towards the end of the Cold War. Breaking down bipolarity: Yugoslavia's foreign relations during the Cold War: Martin Previsi'c (ed.), (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021), xi + 286 pp Yugoslavia's disproportionately influential role during the Cold War is well established among historians of the twentieth century. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the East Pakistan crisis of 1971 as a watershed moment in Cold War humanitarian politics. It argues that the absence of an effective international framework of multilateral foreign intervention or peacekeeping forced the key external actors to resort to covert forms of intervention, while publicly pledging adherence to non-interference in the domestic affairs of Pakistan. The article demonstrates that covert intervention by India, the United States and the United Nations not only undermined the credibility of the Cold War international system, but also fuelled the drift to the Indo-Pakistani war that ultimately ended the crisis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hal Brands' newest monograph, I The Twilight Struggle, i is a nuanced review of US Cold War strategy, set against the backdrop of the strong present-day resurgence in geopolitical tension. It would have been fascinating for Brands to apply his conceptual logic of twilight struggles to Soviet and Chinese Cold War foreign policies in greater detail, especially so as to comment on the existence of causal links between the Cold War and the twilight struggles of the present. [Extracted from the article]

The 'Asian Visits Fund' was the Australian Government's first Cold War people-to-people public diplomacy programme. Standing in the Fund's way was Australia's racially restrictive immigration programme. A central feature of the scheme, therefore, was to present a vision of a non-racial Australia through the new national ideology of Assimilation. The treatment of indigenous Australians was showcased as one way to highlight Assimilation and debunk broader claims of racism. Ultimately, however, the Asian Visits Fund was unable to alter the negative perception of Australia's immigration policy. It was the last major initiative aimed at selling the unsellable 'White Australia Policy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turkey witnessed the unprecedented awakening of leftist politics after acceptance of the 1961 Constitution. The Constitution's provisions on subjects like freedom of thought and social and economic rights enabled the existence of leftist politics in the political arena and prepared the grounds for the policies they would advocate. However, since the US-Soviet rivalry polarised the Middle East, President Sunay's 1967 statement indicating that the Constitution was closed to socialism, despite prominent jurists' counterclaims, coupled with some high-ranking commanders' anti-leftist outburst demonstrated a resurgence of the Cold War state of mind in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After breaking away from 'Stalin's isolationism', Moscow saw the 1959 Cuban Revolution as an opportunity to expand its influence and granted Cubans numerous scholarships for postgraduate and technical training in the USSR. Facing international hostility, preparing new specialists was crucial to Cuba's development. However, for many uneducated Cuban students, in addition to serious external obstacles (weather, language, depression), studying in the USSR was a highly politicised experience. They formed colectivos and were called on to induce a 'revolutionary morality' through incentives and sanctions; they also received ongoing political orientation from the embassy, shaping a well-entrenched 'culture of militancy'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tunisia's postcolonial leadership intervened in North African decolonisation and the Cold War arms race by monitoring fallout from French nuclear explosions in the Algerian Sahara. This article examines the international negotiations that facilitated Tunisian access to monitoring technology and Tunisian participation in nuclear weapons governance. When the International Atomic Energy Agency denied Tunisia's request for technical assistance, Tunisian officials struck a deal with US diplomats, who cleared this arrangement with French counterparts. Radiation detection demonstrated the stakes of Tunisia's intergovernmental relationships, enhanced Tunisia's leverage in nuclear-armed capitals, and revealed nuclear weapons' relevance to Tunisia's foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Liberation movements and the Cold War The Cold War and decolonisation intersected in southern Africa between the 1960s and 1990s. The liberation struggle and the rich sources documenting it have a "broader national significance in South Africa and the world".[30] Ryan Clarke: Navigating NGO records in Zimbabwe The wars of liberation in southern Africa, including the Zimbabwean Second Chimurenga/Rhodesian "bush war" (1966-80), are widely regarded as important proxy wars during the Cold War.[31] However, questions of perspective and agency are important. Positive exceptions are the archives of the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa, although these collections have been thoroughly sanitised, with sensitive intelligence files and financial files removed, and the archives of the now marginalised United National Independence Party (UNIP) in Zambia.[12] The Pamphlet Collection, however, fills this gap to some extent. [Extracted from the article]

Drawing from the author's experience, this Research Note provides an overview of the University of the Western Cape Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives. This archive is rooted in the liberation struggle in southern Africa and contains a considerable number of historical documents, oral histories and audio-visual materials documenting the global anti-apartheid movement. Located in Bellville, on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, the archive is easily accessible and well worth a visit from scholars of the Cold War in southern Africa, the global Black freedom struggle and international social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the decolonisation of southern Africa (1960s-1990s), several national liberation movements benefited from support from the Nordic countries, where they established foreign missions and mobilized international aid. As a result, a considerable amount of African primary source material has been amassed over the years. This material is now accessible through the Pamphlet Collection of the Nordic Africa Institute (NAI). The Pamphlet Collection contains over 700 boxes with (primary) source material from the entire African continent, including unique material from national liberation movements that is difficult to find elsewhere. Scholars of the Cold War can use this fascinating collection to study African agency during an era that – often wrongly - seemed to be dominated by Great Power competition. This Research Note explores contents of the Pamphlet Collection, with a particular focus on material from southern Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the origins of the Free Russia Fund/East European Fund, a philanthropic project carried out through the Ford Foundation that aimed to offer support for displaced persons arriving in the United States in the early 1950s. It demonstrates that George F. Kennan and other organisers of the project started the endeavour with bold Cold War ambitions, but soon lost hope in the political potential of refugees and exiles. The episode casts light on the confusion surrounding 'liberationism', the commitment of some US policymakers and commentators to the liberation of Russia and Soviet satellite countries from communist rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Berlin's place in German-US relations during the Lyndon Johnson presidency. It examines how Johnson linked the defence of the Cold War's frontier city to the US military effort in South Vietnam in order to extract burden-sharing concessions from the Federal Republic of Germany. By the end of Johnson's presidency, the West Germans used his rhetoric against him, driving a wedge between Bonn and Washington on the Cold War's Gordian Knot and leading, in part, to Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Research Note provides background information on how to access records held by South Africa's Department of Defence and Department of International Relations and Cooperation (DIRCO). Both repositories in Pretoria, the nation's executive capital, hold considerable documentation of interest to scholars of the Cold War. The Note outlines the locations of the two facilities, working conditions, and policies that govern the release of their materials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1980s, Poles tuned in with great enthusiasm to the miniseries Shaka Zulu, starring Henry Cele as the so-called Black Napoleon. The apartheid-era production was one instance of exchanges between the apartheid regime and the Polish People's Republic. This counter-intuitive consonance – the screening of an apartheid cultural production in late-Communist Poland – is a fascinating case study that provides one important lens to understand the nature of the relationship between the two regimes, as well as insight into late-apartheid international relations in the last years of the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the role of non-aligned India in the global diplomatic effort that surrounded the Dutch recolonisation conflict in Indonesia (1945–9). It argues that its role was significant, especially in light of its own transition to independence over this period. It draws on material sourced from the National Archives of India and the Netherlands, diplomatic memoirs and published primary material. In demonstrating how decolonisation was complicated by the onset of the Cold War, this article illustrates the intersections between two phenomena that greatly informed the transition of global order from one pinned on European imperialism for centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the revisionist engagement with the history of US covert operations in three spy series published by DC Comics in 1988–90: Blackhawk, The Unknown Soldier and Justice, Inc. It discusses four levels of revisionism: pre-textual (in the editorial/creative process), textual (in the ensuing narratives), intertextual (in the interplay with other media and earlier versions of same franchises) and extratextual (advertisements, reviews, editorials, readers' letters). The article argues that these comics recoded the Cold War in a critical light and recreated the process of disenchantment with orthodox narratives, destabilising the era's dominant historical imaginary of nostalgia and triumphalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The highland minority in the northern border areas of Thailand received special attention from the United States and Thai governments from the early 1950s, as its members were suspected of being supporters or sympathisers of the Chinese communists. After a brief review of the ethnographic research in Thailand before the 1950s, this article examines the ways the Thai and US military researchers promoted racially and culturally hierarchical concepts of national security during the Cold War. Their views directly affected policymaking processes in Thailand, widening further the extant gap between the Thai government and the ethnic minority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Thousands of whites fled the former Belgian Congo in the weeks after independence. This movement had a significant impact on the politics of Southern Rhodesia. Disquieted whites in Rhodesia feared they might face a similar fate. They apprehensively mobilised in an effort known as Operation Refugee to support the displaced. Conversely, black nationalists were energised by the disruption. Their ranks increased and their rhetoric became more confrontational. While the transnational Congo Crisis is routinely evaluated through the framework of the Cold War, in the region's white settler territories, the decolonisation imperative was another critical perspective through which the events in the Congo were perceived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the international cultural relationship between the Netherlands and the Republic of Poland during a period of growing political tensions between the Western world and the Eastern Bloc. Seemingly, both countries did not have any significant cultural ties during this period. However, various archival documents indicate that such ties existed, providing new insights into the history, scale and nature of bilateral artistic and cultural relations between the countries that developed during the early Cold War reality of a divided world – in some cases in spite of political tensions, but frequently also for their sake of political rivalry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on Spanish, German, Polish and Romanian archives, this article explores some aspects of the Cold War that have hardly been studied until now: the activities of the Eastern Bloc secret services in Spain; the surveillance of Spanish diplomats; and Eastern European spies in Spain. The article examines the history of East-West relationships but adds the perspective of everyday life, using oral history and the records of the security police. The focus is on the importance of the surveillance of Spain as a Cold War country, which has almost never been researched in its connection to the Eastern Bloc. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vivian Trías, a prominent Latin American intellectual and leader of the Uruguayan Socialist Party, was an agent of the Czechoslovak State Security Service (StB), the intelligence agency in communist Czechoslovakia. Through a critical analysis of the Czech archives, this article seeks to explain why Trías, who defined himself as a Latin Americanist and tercerista in the Cold War, developed this link with one of the Soviet Bloc countries. The article suggests that solidarity with Cuba and anti-imperialism were the central points through which this collaboration was consolidated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1970s, two floods and an earthquake turned state socialist Romania into a recipient of significant international humanitarian aid. Western relief organisations came to Bucharest to negotiate the terms of their assistance. Drawing on material from German, Swiss and Romanian archives, this article argues that giving and receiving across the Iron Curtain were deeply embedded in the systemic competition of the Cold War. It shows that Western relief workers were able to convince Romanian authorities to make humanitarianism a valid form of East-West cooperation. However, such exchanges remained limited to a few flagship projects, separated from Romania's own recovery measures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US–Turkish relations were marked by the primacy of military actors during the Cold War. This is considered to be the consequence of the so-called special relationship between the US and Turkish militaries based on mutual trust. However, historical record suggests that the two militaries clashed over a number of institutional, strategic and cultural matters from the onset. The US military assistance did not result in Turkish military's transformation along the US military system. Nevertheless, it precipitated a long overdue generational change within a decade. The US-trained young officers purged the Prussian/German–trained old guard from the ranks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that global environmental changes provided a fruitful ground for scientific collaboration during the Cold War. Taking the climate research cooperation of the 1972 US-USSR Agreement on Environmental Protection as a lens, this article shows how both superpowers, initially involved in weather warfare against each other, soon cooperated to tackle the rising problem of climate change. The study reveals that while the cooperation was foremost a scientific undertaking driven by the need for data it nevertheless constantly oscillated between scientific collaboration to advance one's own research agenda and the political tensions of the Cold War rivalry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of Cold War China have mainly concentrated on the affairs of diplomatic elites. This article contributes to the emerging body of scholarship which descends from the realm of high politics and shows how the geopolitical tensions of the Cold War became embedded in frameworks of meaning and practices of everyday life in Mao's China. Concentrating on the military industrial complex established to safeguard Shanghai, the article elucidates how people who participated in its construction experienced Chinese Communist Party efforts to socially engineer them into a work force that embraced its policy of spartan industrial development for national security's sake. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If we allow such a connection (i.e. as we do when we argue that the Soviet collapse was a "good thing" since the USSR was a monstrosity), then we may be called upon to follow this logic to the end and welcome the break-up of Putin's Russia, since it has embraced the same mechanisms of oppression once held dear by the Soviet authorities, and in this regard is a successor to the USSR and ruled by a repressive regime. A first hint at the danger Yeltsin and the Russian government might pose to the Soviet state came with Russia's declaration of sovereignty from the USSR on 12 June 1990. And, certainly under Putin, Russia has sought to gradually re-extend its control over key parts of the former USSR (most coercively in Ukraine/Crimea, Transnistria and South Ossetia).[56] Given this dichotomy, between how the Soviet Union's disappearance was perceived in 1991-2 and how it is presented officially in Russia today, we must ask: is Putin's apocalyptic interpretation historically merited? For example, between 1990-1, the government of the RSFSR, a key republic in the Soviet Union, was encouraging Union-owned enterprises and institutions located in Russia to change their jurisdiction to Russia. Aven's fellow reformer Anatolii Chubais echoed his former colleague's thoughts in a parallel interview: 'From that moment it was necessary to work on reforming Russia, not the USSR'.[80] From the perspective of Chubais, Aven and other former reformers of the late Soviet economy, by the final years of the USSR there was no doubt about the bankruptcy of the Soviet system: "disgusting lies from the first to the last word", as Chubais put it.[81] Hollowed out and unable to fulfil its promises of achieving, the USSR's socialist economy was sooner or later doomed; the question was how and in what circumstances this collapse might occur. [Extracted from the article]