Search

In this paper, we want to show our appreciation for a major figure in our discipline by reading his work carefully, juxtaposing this material with historical narratives that place him in context. We think he would have appreciated the imbrication of his ideas with those of pertinent scholarly forebears, the reactions against socialism, impact of the Cold War, as well as the philanthropic politics that have shaped our intellectual parameters. As we make clear, M.J. Baker was a pioneer, justifying and extending the reach of marketing in the United Kingdom. He wore many hats: academic, editor, entrepreneur, and institution builder. Core themes in his writing are outlined, with attention devoted to his paradigmatic, epistemological and ethical commitments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 1946, President Truman decided to second roughly an eighth of all U.S. military forces to the United Nations. The New York Times declared the same month that the international police force initially proposed by U.S. planners would number "perhaps 2,000,000 men" and that it would "enforce the rules and regulations for world order." This article explores American visions of the postwar order through the lens of the UN military project. In particular, it analyzes how the UN military project played a major role in the American reassessment of Soviet intentions, and with it, America's global military strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION Dans son dernier essai, Retrotopia (2017), Zygmunt Bauman esquissait un tableau socioculturel sombre, qu'un anti-utopiste comme Leszek Koiakowski aurait descrit, probablement, dans les termes d'une << inertie sans espoir [...], Less than a decade after the proclamation of 'the end of history', the anxieties about 'the end of utopia' are gaining ground in the intellectual field all over the world, in the context of both 'the crisis of the future' and the haunting of the present by the painful pasts. The latter two are the main consequences of the fracture in the contemporary temporal order--occurred in the '70s and deepened after the fall of the Iron Curtain--which defines the 'presentist regime of historicity'. These dynamics are counterbalanced, in the same period, by a 'global epidemic of nostalgia', including the commodified forms of 'retromania', that reveals the presentist 'faces of utopianism', from the non-instrumental 'retrospective utopias'--as poles of 'existential' types of reflective nostalgic practices--to the instrumental 'retrotopias' based on the 'restorative nostalgia', which were mobillized in the contemporary memory wars, starting from the '80s. Reflecting the tensions between the fixation on the traumatic legacy of the 'age of extremes' and the apprehensions about 'the future of nostalgia', the presentist dynamics of multidirectional memory discloses conflictual landscapes (social, cultural, and political), from the mnemonic turn of the '70s and the '80s--which has arisen against the background of the decline of both welfare state and the nation-states, and of the global economic crisis--to the post-Cold War contests around 'the divised memories' of 'Europe's Europes', coexisting with the clashes of contradictory 'faces' of nostalgia and utopia. Keywords: presentism, multidirectional memory, nostalgia, retrospective utopia, retrotopia

The present collection of papers is a joint effort aimed at making sense of the changes that Russia's war against Ukraine ushered into the region of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). We have invited a team of authors working on the two subregions, the Visegrád Four and the Baltic Three, to share their reflections on how the full-scale invasion has impacted the transformations in the respective countries' regional outlook. The "kidnapping" as an overarching theme of our forum is an image that refers us to the Cold War and the history of forceful subjugation of CEE countries to foreign imperial domination as a result of aggressive wars and the spheres of influence politics in Europe. As we now clearly see, that is a part of European history that, for the moment, refuses to become history tout court. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This article discusses the significance of international borders in Europe and Northeast Asia during the Cold War (1945–1989) and after. Using the concept of 'moral hazard', the article examines what happens when great powers frequently violate the borders of neighboring countries without suffering adverse repercussions. Norms of sovereignty and territorial integrity are viable only if large countries are willing to uphold them most of the time. The Soviet Union used or threatened to use military force against East European countries on numerous occasions (1953, 1956, 1968, and 1980–1981) with impunity. The Russian Federation adopted a broadly similar policy toward neighboring countries that had been republics of the Soviet Union until 1991. Russian forces in Georgia, Moldova, Tajikistan, Belarus, and Ukraine served as instruments of Russian hegemony in those countries. Until 2014, Western governments made little or no effort to deter or counter Russian military encroachments in neighboring republics. By the principle of moral hazard, leaders in the Kremlin came to believe that they could act with a free hand in the former USSR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Soviet activists in the USSR and members of the Black Panther Party in the United States emphasized the need to document the truth of domestic human rights abuses not in the land of the Cold War adversary but in their own. In the process, they contested the dominant misrepresentations of Soviet citizens and African Americans that obscured those routine human rights abuses. Members of both groups conceived of documenting this truth as essential to ultimately eliminating these domestic forms of state-sanctioned violence. They also spoke of the act of speaking the truth in word and deed as facilitating their own liberation from what they similarly identified as a devastating Soviet and American spiritual death in countries that were officially represented in the Cold War universe as the moral antithesis. The 'woke' or liberated individual was no longer a subservient, mask-wearing 'Homo Sovieticus' or 'Negro' who mouthed the lies of unbounded Soviet democracy and American freedom, but a genuine citizen and full human being who demanded respect for their human rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the British perspectives on the Luxembourg Reparations Agreement between Israel and the Federal Republic of Germany from 1952. Short-term economic interests were of central importance when it came to assessing the consequences of this deal for the United Kingdom. Her Majesty's Government welcomed West German reparations as a means of securing Israel's ability to pay for oil supplied by British companies, but at the same time saw them as a threat to its economic and political interests in the Middle East. British diplomats underestimated the long-term political value of the Luxembourg Agreement precisely because they read it verbatim. They recognized the reservations on both sides but did not expect that working relations between Israel and the Federal Republic would improve rapidly after the Agreement was ratified, limiting in turn the UK's political and economic room for manoeuvre in the region. By examining a hitherto little-noticed chapter of British foreign policy in the postwar years, the article foregrounds the commercial aspects of diplomacy in the early 1950s and contributes to a better understanding of international relations in the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For Western intelligence communities, charged with providing advance notice of adverse developments around the world, Russia under Putin has had to become top priority for study, as was the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Using secret intelligence to help assess the motives and intent of the Kremlin leadership is essential but remains as hard, not least because of the extreme violence of the regime towards anyone suspected of betraying confidences to assist the West. Putin has provided his own explanation for his invasion of Ukraine in 2022 that illuminates his world view and belief in Russia as a Slavic nation, of which Ukraine is seen as part. Putin's background in the KGB is regime is seen as providing continuity with the brutal repressions of the Stalin era. The different methods used by Western intelligence to assess Russia are reviewed highlighting the additional digital sources available today. The warning failures of Western intelligence to provide strategic notice of Putin's aggressive actions are explained by inadequate situational awareness, erroneous explanation of his motives, leading to poor estimation of his subsequent moves, the exception being US and UK prediction of the 2022 invasion itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic politics has shaped the foreign policy of Laos (formally the Lao Peoples’ Democratic Republic, or LPDR) since the 1970s, specifically its relations with China and the United States. During the 1980s, the communist government of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party (LPRP) feared that China and the United States were supporting counter-revolutionary resistance groups, prompting Vientiane to adopt closer relations with Beijing and Washington to ensure its own internal security by motivating them to cut off their support for anti-LPRP groups. As the Soviet Union reduced economic aid to Laos in the latter stages of the Cold War, the LPRP adopted market-based reforms in 1986 to generate closer security and economic cooperation with China and the United States and to grow its economy. Domestic concerns of regime survival and performance legitimacy remain key drivers of Laos’ foreign policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Economist Nobelist Thomas C. Schelling (1921–2016) is known for his contribution to the analysis of international conflict and many see him as the Cold Warrior par excellence. At a time of great uncertainties and dangers, Schelling combined a deep understanding of strategic analysis, a detailed knowledge of US commitments around the world and an inimitable talent for dissecting everyday behavior, which made him a think tank all on his own. When he turned to the analysis of bargaining in the mid‐1950s, one question dominated policy discussions: "How to demonstrate the US commitment to the 'free world'"? Schelling answered unequivocally: By restricting one's choices so as to shift others' expectations and thereby influence their behavior in the desired direction. By the mid‐1970s, after he had broken with the US administration and joined the Committee on Substance Abuse and Habitual Behavior, Schelling transposed the tactics deployed in international conflict to the analysis of individuals trying to achieve self‐control. In the process, he reproduced the logic of military conflict at the level of the self. The view of a conflicted self itself comprised of two selves made restricted choice the daily routine of individuals who wish to avoid the negative consequences of their present behavior in the future while it promised those who enjoy unbounded freedom of choice an unsettling future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1985, British psychoanalyst Hanna Segal delivered the paper 'Silence is the Real Crime' to the first meeting of the group International Psychoanalysts Against Nuclear Weapons in Hamburg, appealing to her fellow analysts to counteract the denial of the geopolitical realities that characterized the late Cold War by intervening in public debates regarding the threat of nuclear war. A year later she gave a paper in London discussing clinical cases of patients who brought their nuclear anxieties to the couch. This article considers Segal's political and clinical writings on the psychological consequences of the atomic age, situating them in the context in which she was living, writing and practising as an analyst: 1980s Britain in a moment of 'nuclear anxiety'. I argue that Segal's anti-nuclear writings shed light on what she called the 'very very tricky' relationship between psychoanalysis and politics. Segal confronted the tension between maintaining clinical neutrality in the consulting room while publicly expressing her political commitments, wrestling with the complex relationships between individuals and the societies in which they live. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The relatively new bundle of scholarship gathered under the notion of a 'global 1989' has produced an innovative field of research that highlights the necessity of a global approach towards the implosion of state socialism in Central and Eastern Europe. Yet this literature has neglected the broad range of international and transnational organizations which had an indispensable role during, but also after, the Cold War. Therefore this article attempts to approach the 'global 1989' from the vantage point of the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU). The analysis of this large trade union confederation sheds new light on post-Cold War labour internationalism, which has often been overshadowed by the developments leading up to the establishment of the ITUC in 2006. Furthermore, the article uncovers how the end of state socialism and its global reverberations engendered new fissures, debates, and tensions within the organization. While there might have been a 'rush to the East' during the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, globalization – which within the trade union landscape was accelerated by the global 1989 – became a far more pressing challenge during the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the "Memory struggle" in-between the two Koreas presented in the documentary films after the April 2018 Panmunjom Declaration. The Children Gone to Poland and Shadow Flowers carry out politics of representation that create a new moment of cultural memories about borders normatively standardized by hostility and indifference. The two documentary films place the camera on the border of the Cold War, which connects the past and the present, which was either not recorded or was misrecorded by one side of the border and therefore erased off the surface of our memories. They are non-nationals in that they can be stateless or multinational, depending on the location of the border. As such, they disrupt the border as boundaries that have continued since the Cold War. On the other hand, the struggle of North Korean defectors to return home reveals the indifference and hostility of South Korean society over this fact, confirming the Red Complex, which eventually exists as a shadow of hospitality for North Korean defectors. In this way, the two texts invite us to confront history before the establishment of the border through war orphans or face the reality that the Cold War frontier has expanded infinitely through an individual of ambiguous identities, such as a North Korean defector. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of the revisionist state has been central to IR, and the literature demonstrates that they initiate international conflicts. As a subset of the revisionist state, revolutionary states in particular have been shown to foment international conflicts. Moreover, ideology has come to explain international conflicts, especially the Second World War, Cold War, and "War on Terror." Nevertheless, the literature on revolutionary states discounts the role of ideology and that on ideology often discounts the role of revisionist or revolutionary states. This paper develops the concept of a distinct type of revisionist state—the revolutionary actor—that explains the outbreak of the Second World War, the Cold War, and War on Terror, three of the greatest global conflicts of the last century. It first develops a model of the revolutionary actor, linking the ideologies of Marxism-Leninism, Nazism, and jihadism that led to the Second World War, the Cold War, and War on Terror. It then offers a theory based on ideology as to why the revolutionary actors initiated these three global conflicts. Lastly, it offers a research design to test the theory and highlights the three cases with recent literature on them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article "Contesting Development Practice and Discourse in Cold War Guatemala" by Sarah Foss explores the complexities of development efforts in Guatemala during the Cold War. Foss argues that state-led development initiatives were contested and reinterpreted by various actors, including indigenous communities who exercised agency despite the political turmoil and violence in the country. The article examines specific programs and initiatives, such as literacy and agrarian reform efforts, community development programs, and military-led initiatives. Foss highlights the importance of understanding the perspectives and actions of indigenous communities and intermediaries who facilitated interactions between aid recipients and state agencies. The article also discusses how changing understandings of development influenced the implementation and reception of these initiatives. While the article does not provide a definitive evaluation of the success or failure of development, it suggests that success can be found in the spaces where development practitioners and indigenous communities negotiated their own terms. [Extracted from the article]

This article examines the role of oil in Brazil's development and its connection to political unrest during the Cold War. It discusses the challenges Brazil faced in finding oil and the involvement of foreign countries, particularly the Soviet Union and the United States. The article highlights the tensions between Brazil's desire for energy self-sufficiency and the influence of foreign companies. It also explores the impact of Soviet involvement on Brazil's political crisis and the eventual coup in 1964. The article argues for a more nuanced understanding of Brazil's role in the global energy issue and its connections with the Soviet Union. [Extracted from the article]

John Finnis's central role in Brexit was only the latest intervention in a long life of practical action that recommends a closer examination of the genesis of his distinctive philosophy. He always insisted that it was intended 'primarily to assist the practical reflections of those concerned to act, whether as judges or as statesmen or as citizens.' In this article, I argue that Finnis crafted his philosophy as a practical guide for conservative actors in the disenchanted Cold War world of the 1960–70s. My first aim is to excavate the theoretical foundations of his Thomist theory of natural law. While his turn to practical rather than speculative reason is well known, few if any appreciate how Finnis radically refounded Thomist natural law on an implicit theory of history. By accepting that the world was historically contingent and changing, he needed to show how we could know the timeless truth of practical reasonableness and the basic goods. In the final chapter of Natural Law and Natural Rights, Finnis introduced an 'abysmal' philosophy of history that explained how a spoudaios (wise man) could reason his way out of the historical contingency of the human world to access the timeless moral truths that transcended it. My second aim is to show how Finnis used his Thomist theory of natural law as a practical guide for action in our contingent world. He followed Eric Voegelin in describing humanity as two 'hostile camps' – the 'transcendental' Christians and their secular allies versus the 'immanentist' liberals, communists, and fascists all committed to 'consequentialist' ideologies. In this eternal battle of good versus evil, Finnis saw his philosophy as a practical guide for this 'creative minority' of transcendentalists for collective action against the heretical faith of immanentist movements aiming to perfect mankind and build heavens on earth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses critical discourse analysis and critical literacy to analyze the first in a series of literacy primers developed with US support for children in Afghanistan in the 1980s, called 'Jihad literacy'. The text is analyzed for its ideological content as related to the themes of religion, violence, and martyrdom in the historical perspective of the Cold War and the Soviet Union's invasion of Afghanistan. The paper demonstrates how the notion of 'Jihad' was subverted to promote a holy war against the Soviet invasion. The educational system supported by the US created a radical version of Islam based on violence and martyrdom, shaping the Afghan society to this day. We contend that the same or similar institutions shape current discourses as in the past and that children are the main victims of politico-economic warfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1953 and 1972 the International Labor Film Institute (ILFI), affiliated with yet organizationally separate from the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions (ICFTU), spread knowledge about, and encouraged the use of, films among Western trade unionists. Holding five formal film festivals, the ILFI also engaged in the collection and distribution of information about films and filmstrips on trade union topics, themes, and successes. Yet compared to other ICFTU forums, ICFTU and ILFI officials were relatively muted on Cold War issues when it came to film activities. When they did discuss such topics, they evidenced a level of uncertainty and confusion regarding how intensely to engage anti-communist messaging in the area of labor films, indicating a concern over how to strike the correct balance between showcasing topics solely focused on labor and engaging Cold War themes. Studying the ILFI and Western labor's relationship to the medium of film thus reveals both an anxiety among Western labor leaders during the early and middle years of the Cold War over how best to weigh their desire to help workers with their goal of appearing sufficiently anti-communist as well as another way the vagueness of the ICFTU's slogan of 'free trade unionism' impacted the ICFTU's activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the end of the Cold War, the protection of civilians has increased its weight on the United Nations (UN) agenda. This article (1) maps the evolution of civilian protection within the UN framework as an indicator of its shifting priorities, (2) identifies breakpoints in the prevalence and character of the protection discourse, and (3) explores how internal processes of policy development and real-world triggers (namely conflicts and peacekeeping operations) shaped this transformation. The article uses Structural Topic Modeling (STM) to analyze an original corpus of Security Council and General Assembly resolutions on complex humanitarian emergencies since 1990. The analysis uncovers two distinct forms of protection, labeled as "Ground protection" and "Political–legal protection," which are characterized by contrasting temporal and geographic trajectories. Moreover, critical junctures in the protection rhetoric (during the years 2000, 2005, and 2008) coincide with policy watersheds rather than conflict outbreaks or trends in peacekeeping deployment. This article offers a comprehensive analysis of the intricate evolution of civilian protection using text-as-data methods, which uses its theory-building design to encourage further explorations on the interplay between internal and external factors in shaping its progression within the UN framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research analyzes the implications US and Russian involvement has had as two great powers in the Syrian civil war for international relations in the Middle East as well as for the relations between Washington and Moscow. Using a structural realist approach, this study suggests that the actions of both the US and Russia have mostly been defined by geopolitical status-quo concerns. As a result, they have preferred that their great power play be contained in Syria. As key findings, this study puts forward that the US-Russia showdown in Syria has prolonged the destruction and shaken US alliances in the region while allowing Iran as a key US adversary in the region to extend its influence deep into the region under cover of Russia. Furthermore, contrary to their broader escalatory security policies, Russia and the US have adopted containment approaches and avoided direct confrontation using Cold War tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the relationship between international‐relations theories and Cold War and post‐Cold War historical dynamics in the Middle East, in particular the Gulf. It first identifies the theoretical approaches that have been applied or that have failed to be applied to the region's changing geopolitics, then delves into Cold War history and its impact on the Middle East and the Gulf by examining the crucial changes to the Gulf security system sparked by developments in the 1970s and the Iran‐Iraq War of 1980–1988. The article next investigates the extent to which the interplay of post‐Cold War regional conflicts and key events, from the Iraq wars of 1991 and 2003 to the Arab Spring, have impacted the Gulf subregional system. The final part scrutinizes the shifting intra‐ and extraregional Gulf politics and how theoretically informed approaches inspired by international political economy can accommodate these geopolitical changes. The article is part of a special issue examining the responses of Gulf countries to rising Sino‐American competition, edited by Andrea Ghiselli, Anoushiravan Ehteshami, and Enrico Fardella. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The successful closure of arms control negotiations today is conditional on the commitment of many more states than during the Cold War. The question of what determines states' positions on arms control has therefore become increasingly relevant. Multiple scholars have identified external security threats by other states as the key explanatory factor of opposition to arms control, but empirical evidence hereof is so far limited to a small set of cases. Against this backdrop, this article carries out a global examination of the effect of external threats in the form of interstate disputes and rivalries on state support for arms control. This analysis is facilitated by a novel measure of arms control support that combines United Nations General Assembly voting data with manual coding of 1,178 resolutions. Across a variety of model specifications, the results do not show any significant effect of external threats on support for arms control. This article argues that this means either that the two variables are not related at all, or that two opposing mechanisms cancel out each other: arms control not only entails costs, but also benefits for states that face external threats, as it limits both states involved in a rivalry or dispute. Either way, this study challenges the notion that there is a strictly negative relationship between external threats and arms control support and thus contributes to our understanding of arms control and foreign policy making in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the mobility regulation and discipline that persisted amid the currents of internationalization and opening during the 1980s through the case of security education films for overseas travelers--an essential component of the education program for South Koreans going abroad. With the liberalization in the policy for overseas travel, attending this educational session before departure became a prerequisite for South Koreans traveling overseas. By analyzing the content and production process of two films produced by the National Film Production Center in the early 1980s, this study argues that the securitization of imagination regarding foreign spaces, overseas travel, and new mobile subjects was implemented by the authoritarian nationstate, facing a transition from immobility to global mobility. This project of regulation and discipline, rooted in the Cold War imagination, persisted as a shadow of internationalization. The conceptual framework suggested by this study, the securitization of imagination, facilitates an understanding of a conjuncture in which Cold War social-cultural history and the history of globalization overlapped in South Korea in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nationalism remains a major influence on international relations in an increasingly globalised world. Many of the wars that erupted after the Cold War have their origins in ethnic tensions, border conflicts, or national aspirations. Given this, the geo-politicisation of nationalism deserves more attention in the literature. The current study aims to further the area by considering the role of territorial disputes in spawning various forms of nationalism and geopolitics. It develops an analytical framework based on the existing border dispute between Nepal and India in the 'Kalapani' region. Post-2019, the Kalapani dispute not only has represented bilateral border disputes between two entities but also reflects the overall geopolitics of the region. Similarly, it also represents the rise of 'nationalism' as a political anchor point in domestic politics in both India and Nepal. The paper based its assessment on the primary and secondary data analysis. Drawing on the data, this paper argues that border disputes between India and Nepal have two facets that signal the rising nationalism in both sides and the changing geopolitics of South Asia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Borders not only delimit state territory but also differentiate state spaces, delineating the periphery from the core. However, a remote borderland is not necessarily the periphery, rather, it can function as a core component in the making of the state. By examining the border islands of Kinmen and Matsu (or Kinma, as abbreviated here) in the Taiwan Strait, we illuminate how the state relocated itself through border measures, and how accidental border activities, in turn, reshaped the state. We contend that since the Chinese civil war abruptly delineated new borders around Kinma Islands in 1949, the dramatic changes in the daily life of the islanders not only passively reflected the geopolitical dynamics during the Cold War, but also actively engendered the (re)building of state and nation in Taiwan and (re)positioning Taiwan in the world. Studying differently scaled and territorialised daily practices as they intersect at the accidental borders, we suggest, provides a contra perspective to rediscover the making of nation/states and the framing of the Cold War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay engages in border studies by articulating a "liminal island chain," linking Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, as a frontier of democracy in the rise of a new Cold War. Tracing the theoretical evolution from boundary to border and bordering in the recent scholarship, it aims to counter the island chain idea in international relations theory with an indigenous settler colonial perspective on the one hand, and to approach democracy as a political rhetoric deployed in Taiwan's and Hong Kong's anti-China protests since 2014 that constructed a biometric, emotional, and civilizational border against China on the other. By taking the Protect Diaoyutai (Baodiao) Movement of the early 1970s that linked Okinawa with Taiwan and Hong Kong as a critical conjuncture of Cold War bordering, the essay adopts a cultural studies approach to consider the implications of multiple bordering in East Asia as congealed in the social movements in Hong Kong and Taiwan, then and now, to offer an analysis of the unfolding of the new Cold War. By conceptualizing Okinawa, Taiwan, and Hong Kong as unwieldly liminal island chain as produced by post/colonial geography and shaped by post/Cold War entanglements, the essay hopes to unveil how multiple bordering is at work in East Asia, and to usher in a trans-local imagination of the democracy to come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores radio's material legacies by exclusively focussing on the trajectories of radio-objects, which travelled between foreign broadcasting stations and their Indian listeners during the Cold War years. The presence of such objects in listeners' homesteads/private collections even today and their affective relationship(s) to them can enable us to examine how radio materially permeated the larger social fabric of listeners' everyday lives, not just through sound but also a plethora of things. Zooming in on gifts, souvenirs, letters, photographs and memorabilia, the article shows how radio-objects enabled Indian listeners to perform difference and distinction locally, to imagine and experience foreign countries through landscape-objects, to establish networks of South-South epistolary exchange, and to 'see' both co-listeners and radio hosts through travelling photographs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay employs the "Korean War minor" as a methodological lens to demonstrate the need for more Asian Americanist critique at the intersection of American childhood studies and empire studies. While scholars have shown how children and children's culture were central to advancing US Cold War policy at home and abroad, this body of research largely neglects to interrogate the centrality of whiteness to dominant constructions of children/childhood. Attending to childhood as a technology of racist, patriarchal, imperial power, I elucidate how the biopolitics of the Korean War produce juvenile Asian-raced and gendered bodies at the precarious boundaries of childhood, as not quite children but, rather, childlike. I grapple, in particular, with how to reclaim the "girl" from US military archives, as the rubric of the "boy-mascot" and "camptown woman" overdetermine and constrain how the girl is allowed to come into view. I develop and enact this decolonial practice of reclaiming the Korean War minor through an analysis of Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl , a novel that is particularly invested in narrating the camptown girl into being. Fox Girl directs attention to the limits of a politics of childhood innocence and prompts a generative reconceptualization of childhood in relation to justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human right to science is set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The two texts, which were adopted consecutively, are similar but not identical. Conflicts in formulating the right to science in international human rights law were rooted in the ideological quarrels of the Cold War. The travaux préparatoires indicate debate about whether the right was essentially about the freedoms of scientists or about the purposes of science, including concern about abuse. Article 15(3) of the Covenant confirms recognition of 'the freedom indispensable for scientific research ... ' The Soviet Union promoted the view that scientific research must pursue progressive aims but was unsuccessful in its attempts to entrench this in the texts. UNESCO's contribution to the Declaration was insignificant but it had considerable influence on the Covenant text. In 1950 and 1951, UNESCO issued important and influential expert statements challenging 'scientific' arguments of racial supremacists, confirming in practice its own understanding of the direction that science should take. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the late 1950s, prompted by the US State Department, an interracial group of national leaders of women's organizations in the United States formed the African Women's Committee to reach out to their African counterparts in the wake of successful independence movements throughout the continent. After consulting with numerous African women and leading experts on Africa, the committee initiated a program that brought groups of African women to the United States for short training programs designed to strengthen their leadership skills through both coursework and immersion in women's organizations. This article examines the assumptions both groups of women brought to their interactions and the ways the program changed during this period as a response to racist encounters in the US, new teachers in the classes and African women's evaluations of their experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article traces the history of a transnational birth control movement centered on India and the United States during the 1950s, a transitional decade that followed Indian independence from the British Empire and that witnessed growing US hegemony in a cold war world. I focus on one key philanthropic organization, the Watumull Foundation, and the activities of its leader, Ellen Jensen Watumull. The Watumull Foundation funded birth control activists in India and the United States, including Dhanvanthi Rama Rau and Margaret Sanger, and supported a growing turn toward population control as a chief purpose of the transnational birth control movement. The result was an Indo-American birth control politics in the 1950s that drew upon racialized networks of kinship, marriage, and friendship; was controlled largely by women; and mobilized small donors to bring American philanthropy into Indian development planning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Overwhelming empathy with all the civilians and conscripts who have suffered from the ongoing violence in Ukraine, which began years before the Russian invasion of February 2022, must be complemented by analysis and explanation. What can anthropologists contribute? I have been disappointed by one-sided accounts endorsing the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky and the cause of the Ukrainian nation that have dominated in the Western mass media and anglophone academic work, including that of anthropologists. From an anthropological perspective, to invoke international law and sacralize political sovereignty is inadequate (Hann 2023; Malinowski 1944). Instead, we need to scrutinize the complex history of the Ukrainian nation, which is being consummated through the present violence. We need to recognize that Zelensky heads an Atlanticist, market-oriented, nationalist regime of dubious legitimacy. This critical stance does not mean deference to the Kremlin in the spirit of the "realist school" of international relations. It does mean recalling that as late as autumn 2021 President Vladimir Putin was putting forward proposals for a peaceful resolution of the crisis brought about by Western geopolitical and economic ambitions since the end of the Cold War. For the Russian political classes (not just for Putin and his oligarchical allies), when it came to NATO expansion Ukraine was a unique red line. However, too many interest groups in Washington as well as in Kyiv actually wanted the war that began in February 2022 (though this could not be declared publicly). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how visible constructions and perceptions of sovereignty in the motion pictures of the United States Information Agency (USIA) factored into the dynamics of US Cold War foreign policy amidst the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement. Specifically, it focuses on agency films about and circulating within the Southwest Asian and North African (SWANA) region – such as the locally produced Iraq al-Youm newsreels (c.1956–58). By mapping the different policy contexts of the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations onto the USIA films' aesthetics and themes, the article illustrates continuities in the United States's attempts to expressively leverage images and evocations of sovereignty to sell and consolidate its policy interests in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Towards the end of the Cold War, the vocabulary of global power, space and economy received a qualitative update. Amongst the terms rapidly gaining prominence since the early 1990s has been the notion of geoeconomics, the coining of which has frequently been attributed to the strategist Edward N. Luttwak. In his interpretation, it signified a transition away from Cold War ideological and military geopolitical competition towards commerce and market‐based geo‐power. Over the past three decades, a 'geoeconomics boom' set in, characterised by think tanks and a varied body of politico‐economic literature making extensive use of the term. Conventionally treated as a neologism, the provenance and earlier iterations of geoeconomics, some dating back more than a century, have been largely ignored by both celebratory and critical accounts. In this paper, we trace and contextualise these earlier instances, leading us to the Geopolitik era in Germany and references to geoeconomics in the United States in the decades after WWII. We thereby offer a critical genealogy of geoeconomics, conceptualised as an object of definitional struggle. Proponents of the term sought to position it variously as a tool of national economic cohesion and competition or as a way of understanding and harnessing shifting global power relations, whilst others sought to subsume geoeconomics to geopolitics. These past struggles track forward into ongoing dialectical tensions between geoeconomics and geopolitics as competing but related geostrategic visions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

United States support for Ukraine and preparation for a potential, likely protracted, conflict with China has drawn attention to the fragility of the U.S. defense industrial base. Since the end of the Cold War, the American defense industry has optimized for peacetime and low-attrition conflicts, prized efficiency and cost-savings over capacity and flexibility, and incentivized short-run returns over resilience and innovation. While this design may have made sense in a period of undisputed U.S. dominance, the rise of the People's Republic of China as a peer competitor and the emerging demand that the U.S. deter and, if necessary, win one or more protracted conflicts requires that Washington take a more intentional and direct role in shaping the capability, capacity, and resilience of the U.S. defense industrial base. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After two decades of counterinsurgency and counterterrorism in Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military has shifted to preparing for large-scale combat operations. However, it would be a mistake to discard hard-earned lessons from these conflicts. Despite contemporary advances in technology and important differences between current US competitors and the Soviet Union, irregular warfare will play a prominent role in the new era of strategic competition. It was a prominent form of US-Soviet competition during the Cold War, is already used extensively by the United States and its competitors and remains attractive given concerns about escalation between nuclear-armed powers. Given the continued relevance of irregular warfare, we focus on two main lessons from the US experience. First, since irregular warfare is about influencing populations and achieving political goals without large-scale combat operations, influencing and working alongside the partner is the primary mission. The second lesson follows directly from the first; if irregular warfare is ultimately about achieving policy goals with an economy of military force, IW is a team sport requiring joint and interagency collaboration to be effectively implemented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]