Arrested development: the Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955–1968; Cold War liberation: the Soviet Union and the collapse of the Portuguese empire in Africa, 1961–1975

Abstract

Following the end of the Second World War, a ‘wind of change’ that called for an end to the global colonial order swept over the African continent. In the aftermath of the bloody conflict, the United States and the Soviet Union (USSR) replaced European empires to become the new superpowers. In many ways, the terms ‘liberation’ and ‘development’ capture both the opportunities and the challenges that African groups and countries faced vis-à-vis the Cold War powers. The two books under review here, both of which were published in mid-2022, are exciting new additions to the studies of the global Cold War. Arrested development and Cold War liberation offer a fresh perspective on the USSR's entanglements with Africa. The old, conventional narrative of the Cold War history, as a simplified East–West confrontation driven by Washington, Moscow and their respective allies, has since given way to a new international history of the Cold War. This growing literature has revisited the most important aspects of the Cold War, criticizing the disproportionate attention that was paid to military and strategic priorities as well as to Europe-centred accounts of the Iron Curtain rivalry. Rather, those scholars focusing on its global elements have sought to connect the Cold War to the political and social development of the ‘Third World’ (see Odd Arne Westad's The global Cold War: Third World interventions and the makings of our times, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005; reviewed in International Affairs 82: 3, May 2006). As both books persuasively demonstrate, the history of postcolonial Africa also needs to be understood within the ‘historical intersections’ of ongoing decolonization, the global waves of social mobilization and the larger theatre of Cold War realpolitik (see Jeremi Suri's ‘The Cold War, decolonization, and global social awakenings’, Cold War History 6: 3, 2006).