Legacy Of Cold War Research Articles

A Cold War legacy of student politics and anti-communism: the contingency of Poland’s illiberal turn

ABSTRACT This article offers a historical reflection on the roots of the populist-driven “illiberal turn” in Poland. Acknowledging the backsliding of recent years as the result of political contingency and the agency of a critical mass of disruptive political actors on the Right, the article argues that the “illiberal turn” was precipitated by the interplay of three historical factors, such as dynamics of Cold War era student politics, the demise of communism in 1989 with its echoes in the subsequent decades, and the implosion of the strong post-communist Centre-Left in the mid-2000s. These processes have ensured that Poland’s political trajectory has been more sui generis than understood through the general prism of the rise of populism and that it is more the result of an entrenched political class whose worldviews have been forged by the anticommunism of the 1980s and its legacy.

“Didn’t that sound like the north was calling us?” Imagined geographies and Cold War legacies in Sofi Oksanen’s Dog Park (Koirapuisto)

The article presents a discussion of Finnish-Estonian author Sofi Oksanen’s 2019 novel Dog Park (Koirapuisto), a social and psychological thriller about two Ukrainian women working in the Ukrainian fertility industry, offering surrogacy services to Western clients. The novel explores some of the new modes of exchange and cultural encounter that were established between Ukraine and the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union. It presents a reflection of the social and human consequences of the transition from communism to capitalism but is also a story of how the legacy of Cold War geopolitics continues to shape European mental geographies and experiences at the intersection of East and West. Drawing on concepts from human geography and postcolonial studies, the article offers a reading of Oksanen’s novel focusing especially on how the novel negotiates these geopolitical shifts as well as the position of the Nordic countries on the changing European map.

“This is what we wanted to learn”: Anti-racist and anti-colonial education with 1st gen Korean American seniors in a time of Asian hate and racialized dread

In this paper, I explore the challenge and promise of developing an anti-racist and anti-colonial curriculum and pedagogy in a time of racialized dread. Drawing on my experience teaching a 10-week course on racial justice, delivered in the Korean language, to 1st generation Korean American seniors in the Southern United States. I explore how the group channeled their frustration, tension, and anger in the face of Asian hate into hope and a passion to learn about the history of race in the United States and the Asian American community. Through weekly lectures, counter-storytelling, and in-depth discussions, I learned of their desire to name the racialized dread arising from everyday racism. By employing Critical Race Theory and Asian Critical Theory, and centering the Ethnic Studies’ liberatory approach to education, I demonstrate that the community’s perceptions of race and racism are shaped at the intersection of U.S. imperialism, South Korea’s transnational ideology of meritocracy, and the legacy of the unending Cold War on the Korean Peninsula. This paper also reflects on how engaging an ethnic community through teaching transformed my pedagogy and perspectives to be more decolonial and inclusive. In light of the current war on Critical Race Theory, this paper contributes to expanding discussions focused on reimagining and revitalizing the liberatory pedagogy of community as a way to confront racialized dread.

The nature of Lao security challenges

East Asia (including the sub regions of Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia) has been viewed as ranking among the most dangerous or conflictual regions on the planet, enduring colonial and Cold War legacies and several potential flashpoints. Regional international security governance has focused on nonintervention and conflict management, whereas domestic governance has focused on national security, development, and unity under tight central government control. Laos is a paradigmatic case of East Asian security policy prioritization. Its authoritarian government focuses, primarily, on traditional state-centric conceptualizations of security, and top-down, macroeconomic models and mega-projects to develop the country out of insecurity. This research project uses a qualitative approach consisting of literature review, document analysis, and limited interviews in the field. The conclusions are that, while by some measurements Lao governmental policymaking has been successful in achieving stated security objectives, in terms of nontraditional security (NTS) and human security considerations, these policies may not only be considered insufficient, but could also be counter-productive, storing up challenges for the future. Hence, the final section contains policy prescription for a more sustainable security situation in the Lao PDR.

Latin American Studies and the Cold War

Latin American Studies and the Cold War

"Does Chinese philosophy count as philosophy?": decolonial awareness and practices in international English medium instruction programs.

This qualitative study integrates key theories on epistemic decolonization from Asia, Africa, and Latin America to investigate the decolonial awareness and curriculum practices of teachers and international students in an English as a medium of instruction (EMI) program on Chinese philosophy and culture at a top-rated university in China. Content analysis of the in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 17 informants reveals that the teachers and students all demonstrated varying degrees of decolonial awareness related to the marginalized status of Chinese philosophy in Anglo–-Eurocentric disciplinary systems and adopted the following strategies to decolonialize the curriculum and foster epistemic justice in the unequal geopolitics associated with knowledge production: (1) historicizing Chinese philosophy as a modern discipline that has emerged from inter-knowledge dialogues across philosophical traditions and is still in constant tension with the complex interplay of the semi-colonial, imperial, and Cold War legacies; (2) abandoning the Anglo-Eurocentric benchmark by pluralizing the disciplinary contemporaneity, and (3) cultivating epistemic trust in Chinese through intercultural translation. Moreover, the flexible shuttling between Chinese and English in EMI classrooms and tutorial sessions helped the informants to observe the decolonial awareness that was inherent in their understanding of the discipline-specific ontology. The findings suggest the agentive potential of teachers and international students to foster epistemic justice in EMI curriculum design and implementation that counters the hegemony of English as a colonial force. Finally, implications for decoloniality-informed EMI policymaking and curriculum internationalization are discussed.

Unwanted participation? Defector public diplomacy in South Korea

ABSTRACT The controversy surrounding defector balloon launches into North Korea is often viewed as a bizarre example of Cold War legacies on the Korean peninsula. However, it is also a unique case study of non-state public diplomacy because these groups are attempting to engage in cross-border communication against the wishes of their host government. This article argues that South Korea’s unique interpretation of public diplomacy as a participatory activity has proven vulnerable to non-state organisations with divergent views of the national interest, which has resulted in two different types of public diplomacy being directed at North Korea. Subsequent attempts by the South Korean government to control the dissonant public diplomacy of non-state groups resulted in reputational costs for both sides and ultimately failed to prevent defectors from advancing their claim to a human right to communicate across national borders. Even though this case study broadly supports a polylateral interpretation of public diplomacy, it cautions that human rights discourses may obscure the fact that the traditional diplomatic system was designed to mitigate many of the risks associated with non-state diplomatic actors. Therefore, this paper suggests the need for more discussion about the consequences of a right to communicate across national borders.

Introduction to “Right-Wing Activism in Asia: Cold War Legacies, Geopolitics, and Democratic Erosion”

This essay introduces four articles that form a special issue of Politics & Society titled “Right-Wing Activism in Asia: Cold War Legacies, Geopolitics, and Democratic Erosion.” The articles focus on Japan, South Korea, and Thailand. These three Asian countries present important cases to generate critical comparative insights about the patterns of Far Right mobilization, for their geopolitical histories provide common ground while institutional variations set distinctive conditions. Most importantly, all of them were shaped by the particularly sharp conflicts of the Cold War in the region, and the articles in this issue demonstrate how this legacy has generated illiberal conditions in these countries today.

Reassembling colonial infrastructure in Cold War Korea: the Han River Basin Joint Survey Project (1966-71)

ABSTRACT This article explores how the Han River Basin Joint Survey Team (HJST), consisting of American and Korean engineers, planned the Han River Basin development project in South Korea during the late 1960s and the early 1970s. While much of the existing literature adopts the lens of Cold War geopolitics, arguing that American political and technical elites drove worldwide river basin development to promote an anti-communist alternative, this article reveals a nuanced picture of localized tensions between the authoritarian regime’s political aspirations and longstanding Cold War and colonial legacies. It shows that development of the Han River Basin was planned based on hydrological data and technical infrastructure produced during Korea’s Japanese colonial era. Moreover, it is impossible to understand HJST’s work without taking into account the political aspirations of the South Korean authoritarian regime.

The USSR and Cold War Legacy: Implications for the Current International Agenda

Interview with Michael A. Reynolds, Director of the Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies of Princeton University, USAMichael A. Reynolds is an American historian and political analyst. His teaching and research range over the geography of the Middle East and Eurasia and covers the themes of empire, international relations, nationalism, geopolitics, ethnic confl ict, and religion and culture. He is the author of Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires, 1908-1918 (Cambridge University Press, 2011), co-winner of the 2011 American Historical Association’s George Louis Beer Prize, a Financial Times book of the summer, and a Choice outstanding academic title. He is the editor of Constellations of the Caucasus: Empires, Peoples, and Faiths (Markus Weiner, 2016). Reynolds also writes on contemporary issues related to Turkey, Russia, the Caucasus region and U.S. foreign policy. His writings have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, The National Interest, and War on the Rocks, among other venues. He holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton and an MA in Political Science from Columbia.

Circling In on “Asian Media Studies”

Circling In on “Asian Media Studies” Alexander Zahlten Urban Horror: Neoliberal Post-Socialism and the Limits of Visibility by Erin Y. Huang. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. Pp. xii + 271. $99.95 cloth, $26.95 paper, $14.55 e-book. Powers of the Real: Cinema, Gender, and Emotion in Interwar Japan by Diane Wei Lewis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2019. Pp. xiii + 267. $55.00 cloth, $29.00 paper. Identity, Mediation, and the Cunning of Capital by Ani Maitra. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2020. Pp. xi + 299. $99.95 cloth, $34.95 paper, $34.95 e-book. Puppets, Gods, and Brands: Theorizing the Age of Animation from Taiwan by Teri Silvio. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2019. Pp. xvii + 270. $80.00 cloth, $30.00 paper, $24.99 e-book. Does something like “Asian Media Studies” exist? If it did, it would invariably be a tenuously positioned field, subject to the recently reformulated critiques of area studies even as it struggled for attention from a largely US- and Eurocentric and increasingly philosophical media [End Page 289] studies “proper.”1 At the same time, there is no question that work that understands itself as engaging with “media” in the context of Northeast, South, or Southeast Asia has increased immensely. Asia has become a lively and theoretically fertile research space. In most of this work, institutionalized area divisions are implicitly or explicitly baked into the accompanying research frameworks, and they often stand for markedly different approaches, theoretical propensities, reference points, and priorities. Though to some degree a generalization, I nevertheless suggest that beyond the general focus on audiovisual media forms recent English-language scholarship on South Asia often foregrounds issues of decolonization and postcoloniality.2 Scholarship on Southeast Asia builds on such frameworks but increasingly explores issues of migration and sexuality.3 On the other hand, work on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) engages with understanding the ruptures and continuities of the relationship between political discourse and media technology and gives special consideration to issues of the archive.4 Research centered on Japan, perhaps most of all, moves toward a media-philosophical approach and considers the question of rethinking regionality and the dynamics between media channels.5 The vexing and almost certainly deliberate vagueness of what constitutes media (or the even more nebulous and all-encompassing “media ecology”) in much of this work potentially opens up leeway for important discussions beyond regionalized silos. But for the most part, these wider discussions have not happened. To the extent that media studies frameworks or concerns have entered into area studies, the resulting [End Page 290] work has often chosen to downplay the divisions of media specificity and traded these new contact zones for retaining institutionalized regional divisions. In the disciplinary or field-topological sense, then, much of the most recent work navigates but leaves largely unsaid the curious angle at which the techno-philosophical character of media studies proper stands to the renewed self-questioning of area studies paradigms. As media studies quickly expands the concept of media beyond the narrowly technological to include, for example, clouds, atmospheres, and an all-encompassing shift to data, the field becomes increasingly universalist.6 The rapidly growing body of often-intersectional work on race and especially Blackness and media is a partial exception to this tendency.7 As certain sections of area studies make renewed efforts toward decolonizing, decentering, and reexamining their cold war legacies, they grasp for new ways to consider site-specificity and connectivity. How, then, to consider “media” and “area” together productively, in ways that negotiate this relationship but can still think beyond this tension of the moment? Media studies proper usually equates to Euro-American area studies, yet without engaging the limitations of an area studies framework. What contribution can scholarship that is more self-aware of issues of site-specificity make to understanding the limitations and possibilities engendered by our respective media situations as they shape social, economic, and political dynamics, as well as perceptions, sensations, and epistemologies? How does a kind of analogous concern with boundaries between “media” and between territories point to a potential reimagining of both sides of this coin, or of...

Problem bezpieczeństwa Ukrainy: w poszukiwaniu rozwiązania

Independent Ukraine will soon turn 30, but the country in the heart of Europe cannot boast a predictable and stable security position. The conflict with Russia after the regime change in 2014 proved, that a prolonged conventional war in Europe is still a probability. In order to install a durable peace, the all-European security arrangement shall have no low-profile security positions of those European countries, which do not enjoy membership in military unions. The Cold-war legacy of perception of security as a divisible notion is a contradiction to the idea of security for Europe. As long as there are divergences in the level of security, there would be a temptation to test the opponent’s readiness and strength on the territory of a weaker country. This is what happened in Georgia in 2008 and has been happening in Ukraine since 2014. In search for a solution, a special attention shall be paid to the issues of status and perception of security. For a small power, which is not a member of a military bloc, it is existential to follow an approach of collective security, not collective defence. Perception of security as indivisible supposes prioritising intensive engagement of the UN and the OSCE. Ukraine as a small power shall also enhance its security position through implementation of decent democratic procedures and true market reforms. These measures have a potential to create global economic linkages through integration of Ukraine’s economy to the global capitalist system not as a supplier of raw materials, but on parity basis.

The Twenty Years’ Crisis of European Energy Security: Central and Eastern Europe and the US

ABSTRACT In the last twenty years the European energy security debate has been overwhelmingly focused on the energy security of the Central and Eastern European (CEE) states and on their relationship with Russia. The key issue has been Russia’s attempt to maintain its influence and control through its energy dependencies. The article argues that the problems encountered by the CEE states have been resolved to a large extent due to the actions taken by the European Commission (EC). The EC has played a vital role in providing a collective voice for CEE and in supporting their regional energy integration in order to reduce their vulnerability to external pressures from Russia. The article goes on to argue that while the issue of CEE energy dilemmas has been addressed this does not, however, mean that the European energy predicament regarding Russia has been fully resolved. The article contends that the European-Russian energy relationship is also conditioned by larger geopolitical concerns regarding the US-Russian relationship, NATO, as well as by Cold War legacies which have come to the surface in a cyclical manner. The Trump administration’s sharp criticism of new energy infrastructure projects constructed from Europe to Russia underscores this point. The article asserts that European energy security will remain problematic in the absence of a more general political settlement between Russia and the West.

From Occupation to War: Cold War Legacies of US Army Historical Studies of the Occupation and Korean War

From Occupation to War: Cold War Legacies of US Army Historical Studies of the Occupation and Korean War

Legacies of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia: An Introduction

ABSTRACT This article introduces the pieces collected in this special issue on the legacies of the Cold War in East and Southeast Asia. Linking to the Journal of Contemporary Asia’s 50th Anniversary volume, it examines the origins and conflicts associated with the Cold War in Asia. In this special issue, the authors collectively examine the enduring legacies for the region of US engagements that established a set of politically authoritarian regimes trumpeting anti-communism while promoting American-style capitalism. While the path-dependence of this historical moment has not by itself bequeathed Asia’s current crop of authoritarian governments, the authors argue that the current situation cannot be fully understood without reference to Cold War legacies. This introductory article contextualises the pieces in the special issue by providing a broad overview of the variety of Cold War political and economic legacies for the region. It concludes by noting the importance of the kinds of detailed, critical, theoretically informed and empirically rich research that Journal of Contemporary Asia has encouraged since its inception.

From Russia with love: medical modernities, development dreams, and Cold War legacies in Kenya, 1969 and 2015

AbstractIn 1966, a new hospital was being built in western Kenya with Soviet aid. Designed by Soviet architects and planners, with equipment transported from the USSR, it was to be the largest hospital in Kenya. Still referred to today by Kenyans as ‘Russia’, it was the pet project of Oginga Odinga, the central figure of political opposition in postcolonial Kenya, who cultivated friendship with the USSR. Like the training offered to African students at the Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow, the hospital was a gift of the Soviets, a material embodiment of medical modernity, socialist internationalism and Africa's hopeful future. However, it soon became deeply embroiled in Kenya's Cold War politics. This article explores the remains and legacies of these Soviet gifts, tracing their connections to visions of progress and development, decolonization and struggles for political freedom in postcolonial Kenya. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival material, newspaper reports and interviews with Kenyans who were educated in the Soviet Union, I trace how, in institutional, bureaucratic, affective and biographical remains, diverging dreams and anticipations of progress and development converged and collided. Russia, like the city of which it forms a part, emerges as a palimpsest: a site of hopes and dreams, violence and disappointment, and the anticipation of futures.

“Climate Refugees”—A Useful Concept?

“Climate Refugees”—A Useful Concept?

Cold War as Method

Abstract This essay proposes a reconceptualization of the Cold War as a critical methodology for the study of contemporary Chinese-language cultures and literatures. Arguing that the Cold War is not over but simply transformed, the author redefines it as an enduring “problematic of the present,” an emotional structure that continues to shape the contours of literature, academic discourse, and identity formations in ways of which we are not always fully conscious. Hence the Cold War is best understood as a “cultural palimpsest” where the old dilemma of communism versus anticommunism is rewritten into a contemporary idiom of colonialism versus self-determination. After developing the concept of Cold War as method, the second part of the essay offers a concrete example through a critical reading of Swordsman II, a 1992 martial arts film adapted from Jin Yong's 1967 novel. While the film has generally been analyzed for its representation of (queer) sexuality, the essay shows that it is the Cultural Revolution and its Cold War legacies that explain the emergence of its main character.

The Flag of Refugees: Critical Ethnography of a Vietnamese Canadian Community Conflict

The Flag of Refugees: Critical Ethnography of a Vietnamese Canadian Community Conflict Anh Ngô This case study illustrates the complex consequences of the pressure for political representation within a diasporic community. In 2015, an internal conflict disrupted a local Vietnamese women’s agency in Toronto, Canada, over the issue of political representation. This case study describes a conflict between the senior members of this agency and their 1.5 generation counterparts who made up the agency’s board of directors. The conflict arose as a consequence of the latter’s failure to display the flag of the Republic of Viet Nam (rvn) at its events and office. The rvn flag, visualized as three red stripes on a yellow background, represents the lost nation of South Vietnam following the civil war, which became part of the larger Cold War, lasting nineteen years and resulting in massive civilian losses (Lau 153). While to non-Vietnamese persons, the display of the flag may seem trivial, it is the chief political issue in the diaspora because the flag is charged with a complex history, memory, and transnational politics. The conflict that arose in response to an agency’s decision not to fly the rvn flag shows how Vietnamese refugees negotiate their sense of identity and community in a multicultural nation-state like Canada and how larger political forces such as the Cold War legacy and Canadian nation-building exert pressure on understandings of who and what is a refugee. I [End Page 73] argue that the multiple issues presented by the key players in this conflict became elided as the diaspora became hyper-focused on the single sole issue of political representation and overlooked other significant concerns. This case is important for it demonstrates how the often-inevitable act of community-making in an official multicultural society results in a flattening of the multiplicities and complexities of intra-group refugee relations. Previous studies have highlighted the importance of intra-community conflicts to signal the need for the literature to resist the flattening of identities. Recently, Yan, Wong, and Lai interviewed thirty-nine self-identified Chinese persons in Vancouver and noted that for their participants, who differed in place of origin and time period of migration resulting in distinct social, political, and economic systems, “transnational political tensions among the different places of origin are a factor that further divides them, representing an obstacle to generating mutual trust” (456). Contributing to the call for an awareness of multiplicity of communities’ identities, this article traces the events of a specific conflict among the Vietnamese in Toronto. I argue that this conflict, which originally emerged out of some significant complaints by the seniors, which point to deep material and structural challenges Vietnamese seniors face in Canada, became shaped and overshadowed by the larger political context so that the only issue to be addressed was that of political representation. This political context is shaped, on the one hand, by anti-communism, whose persistence attests to the lingering aftermath of the Cold War in shaping diasporic identities and, on the other hand, by the pressures of a Canadian multiculturalism which forces diverse groups of people related by ethnicity to present themselves within a boundary of static culture (Dang, Le, Nguyen). In particular for the Vietnamese community, this static representation is entangled with the events of the war in Vietnam. To some in the Vietnamese community the rvn flag is the symbol of their political purpose and identity. Particularly for those involved in formal Vietnamese associations, most identify as South Vietnamese refugees and as political exiles, having left Vietnam after the end of the war in 1975, in political protest and fear of political persecution. However, in 2015, the younger staff and board of directors of the agency contended that the display of the rvn flag is divisive, as it has come to only represent the loss of the civil war for the South Vietnamese and not the full range of subject and political positions in the diaspora. The diaspora, now over forty years post the war in Vietnam, contains a multitude of identities and sociopolitical affiliations, yet this group continues to present as one community under one flag. After...

Cold War Legacy in Public and Private Health Spending in Europe.

Cold War Era (1946–1991) was marked by the presence of two distinctively different economic systems, namely the free-market (The Western ones) and central-planned (The Eastern ones) economies. The main goal of this study refers to the exploration of development pathways of Public and Private Health Expenditure in all of the countries of the European WHO Region. Based on the availability of fully comparable data from the National Health Accounts system, we adopted the 1995–2014 time horizon. All countries were divided into two groups: those defined in 1989 as free market economies and those defined as centrally-planned economies. We observed six major health expenditures: Total Health Expenditure (% of GDP), Total Health Expenditure (PPP unit), General government expenditure on health (PPP), Private expenditure on health (PPP), Social security funds (PPP) and Out-of-pocket expenditure (PPP). All of the numerical values used refer exclusively to per capita health spending. In a time-window from the middle of the 1990s towards recent years, total health expenditure was rising fast in both groups of countries. Expenditure on health % of GDP in both group of countries increased over time with the increase in the Free-market economies seen to be more rapid. The steeper level of total expenditure on health for the Free-market as of 1989 market economies, is due mainly to a steep increase in both the government and private expenditure on health relative to spending by centrally-planned economies as of the same date, with the out-of-pocket expenditure and the social security funds in the same market economies category following the same steepness. Variety of governments were leading Eastern European countries into their transitional health care reforms. We may confirm clear presence of obvious divergent upward trends in total governmental and private health expenditures between these two groups of countries over the past two decades. The degree of challenge to the fiscal sustainability of these health systems will have to be judged for each single nation, in line with its own local circumstances and perspectives.