ABSTRACT War and politics are closely connected in armed struggles for authority and legitimacy. At the end of the Cold War, the National Party (NP) white minority government in South Africa started negotiations with the African National Congress (ANC) and SA Communist Party (SACP) on a new political order. In May 1990, the Conservative Party (CP), the official opposition in Parliament, announced a ‘Third Freedom Struggle’ to prevent what it described as communist-dominated black majority rule over Afrikaners as a people. Its strategy eventually included electoral opposition, delegitimisation of the transition, and alliances with Zulu, Xhosa and Tswana homeland leaders. The CP caucus was divided on goals and means, but one parliamentarian, Schalk Pienaar, helped to build the extraparliamentary Farmers Crisis Action (BKA). Another parliamentarian, Koos Botha, played a leading part in a campaign of bomb attacks to strengthen the negotiation position of those who pursued an Afrikaner state. The paper analyzes and compares the previous experience, leadership roles, aims, methods, political entrepreneurship and shifting opportunity structures of Pienaar and Botha. The paper is based on primary and secondary sources, including interviews with Botha and Pienaar. It argues that both were forerunners in different extraparliamentary trajectories that helped build rebel groups.

ABSTRACT In 1986, a mysterious young girl claiming to be “Yūko,” the daughter of the Japanese ambassador to Thailand, appeared in Bangkok. The girl in question, Kantiya Asayot from Chiang Rai province in Northern Thailand, named herself “Yūko,” forging for herself a new identity from Japanese media circulated in Thailand. Traversing the increasingly “Japanized” Bangkok cityscape as Yūko, Kantiya discovers the increased mobility that her new identity affords. Retrospectively named “The Yūko Incident,” this event sparked a national media frenzy and became an entry point for competing anxieties over gender, national identity, and Japan’s intensifying economic and cultural presence in Cold War-era Thailand. This article examines representations of “The Yūko Incident” in two primary texts: the initial 1986 newspaper coverage of the incident by Thailand’s newspaper tabloid Thairath, and Yoshioka Shinobu’s 1989 literary non-fiction Nihonjin gokko. Within the context of escalating Thai (and Japanese) anxieties about Japan’s presence in Cold War Thailand, I argue that Kantiya emerges as a deviant figure of the monstrous feminine in these texts, revealing the gendered and racialized dimensions of Thailand’s grappling with Japanese influence, and paradoxically, Japan’s own grappling with its influence on Southeast Asia and the world, thus underscoring how female bodies become critical sites for the negotiation of Cold War era anxieties and identities. Excavating different layers of anxiety revealed by the event, I trace the unevenly shared experience of intertwined material and geopolitical histories that the mischief of a thirteen-year-old Thai girl exposes in Cold War Thailand.

Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted multiple resolutions condemning the aggression and calling for the withdrawal of Russian forces. While some Global South countries supported these measures, many refrained from taking a critical stance toward Moscow, despite clear violations of international law. What accounts for this divided response? Departing from existing explanations that focus on contemporary geopolitical or economic interests, this paper traces Global South countries’ positions to the Soviet Union’s extensive Cold War–era interventions in the developing world. We argue that states that received greater volumes of Soviet aid are significantly more likely to align with Russia today, driven by both material dependencies and ideational legacies. Empirically, we demonstrate that the observed association withstands extensive robustness tests and is substantiated by evidence for both material and ideational mechanisms. These findings underscore the importance of a historical-institutional approach to understanding international alignment in the Global South and call for moving beyond the Liberal International Order framework when analyzing global responses to contemporary conflicts.

ABSTRACT This article examines the evolving dynamics of minilateralism and trilateral cooperation in Northeast Asia, and assesses their implications for regional security and order-building. It traces the development of minilateral frameworks in the region since the end of the Cold War, focusing in particular on two key trilateral cases: security cooperation between the United States, Japan, and South Korea, and functional cooperation between China, Japan, and South Korea through the Trilateral Cooperation Secretariat (TCS). It is argued that US–Japan–South Korea trilateralism, which was initially shaped by the need to address the North Korean nuclear challenge, has become a core element of the US-led security architecture aimed at balancing China’s growing influence in the Indo–Pacific. By contrast, the TCS reflects a pragmatic form of minilateralism centred on economic and technical cooperation. Yet its effectiveness has been constrained by deep-seated geopolitical tensions and institutional limitations, particularly amid intensifying US–China rivalry. The article concludes that while trilateral minilateralism offers new avenues for coordination, it also risks exacerbating security dilemmas. Strengthening institutional mechanisms for strategic communication, confidence-building, and risk reduction will be essential to supporting regional stability and order-building.

Exploring Chinese Elements in J.D. Salinger’s Works: A Response to McCarthyism in the Early Cold War Era

This study examines the sociological foundations of regime stability in contemporary Russia by analysing how social consent is produced and sustained in the absence of democratic institutions. Building on existing scholarship that rejects the teleological assumptions of the post–Cold War transition paradigm, the research conceptualises Russia not as a failed democracy in transition but as a stabilised authoritarian order in which compliance has been normalised. The literature demonstrates that regime durability in Russia is rooted in an ideologically mediated relationship between the state and society rather than in electoral legitimacy or participatory governance. The study draws particular attention to the ideological framework of "sovereign democracy," which redefines political legitimacy as loyalty to state sovereignty and national survival rather than popular consent. Within this framework, democratic institutions function as symbolic façades, while dissent is reframed as moral betrayal or foreign interference. The research further highlights how this ideological construction is reinforced through legal repression, social atomization, and the restructuring of civil society into state-aligned and marginalised spheres. Rather than eliminating civic participation, the regime channels social engagement into controlled and depoliticised forms, producing what the literature describes as consentful contention—localized claims-making that affirms, rather than challenges, state authority. The analysis also emphasizes the role of historical legacies and moral narratives in shaping societal responses to authoritarian governance. Experiences of the turbulent 1990s, combined with enduring ambivalence toward Western political models, have contributed to widespread acceptance of a strong, centralized state. Economic hardship and political exclusion are often morally justified through narratives of sacrifice, stability, and civilizational endurance, further limiting the potential for collective mobilization. By synthesizing research on ideology, civil society, repression, and contentious politics, this study argues that social consent in Russia is best understood as a form of adaptive compliance rather than democratic legitimacy. The findings contribute to broader sociological debates on authoritarian resilience by demonstrating how regimes can maintain stability through the management of consent, participation, and meaning, even in the absence of democratic accountability.

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the epistemic ruptures and political debates concerning socialism, Europe and democracy within the Italian Left from the global crises of the 1970s to the Eastern European transitions of the early 1990s. It explores the networks and trajectories of socialists who didn’t identify with Bettino Craxi’s socialist government and often challenged it. Although they were sharp critics of the Soviet Union, they had different attitudes towards the Italian communists. Particular attention is paid to Vittorio Foa, Antonio Giolitti, Bruno Trentin, Luciano Cafagna and Giuliano Amato, who belonged to different generations and engaged with East–West European left-wing cultures. Throughout the 1980s they sought to critically evaluate end redefine the twentieth-century left-wing concepts. They questioned the myth of the historical significance of the working class, addressed the crises of the Fordist model, Soviet-style statism and welfare states, as well as developed hybrid ideas of socialism, liberalism, reformism and Europeanism. In their effort to ‘reinvent the Left’, they made often controversial interventions in the contested political space between socialists and communists. They challenged previous leftist traditions by contrasting ‘neoliberalism’ in this way, but their ideas did not coalesce into a coherent ‘third way’ vision – let alone full acceptance of ‘neoliberalism’. Foa, Giolitti and their interlocutors remained rooted in the horizon of socialism. These ideas continued to circulate well after the end of the Cold War and the sudden disappearance of the Socialist Party, as well as the ambiguous transformation of the Communist Party. In the aftermath of the transitions to the Eastern European post-communist regimes and the collapse of the Italian party system between 1989 and 1993, however, their ideas experienced a ‘strange defeat’.

The U.S.-China Technological Cold War: Strategic Competition, Realist Dynamics and Global Implications

In many disciplines of the social sciences, it is thought that at least three factors should be considered in order to make an evaluation about a subject. One of these is the period of the issue or problem being addressed, which can be called the temporal context. Another is the identification and classification of terms that explain this period, which should be approached as conceptual context. Finally, a comparison is expected to be made in order to see the differences and changes in the cause-process-effect axes, which can be called the context of comparison. Considering these three factors, this study aims to focus on the concept of détente, one of the most “popular” concepts of the Cold War, so to speak. For this purpose, the temporal framework is limited to the Cold War period and various approaches to the concept and its reflections in international politics are presented. At the same time, perspectives on the causes, processes and outcomes of the construction of the détente process are presented. Through such a focus, it has been possible to draw attention to the similarities and especially the differences in the way the concept was perceived and applied by the actors during the Cold War.

Within the spiral model of security dilemma, this research takes the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) theory to assess warfighting strategies, development and use of new weapon systems and countermeasures being employed in the Ukraine War. While this war does not indicate any chances of concluding and has not yet escalated to possible deployment of nuclear weapons, it does present sufficient prospects of development of a new kind of warfighting. This research aims to identify how NATO including the US, Russia and Ukraine are searching for prospects to continue this war through carefully adding new strategies, weapon systems and technologies that do not trigger a nuclear response. Between modern warfare and the nuclear overhang, all parties to this conflict have challenged longstanding arms control and risk reduction mechanisms. The research also compares Cold War paradigms of warfighting with modern warfighting strategies to assess changes or repetition of military doctrines and use of military technology. It argues that a hybridisation of Cold War style of warfighting is being reintroduced with precision-intensive, sophisticated weapons while redefining concepts such as collective security and multi-domain warfare. This research also identifies the impact this war has on Europe’s already fragile security outlook and possible fractures it has on NATO’s collective security/collective defence paradigm ever since its inception. It also takes stock of possible scenarios where nuclear risk could be at its maximum and new forms of warfighting that can impact conventional warfighting strategies to unprecedented levels.

By studying more local, small-scale radio stations with transnational reach, such as “Voice of Truth,” media history scholarship can better understand the complexity of media landscapes during the Cold War. The production team of the exiled Greek communist radio station based in Bucharest worked to reconcile grand Marxist theories and ideological frameworks with the daily experiences of their target audience, namely Greek labour migrants in West Germany. Seeking to be at the avant-garde of informed resistance, the producers opened as many channels as possible to receive and transmit information, often in remarkable ways given their limited resources. By closely monitoring sociopolitical affairs, triangulating information, and reinforcing transnational ties, the exiled communist radio station proved to be more multivocal and less sclerotic than we might imagine.

This study offers a reinterpretation of United States public diplomacy in Turkey during President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s tenure (1953-1961) through the lens of Wilsonian liberal internationalism. It addresses the tendency to dismiss cultural and informational initiatives as ad hoc Cold War propaganda serving containment rather than recognizing them as components of a coherent ideological tradition grounded in democracy promotion, collective security, open diplomacy, and moral leadership. The article fills a gap in the literature by reframing Voice of America broadcasts, Fulbright exchanges, binational cultural centers, and private foundation projects as tools that combined normative aspiration with strategic calculation. Methodologically, it employs multi-archival research in the United States and Turkey, supplemented by contemporaneous Turkish and American media sources and program records, and uses process tracing to connect policy memoranda, budget decisions, audience targeting, and message design to observed outcomes. The analysis demonstrates that Turkish-language Voice of America programming fostered open information flows and public debate; Fulbright scholarships and binational centers expanded educational mobility and mutual understanding; and philanthropic development schemes linked knowledge transfer to civic participation. These initiatives simultaneously strengthened Turkey’s alignment with the United States, reinforced NATO’s southeastern flank, and diminished the social resonance of Soviet messaging. The key finding is that ideological and strategic functions were interdependent rather than hierarchical. Wilsonian commitments operated as a substantive component of Cold War statecraft in Turkey, shaping ends and means in tandem. By illuminating this reciprocity between values and interests, the study refines prevailing interpretations of American foreign policy and provides a more nuanced account of how public diplomacy influenced the evolution of Turkish–American relations during the 1950s.

China's successful implementation of its outward-looking policies and its acceptance into the WTO after the Cold War have led to a reduction in trade barriers. China has thereby accelerated its economic rise and developed its methods of cooperation with regional institutions. China, which initiated official and commercial relations with the EU in the 1970s, took a holistic approach to Europe until the 2010s due to its concerns about attracting investment and export concern. However, the rise of voices calling for preventing increasing dependence on China in the mid-2000s and the loss of income and employment suffered by European countries during 2008 economic crisis marked an important turning point. On the other hand, China's success during this period and its substitution of Central and Eastern European countries played an active role in the establishment of the 17+1 platform. China's promise to increase its global investments under the BRI has also increased interest in China across Europe. This has also raised suspicions that China is involved in a new initiative to divide the EU from within through its 17+1 platform in Europe. The main objective of this study is to reveal what China aims to achieve through its multifaceted cooperation in Europe and to determine how realistic the growing suspicions about China are. This study applies a qualitative research method, utilizing fieldwork, pre-interviews, and comprehensive data analysis. The findings of the study indicate that there has been no significant change in China's traditional perspective toward Europe, and investments in the 17+1 countries are not large enough to divide the EU. China's trade and investment policies continue to focus heavily on Western European countries. On the other hand, China's projects, acquisitions, and construction activities in different parts of Europe show that it is seeking to advance its national interests across the continent.

Even after the end of the Cold War, North Korea remains a ‘theater state,’ showcasing its power through rituals and events, and propagating propaganda. North Korean children's literature also fundamentally operates as a political tool to sustain North Korean political ideology. This study analyzes how, in the tenth volume of the representative North Korean children's literature series ‘Korean Children's Literature Anthology’ titled ‘The Garden of Laughter,’ tales with relatively reduced or eliminated ideological content are included, yet underneath their plots, political ideology still operates. Chapter II discusses, based on Ted Hughes's arguments, the functioning of visual biopower during the colonial and Cold War periods and explores North Korea as a theater state that still maintains power through visual biopower. In Chapter III, building on this, the study analyzes the operation of visual biopower in the cyclical perspective of North Korean fairy tales. First, it discusses how the principle of North Korean fairy tale creation is based on the Juche ideology. Then, it examines how the tales in ‘The Garden of Laughter’ have a mythic nature, where characters embark on adventures in a fantastical world and show a cyclical perspective returning to the Confucian ideology (loyalty), yet are the result of an ideology that authoritatively imposes loyalty to the ‘Juche ideology’ and excludes an open perspective towards a new world.

The capacity of creative content to construct civil societies’ consent leads historical TV series, as narratives that reflect political stances, to be questioned. Since the Cold War, Türkiye and South Korea have been influenced by US-centered Western main flow but have also produced alternative flows since the 2000s.This study classifies historical fictions by platforms -national channels and the American digital platform Netflix- and comparatively analyzes selected fictions using the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). The aim is to reveal the relationship between the narratives’ prominent characters and their political reflections through governments’ global agendas. The study concludes that narratives selected from state cultural institutions tend to be more nationalist, while narratives from Netflix, despite local production, reflect the influence of the hegemonic cultural center. This research contributes to literature by applying the NPF as a unique method, comparing Turkish and South Korean cultural elites’ narratives, and interpreting political reflections of prominent characters.

The anticipated stable, rules-based world order after the Cold War has unraveled, leading to fragmentation, volatility, and unclear power dynamics, reflecting deeper structural shifts in the global system beyond isolated crises or regional conflicts. The paper analyses the structural, geopolitical, and strategic reasons of the modern instability in the international system and evaluates the character of the power struggle in the 21st century. The new order is being defined by these cross-cutting flashpoints, decentralised conflict patterns and ambiguous rules that damage traditional mechanisms of governance, deterrence and crisis management, contrary to the traditional assumptions of binary great-power rivalry. Power today relies on economic strength, technology, and information control, affecting flashpoints in Eastern Europe, Indo-Pacific, Middle East, and Africa, where conflicts and non-state actors intensify security challenges. These arenas are labs of new types of strategic competition where escalation is usually controlled, ambiguous, and calculated restrained instead of overt or absolute. Focus is given to shifting U.S. global influence, China's strategic rise, Russia's revisionist actions, and middle powers navigating increasingly flexible, transactional alliances in a changing international landscape. These dynamics, when combined, are an indicator of redistribution of power which is uneven, contested, and negotiated, as opposed to being transferred cleanly. Technological advances, economic ties, and ideological fragmentation have merged traditional boundaries between peace and conflict. Consequently, international competition is progressively operating in the long grey-zone ranges, neither open war nor ordinary diplomacy, but infiltrated with coercion, pressure, and influence that is applied continuously and not in spurts.

Throughout history, the Mediterranean and its surroundings, the core of many empires and home to several civilizations since antiquity, witnessed nations, states and empires struggle to dominate, thereby becoming an important factor in determining their foreign policies. While the region had an important role in the making and sustaining of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires, the colonial Britishers saw it as a prerequisite for controlling their colonies in Asia. During the Cold War, it invited attention from the Americans and Soviet Russians alike as they competed to establish their dominance in the region because of its growing importance in energy transportation. Parallelly, with the Turkish straits being key to the Mediterranean, it also brought the attention of Cold War actors to Turkey. This paper mainly examines why the United States (USA) increased its attention over the Turkish Straits and its respective policies toward Turkey at the beginning of the Cold War. Also paper evaluates the economic presence of the USA at the Turkish Straits by using data’.

The following research Article describes a gender centered account of the exemplary operational strategies of the Israeli intelligence facilitation firm the Mossad through the documented life of two women i.e., Sylvia Rafael and Catherine Perez-Shakdam. Based on archival information, memoirs, declassified records, and reliable media investigations, the paper will analyze the use of gender and identity construction and ideological orientation in human intelligence (HUMINT) operations. One of the participants of the Cold War, the undercover Israeli campaign after the Munich massacre was Sylvia Rafael who worked under the alias of a journalist to help locate the desired targets. Catherine Perez-Shakdam is a contemporary political commentator who was a contributor to Iranian state media, subsequently publicly denounced her religious identity, raising concerns with the manipulation and control of ideology and access. It does not make speculative conclusions, yet the paper presents patterns in the use of gendered identity in intelligence that can be verified. It forms part of the critical research in the field of intelligence in wondering how the traditional and non traditional facets of espionage become grown-up reliant on the performative identity within the notionally sensitive political set ups.

After the Second World War, a new family model, based on a return to traditional gender expectations, was reshaped to fit the emerging consumer society and became widespread in the American society. During the Cold War, the archetype of the white, middle-class suburban family, with strictly defined gender roles, was promoted as a symbol of the “American way of life” and used as a tool of “soft power” by US diplomacy. This article analyses the construction and consequences of this family model, focusing on the role of the traditional housewife. To this end, I have examined the most influential women’s magazines and newspapers of that period, along with data from the Kelly Longitudinal Study, which documents married life between the 1930s and 1950s. The findings reveal how this family ideal functioned as a strategic instrument during the Cold War and the impact this demanding model had on American women.

The Icelandic writer Gunnar Gunnarsson (1889–1975), who wrote in Danish, and the Swedish pedagogue, literary scholar and politician Stellan Arvidson (1902–1997) exchanged letters for 50 years (their ca 350 letters are kept at the National Library of Iceland). Their political opinions diverged early on, however, which became particularly obvious in relation to Germany: Whereas the anti-Nazi Arvidson lost his position as lecturer in Swedish in Greifswald following the Machtübernahme in 1933, Gunnarsson was a frequent guest in Nazi-Germany where he received an honorary doctorate in Heidelberg in 1936; he is also known as the only Icelander to have met Hitler in person. During the Cold War, Gunnarsson sided strongly with the anti-communist camp, whereas Arvidson, although a social democrat, remained a true friend of the GDR (honorary doctorate in Rostock in 1969, professor in Greifs­wald in 1981) until the fall of the Berlin Wall and beyond. It is remarkable how Gunnarsson, because he had seen the “injustices” the Ver­sailles peace agreement had caused the Germans, tended to notice only the positive sides of the “national revival” in Germany of the 1930s. Arvidson, in contrast, had realised the danger of Nazism early on but for that very reason later became insen­sitive to the dark sides of the GDR. In spite of all these differences the two seem to have been genuinely good friends who enjoyed each other’s company. It appears, furthermore, that Gunnarsson, who often felt at odds with both the Danish and Icelandic literary scenes, found it easy to confide in Arvidson as a Swede. Add to this Arvidson’s never-failing zest in pro­moting Gunnarsson in Sweden (although the hopes of a Nobel Prize would not materialize), which remained the fundament for their lifelong friendship.