Geology as geopolitics: continental drift and the southern hemisphere.

Cold War studies is ‘a mobile galaxy’

Radio nuclear attack scenarios are potential threats that state actors must deal with more than ever in the context of preparedness and response since the Cold War. Radioactive contamination can occur in many scenarios, which means that, in addition to increased skin- and whole-body doses from external radiation exposure, there is also a risk of incorporation and contamination carryover. In many contexts, only theoretical considerations have been made about which substances would be suitable for removing various radioactive compounds. The goal of this work is to systematically investigate the efficacy of various skin decontamination agents in aqueous solutions, e.g., soap, urea peroxide, EDTA, citric acid, and hydrochloric acid. As a model radionuclide we utilized Manganese-56 in two chemical forms: 1. 56MnCl2 and 2. 56MnO2. The contamination was deposited on the surface of ex vivo pig skin during a 15 min contamination protocol. Pre- and post-decontamination measurements were performed by using a lead-shielded gamma spectrometer in a standardized geometry. The counts in 180 s were analyzed after decay and background correction. The decontamination process involved a standardized 30-second spray followed by a single wipe on the pig skin performed by the same decontaminating experimenter. While the tested decontamination agents were approximately equally efficient in removing water-insoluble radioactive contamination (56MnO2), decontamination from water-soluble 56MnCl2 showed a dependency on the decontamination agents. We found that low-concentration aqueous acid solutions (e.g., 3% citric acid) showed a considerably enhanced efficiency compared to a 1% soap solution.

ABSTRACT This article looks at the evidence of two recent cases of war involving nuclear powers: Russia-Ukraine and Iran-Israel. It arrives at three conclusions. First, nuclear weapons, even when they are reinforced by second-strike capability, do not prevent limited attacks on homeland territory below the threshold of invasion. Second, nuclear powers did not use or threaten to use nuclear weapons after these retaliatory attacks. Third, the strategic balance was not directly relevant to leaders’ calculations in any of these cases. The empirical evidence suggests that theories of deterrence, developed in the historical and cultural context of the Cold War, do not translate well into other contexts and need revision. It may well be that nuclear weapons deter some kinds of behaviour, but not others, and that the use of one set of instruments to deter one kind of threat makes the prevention of another more difficult.

ABSTRACT This article examines how international ideas travelled to Vietnam, and it assesses the current state of international studies within the country. Vietnam’s initial encounters with the West date back to the sixteenth century when European missionaries first arrived. However, it was during the period of French colonization that numerous international concepts found their way to Vietnam, either directly or indirectly. Vietnamese patriots, notably figures like Ho Chi Minh, played a critical role in introducing and employing these international ideas in the struggle for Vietnam’s independence. This eventually laid the foundation for modern Vietnam’s foreign policy as well as the development of international studies in the country. After years of vicissitudes, through colonization, anti-imperial warfare, national unification, the Cold War era, to the transformative Đổi Mới reform era, international studies (IS) and international relations (IR) in Vietnam have gained significant momentum. The gradual acceptance of Western IS/IR is noticeable, as a result of Vietnam’s deepening integration into the international community. Despite these recent promising developments, IS or IR has not yet evolved into a full-fledged discipline in Vietnam.

In the 1950s, Alan Durrant of the University College Wales began a series of experiments to investigate the inheritance of environmental effects in plants, forging an unexpected connection to the controversial hereditary theories of Trofim Denisovich Lysenko. Durrant's work relied heavily on a specific fibre flax variety, Stormont Cirrus, developed in the interwar period in the UK for linen production. I investigate how the exigencies of the UK linen industry, along with Durrant's training and institutional setting, formed the milieu that generated an unexpected outlier in British genetic scholarship during the Cold War. I supplement my text-based historical analysis by conducting experiments to re-examine the genetic constitution of the original Stormont Cirrus cultivar. These findings suggest that Durrant's creation of alternative 'genotroph' derivatives by treating Stormont Cirrus plants with different soil nutrient regimes likely resulted from selection of pre-existing genetic variation present in the incompletely inbred parental strain, rather than being an example of inherited environmental effects. Inverting Durrant's intention to interpret his results in the context of Lysenko's work, my historical analysis of Durrant's flax genotroph findings informs a reappraisal of one of the key experimental claims supporting Lysenko's environmentalist concepts of inheritance.

The research titled “The State of Knowledge in Social Studies Research in Thailand: Past and Future Trends” aims to investigate historical foundations, assess current status, and synthesize the body of knowledge to determine future directions for social studies research. The scope of the study covers the period from 1960 to 2024. A qualitative research methodology was employed, utilizing documentary research and content analysis of data retrieved from the Thai Digital Collection (TDC). The findings reveal that the development of Thai social studies research has been shaped by the "politics of knowledge production," which can be categorized into three distinct phases: 1) The 1960–1981 period: Knowledge production was centralized, focusing on national security ideologies and anti-communism within the context of the Cold War, with survey research serving as the primary methodology. 2) The 1982–2005 period: This era witnessed a decentralization of knowledge production to regional levels, aligning with globalization and the 1999 Education Reform. The focus shifted toward instructional innovation and Research and Development (R&D). 3) The 2006–2024 period: Amidst democratic regression and a resurgence of conservatism, research topics predominantly adopted the Sufficiency Economy Philosophy and state-sanctioned ideal citizenship as core themes, with R&D emerging as the most dominant methodology. The state of knowledge in Thai social studies tethered to the concepts of the ruling power. To transcend these limitations, future trends and directions should increase the proportion of qualitative and interdisciplinary research. Furthermore, research should be integrated with decentralization efforts to establish an ecosystem that promotes academic freedom, thereby truly responding to the diverse needs of society.

This article examines how European-level heritage instruments translate the passage from Cold War division to free movement into repeatable practices of rights education. It compares three governance carriers that operate through different technologies of authority: the European Heritage Label, the Council of Europe’s Cultural Routes programme, and the House of European History. Treating policy and curatorial documentation as discourse that organises practice rather than merely describing it, the analysis follows the critical insight that institutional texts create problems, allocate agency, and stabilise normative assumptions through recurring vocabularies and evaluative criteria. Across the three instruments, mobility becomes teachable through three mechanisms: enforceable obligations and monitoring, spatial sequencing and renewal rules, and modular pedagogy with multilingual accessibility. The comparison also identifies failure conditions that are legible within institutional evaluation cultures themselves: European dimension language may substitute for curricular depth, multilingual provision may be treated as symbolic compliance rather than access justice, and network governance may concentrate recognition in emblematic hubs while peripheral nodes remain thinly resourced.

ABSTRACT Most military organizations require a steady flow of volunteers to remain operationally effective. These volunteers are enticed to serve with advertising in newspapers and magazines, commercials on radio and television, and a plethora of online content. Considerable sums of money are spent on such promotion, but little is known about how it is developed or who develops it, with most existing studies devoted to the recruiting drives of the two world wars or Cold War. In this article, I shift focus to more recent times to show how recruiters use digital media to promote service, how the media industries are implicated in, and in many cases driving forces behind, such promotion, and why their work can be considered a form of strategic communications. The premise, spelled out at the outset, is that recruiters require varying forms of private expertise to operate. The evidence, which takes the form of a comparative case-study analysis of recent recruiting work in Germany, Japan, and Russia, suggests recruiters are “strategic actors” whose role in promoting and justifying service warrants close attention.

This study draws on archival materials from Academia Historica to examine how, after the Korean War, Taiwan’s Nationalist government used the party–state–military apparatus to promote martial arts as part of its Cold War cultural strategy. This effort aimed to assert ideological legitimacy, construct cultural orthodoxy, and counteract diplomatic marginalization amid geopolitical isolation. In the post–Cold War era, as martial arts administration in Taiwan gradually shed its overt ties to the military and the ruling party, martial arts evolved into a more civilian-oriented national movement. Nevertheless, Taiwan’s efforts to internationalize martial arts have yielded limited results. In addition to internal challenges such as disputes over leadership and institutional reform, these efforts have also been hindered by external factors, notably the dominance of international frameworks favoring Olympic-standardized martial arts competition.

During the early Cold War, America’s normative gender roles and consumption-oriented culture became intertwined with its foreign policy goals in rivalling its primary “threat,” the Soviet Union. This paper will discuss the American National Exhibition, a grand spectacle that took place across six weeks in Moscow during the summer of 1959, and was attended by 2.7 million people. Filled with glittering displays of American consumer culture, the exhibition was rife with representations of happy, fulfilled, and feminine women. This event symbolized the pinnacle of US government efforts to undertake a unique form of female oriented cultural diplomacy and soft power as a means to convince the “other” – Russian women - that the American way of life could improve their own lives, due to its consumer goods and their accompanying comforts and conveniences. It is part of a larger study on the American National Exhibition which seeks to demonstrate that cultural diplomacy and soft power should be considered an important element in the gradual erosion of the Soviet government.

ABSTRACT The South African National Defence Force (SANDF) has faced difficult strategic conditions since democratisation in 1994. These included the end of the Cold War and apartheid, ambiguity pertaining to external threats, democratic regime change, the integration of former non-statutory forces, a declining defence budget, and the acquisition of new prime mission equipment. In an attempt to cope with these conditions, the SANDF adopted the mission-based approach as a threat-independent “coping mechanism” for military strategy. The aim of this paper is to discuss the SANDF’s selection and use of this approach. This is done to give more clarity to strategy gaps and why the SANDF finds it difficult to achieve a balance amongst strategic variables. It is argued that in the absence of clear strategic guidance to make difficult trade-offs, the finalisation of military strategy has become a dragged-out process to avoid decisions that could threaten the retention of legacy and core military capabilities.

This article examines the evolution of the Chinese Communist Party’s policy toward Protestant Christianity through the lens of wartime governance. It argues that religious regulation under Xi Jinping is best understood as the reactivation of a united front strategy forged in recurrent episodes of war and conflict. Tracing the CCP’s engagement with Protestant institutions and communities from the Republican era through the Cold War to the present, the article shows how Protestantism has consistently been treated as a transnational network subject to co-optation, surveillance, and control. Recovering this historical legacy clarifies contemporary church–state tensions and informs diplomatic and religious engagement amid intensifying U.S.–China rivalry.

ABSTRACT This article explores the education policies of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) towards returned qiaosheng 侨生 (overseas Chinese students) between 1949 and 1966, a formative period of socialist nation-building. Drawing on Chinese local archives, institutional records, and memoirs, it investigates how the PRC sought to reshape the outlook of qiaosheng who returned with patriotic idealism but soon encountered disillusionment in post-revolutionary China. Central and local authorities employed preferential treatment, labour education, and ideological training to integrate qiaosheng into the socialist system and mobilise them for national reconstruction. The article argues that despite constraints, the education policies partially succeeded in reorienting qiaosheng’s identities and embedding socialist values. Situating qiaosheng within the broader project of socialist nation-building, this study contributes to debates on education, migration, and political socialisation in Cold War Asia, while revealing how the PRC managed transnational loyalties in a volatile era.

Folk linguistics properly encompasses not only popular ideas about language itself, but also opinions about the nature of linguistics itself and what a linguist does. In this study, I investigate portrayals of linguistics, linguistic topics, and linguists in ~100 English-language novels published over the last ~100 years. These depictions offer a window into the public’s understanding of the field, while also shedding light on which linguistic topics capture the interest and imagination of writers and readers. The corpus reveals an overall increase in the number of linguistics-relevant works, which fall into the main categories of those involving signed languages and deafness, having a linguist protagonist, animal language, xenolinguistics and alien languages, lexicography, and language disorders. Observed changes within the categories track societal trends, starting from Cold War era interests in political control plus Space Race-driven interest in inter-species communication, and shifting in our current age of social media and AI hype to language commodification, control, and truth values.

Abstract Using a rich set of multilingual sources, this article traces the underexplored history of China’s involvement in the World Federation of Trade Unions (WFTU) from 1949 to 1966. It details the WFTU’s role in providing an institutional infrastructure for China’s international activism and documents the All-China Federation of Trade Unions’ engagements with socialist internationalism and people’s diplomacy. After 1960, against the backdrop of the Sino–Soviet split, the WFTU became a platform for Chinese dissent against pro-Soviet positions. After a decade of mutual collaboration, China’s position changed dramatically and relations with the WFTU were eventually halted in 1966 due to developments in the international communist movement and the radicalization of China’s internal and external politics. By focusing on the WFTU, the article highlights the possibilities (and constraints) presented by Soviet-backed international organisations for China’s foreign relations, illuminating broader issues related to China’s socialist internationalism, labour diplomacy, and transnational networks during the early Cold War.

The UN Security Council (UNSC) has been under an increasing international spotlight with the wars in Syria and Ukraine and the vetoes of some of its five permanent members (P5) in these wars. Yet, the P5 behave differently in and towards the UNSC, and this difference is not (only) explainable by material factors but also, as constructivist IR theory would argue, by the different ideational perspectives they have about world politics and their place in it. This paper deals with China’s conduct in and toward the UN Security Council from a constructivist perspective. China’s behavior rests on several notions, such as non-interference in the internal affairs of a State, and respect for its territorial integrity, as well as opposition to the use of force for regime change. China perceives the world as multipolar and pluralistic and considers that world politics should be conducted in a prudent and constructive manner that is based on consensus through consultation (among great powers) and the respect of the interests of all parties (including small and middle States). Since the start of the 21st century, China has been increasingly more active and assertive in the UNSC, which is evidenced by the fact that it is the permanent member with the most abstentions during this period and the only permanent member that has used the veto more times after the end of the Cold War than during it. At the same time, China wants to portray itself as a “responsible great power” in the UN and in the global order and pays considerable effort in building and maintaining this image. Yet, it stands for a restrictive interpretation of key concepts for international peace and security, such as sovereignty, responsibility, and threat to peace, and is not keen on Security Council reform.

In the 1990s supporters of economic freedom had reasons to be optimistic. Because of its economic superiority the West had just won the Cold War. The Soviet Union and its empire were dissolved. The threat of nuclear war and mutual assured destruction had receded. Western economic superiority was ultimately rooted in economic freedom and decentralized decision-making. As Mises (1922/1988) and Hayek (1945) had recognized, private property rights in the means of production and decentralized decision-making are essential, if we want to benefit from of a rational allocation of scarce resources and to exploit human knowledge which is dispersed across millions of minds. Decentralized decision-making is maximized in market economies with limited government where consumers rule and people enjoy entrepreneurial freedom. It is minimized in centrally planned economies.

ABSTRACT This article is placed within a network of studies that aim to shed light on the complex relationships between the Cold War policies, including the European Recovery Program (ERP) or Marshall Plan and architecture and urbanism. Its main objective is to provide an understanding of how architecture and urban planning, which are related to the Marshall Plan politics, contributed to the formation of national identity in both Greece and Italy. The article emphasizes the interplay between urban planning and politics within this context. Departing from the hypothesis that the Marshall Plan played a crucial role in the reconstruction of Europe after the Second World War, it aims to show that architecture and urbanism were very important in this respect, focusing on two key players regarding the connection between the politics of the Marshall Plan and agendas for urban design: the Greek town planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis and the Italian industrialist Adriano Olivetti.

Abstract This article describes the perception of the guest performance of Porgy and Bess in Vienna in September 1952. While the complex history of the creation and reception of Porgy and Bess in the US has been carefully researched, the reception of the European guest performance has been largely limited to analyses of Robert Breen’s 1950s restaging of the original libretto by DuBose Heyward and George and Ira Gershwin and the embedding of Porgy and Bess in US cultural diplomacy in Germany and Austria during the Cold War, without taking into account the differences between the two countries. The author argues that the media reception of Porgy and Bess in postwar Austria cannot be understood without considering the dominant position of the US occupying power in Austria and the political orientation of the press, which is reflected in the commentaries. The spectacular media success of Porgy and Bess can be seen as a prime example of the successful media and cultural policy of the American occupying power in Austria, which not only promoted American culture but also helped to overcome racial prejudices in an extremely conservative country.