Global Cold War Research Articles

Hegemony by Adaptation: Decolonizing Ghana’s Construction Industry

Abstract This paper discusses competing visions of the decolonization of Ghana’s economy during the first decade of the country’s independence from Britain (1957–1966), and the agency and horizon of choice available to the Ghanaian decision-makers in charge of implementing these visions. It focuses on Ghana’s construction industry, both as an important part of the national economy and as a condition for Ghana’s broader social and economic development in the context of colonial-era path-dependencies and Cold War competition. By taking the vantage point of mid-level administrators and professionals, the paper shows how they negotiated British and Soviet technological offers of construction materials, machinery, and design. In response to Soviet claims about the adaptability of their construction resources to Ghana’s local conditions, the practice of adaptation became for Ghanaian architects and administrators an opportunity to reflect on the needs, means, and objectives of Ghana’s construction industry, and on broader visions of Ghana’s economic and social development. Beyond the specific focus on the construction industry, this paper conceptualizes the centrality of adaptation in enforcing technological hegemony during the period of decolonization, and discusses African agency beyond the registers of extraction and resistance that have dominated scholarship on the global Cold War.

Refuelling the Cold War: The China factor in the United States and Japan’s pursuit of economic détente with the USSR, 1972–1980

Abstract This article evaluates China’s influence on the making and unmaking of economic détente in the 1970s. Utilizing recently declassified documents in Japan, the United States, and China, this article demonstrates that Chinese officials used both diplomatic and commercial means to influence their Japanese and American counterparts to prevent them from developing economic relations with the Soviet Union. During this process, Japanese and American industrialists had to carefully weigh up their participation in governments’ geopolitical schemes when pursuing business opportunities in the two socialist countries. This cautious attitude led to shifting dynamics in economic détente and varying outcomes for development projects. Chinese activism also prompted changes in Japan and the United States when decision-makers sought to benefit from the Sino-Soviet confrontation and maximize their economic and geopolitical gains. This article, therefore, features economic détente as a dynamic, multilateral process and emphasizes that the volatile geopolitics in Northeast Asia played a crucial role in ending détente and redrew the global Cold War to carry stronger economic overtones.

The Sandinista revolution: a global Latin American history; Nicaragua must survive: Sandinista revolutionary diplomacy in the global cold war

The Sandinista revolution: a global Latin American history; Nicaragua must survive: Sandinista revolutionary diplomacy in the global cold war

Review of Nicaragua must survive. Sandinista revolutionary diplomacy in the Global Cold War

Review of Nicaragua must survive. Sandinista revolutionary diplomacy in the Global Cold War

‘More Flags’ Meets Failure: Brazil, the United States, and the Vietnam War

As part of its ‘more flags’ campaign, the United States wanted Brazil to fight in the Vietnam War. No Latin American country mattered more to the U.S. effort. The United States considered leveraging an economic loan, naval vessels, and a prioritization of Brazil in inter-American affairs. Many Brazilian officials liked the idea of a greater military presence in Vietnam. They hoped to gain valuable counterrevolutionary experience in a tropical setting akin to their own, curry favor with the United States, and acquire new military technology. Brazil’s greatest proposal centered on a request for modern naval destroyers that would see Brazil baited into combat. But public opinion, self-imposed restrictions, and key individuals ultimately doomed the prospects for Brazil’s entry. This article helps to further internationalize our understanding of the Vietnam War and situate Latin America within the broader context of the global Cold War. It adds to our understanding of the limits that existed in U.S.-Latin American relations, the U.S. commitment to multi-lateralizing its military campaign in Vietnam, and the political capacity of Brazil’s military dictatorship at home.

Euphrase Kezilahabi’s Kaptula la Marx as a site of cold war contestation and communitas making

This article analyzes Euphrase Kezilahabi’s Kiswahili play Kaptula la Marx, examining its explicit engagement with Cold War politics, ideologies, and aesthetics. Kezilahabi blends the satirical and revolutionary, making the play a site for Cold War contestations and community-building. It is a work of postcolonial disillusionment but also a call to arms. By focusing on the portrayal of the African dictator, particularly his ill-fitting clothes as symbols of power, Kezilahabi satirizes and undermines the dictator’s authority. The play’s rich Cold War references reveal Kezilahabi’s global visions, addressing African politics’ entanglement in the global Cold War and a growing North/South divide. Additionally, the play draws on radical theater traditions, featuring a revolutionary leader figure and interactive elements with the audience that inspire oppressed groups to unite for change.

Intellectuals, expressions, and transnational networking: a case study on Feng Zikai’s overseas cultural practices and religious productions Protection of Life during the Cold War period (1950s–1970s)

ABSTRACT Feng Zikai and Master Kong Hiap in Singapore not only completed and published the masterpiece Protection of Life at the behest of their mentor, Master Hong Yi but also actively contributed to the growth of religions during the P.R.C.. The focus of this paper will be on the Protection of Life, which was completed secretly in socialist China between the 1950s and 1970s, as well as Feng Zikai's overseas cultural practices, to investigate how these helped Feng Zikai to broaden his cultural expressions and preserve his teacher Master Hong Yi's religious thoughts. Through revisiting Feng’s creations and other cultural practices, this paper reveals a competing and conflicting revolutionary structure of feeling, across the 1949 geographical fault line as well as in the global Cold War context. Besides, this paper intends to investigate intellectuals’ living status and social networking critically in socialist China during the mid-twentieth-century.

The Rise and Fall of Israel’s Anti-Apartheid Policy: The Case of Israel’s Relations with the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) During the 1960s

ABSTRACT In contrast to the strained relationship between Israel and South Africa’s anti-apartheid movements in recent decades, the 1960s witnessed Israel actively championing an anti-apartheid stance. From the early 1960s onwards, various anti-apartheid groups sought assistance from Israel in their fight against white supremacy, viewing the Jewish State as a natural ally in their struggle against racism. This led to the formation of a relationship between Israel and the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC), a significant development often overlooked in contemporary historical narratives. Despite its brevity – spanning less than a decade – this alliance offers valuable insights into African nationalism and its interaction with global Cold War dynamics, while also shedding light on Israel’s multifaceted engagement in Africa. This article aims to reconstruct this historical relationship in detail, emphasizing its significance in elucidating the intricate connections between the Arab-Israeli conflict and the racial conflict in South Africa during the 1960s.

A Hub of Anti-Colonialism: Prague's International Organizations in the Transnational Socialist Network and Global Cold War

During the Cold War, Prague was home to several international non-governmental organizations (NGOs) uniting member organizations of different fields (students, journalists, trade unions, communist parties, churches and others). This article aims at a reinterpretation of their history through the lens of decolonization, presenting the NGOs not only as soldiers in the Cold War but also as ‘hubs of anti-colonialism’. It shows the role of the ‘Third World’ delegates in the NGOs and their positioning toward Czechoslovak state socialism. It explores the mechanisms of knowledge production and transfers through media and training programmes.

Refugee Camps as Spaces of the Global Cold War: Cold War activism and humanitarian action within refugee camps in Honduras during the 1980s

ABSTRACT This article looks at refugee camps for Salvadoran and Nicaraguan refugees in Honduras, as a lens to examine the relationship between the Cold War and humanitarianism during the 1980s. While this period, particularly in Central America, saw an intensification of the Cold War, it also saw humanitarian actors assert themselves more forcefully and independently than previously. Even as signs of a more independent humanitarian system were beginning to emerge however, the actors within that system were unable to avoid the continuing influence of theCold War context. This article demonstrates how historical analysis of refugee camps has a relevance outside of refugee studies and the history of humanitarianism.

Introducing Remembrances of Tricontinental Pasts: Narratives and Artefacts of Global Cold War Social Movements

Introducing Remembrances of Tricontinental Pasts: Narratives and Artefacts of Global Cold War Social Movements

The Politics and Aesthetics of Liberation: Revolution and Its Aftermath in Contemporary Artistic Practice from and about Lusophone Africa

Abstract This essay explores the ways in which artistic practices have revisited histories and memories of anti-colonial struggle, socialist revolution, and decolonization in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Portugal, while also addressing apartheid South Africa and the global Cold War. The cartography drawn here follows the histories and geographies of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid friendship without losing sight of several forms of imperialism, old and new. This essay examines the archival and historiographical potential of contemporary art in remembering histories of revolution and decolonization, notably those pertaining to cultural production and especially film, in the globalized, neoliberal present. My case studies are distinct but related works by Ângela Ferreira (Mozambique, 1958), Filipa César (Portugal, 1975), and Kiluanji Kia Henda (Angola, 1979), which include installation, video, photography, and performance for the camera. What sort of insights do the archival imaginations of pasts, presents and futures at play in these works offer? And how far can the ethics and politics of their aesthetics go?

Review: World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War, by Masha Salazkina

Review: <i>World Socialist Cinema: Alliances, Affinities, and Solidarities in the Global Cold War</i>, by Masha Salazkina

Writing in solidarity: Gu Cangwu, Cultural Revolution, Cold War

ABSTRACT This article will shed light on the remarkable yet overlooked influence of the Cultural Revolution on renowned Hong Kong writer Gu Cangwu during the Cold War period. Through scrutinizing his untapped works in the 1970s, the article will argue that Gu Cangwu incorporated a Communist perspective in his observations of pivotal local, national, and global events in his poems and writings. Gu’s untapped works show his attempts to use Cultural Revolution ideology and Chinese nationalism as a source of resistance to British colonialism amid Hong Kong’s Defending Diaoyu Island Movement in 1971, a movement in which international recognition of Communist China at the United Nation sparked Gu’s nationalistic fervor and encouraged him to embrace critical realism. The article also puts Gu’s sympathetic portrayals of the Cultural Revolution and Vietnam War in juxtaposition with his decadent narratives of the 1972 Hong Kong landslides, showing that his effort to build local solidarity with Chinese nationals and the people suffering in the global conflict of the Cold War was based on a stance in opposition to capitalist-imperialist-colonial aggression. More significantly, transcending the simplistic Cold War binary between communist totalitarianism versus liberal capitalism and foregrounding the specific experience of the Cold War in the Hong Kong context, the case of Gu Cangwu demonstrates that the production of Hong Kong literature in the 1970s occurred at the intersection between local ideological contestation and global Cold War tensions.

Forging an Anti-Bandung

During the course of the Cold War, Saudi Arabia cultivated close relations with the anti-communist states of East Asia. This development, this article argues, was driven by the shared positional marginality experienced by these actors vis-à-vis the Third World bloc. Unable to participate in the postcolonial possibilities unleashed in the mid-twentieth century, these states drew upon each other's visions of pan-Islamism and anti-communism to forge an “anti-Bandung.” As threats from the global Left intensified by the late 1960s, their reactionary solidarity transformed into an informal yet highly strategic alliance that lasted until the end of the global Cold War. This article calls for a broader conceptualization of inter-Asian and Afro-Asian solidarities that incorporates the narratives and activities of the non-Western Right and provides a new reading of Cold War Saudi Arabia that considers its complicated entanglements with Asia-centric anti-communist internationalism.

Introduction

This introduction to the special section “Inter-Asian Cold War Linkages” shows how an interdisciplinary group of ten scholars take up the understudied Cold War linkages between the Middle East, on the one hand, and East and South Asia on the other. They examine how the inter-Asian lens allows us to rethink the history of the twentieth-century Middle East. Central to such rethinking is the destabilization of some of the dichotomous categories that were normalized during the Cold War and that have greatly shaped how we view culture, economy, politics, and society. These include the categories of state/nonstate, national/transnational, revolution/counterrevolution, religion/secularism, and private/public. Instead of taking these dualities for granted, the scholars here foreground the blurred and dialectical relationship between them, utilizing the Middle East as a site of critical analysis, learning, and theorizing and putting its study in conversation with the more Asia-centric and transnationally attuned literatures of the global Cold War.4 In the process, alternative genealogies and relationalities of the Middle East emerge, ones that place the Middle East in the world rather than prioritize how “the world” has acted on the Middle East, usually as a periphery or site of intervention. Doing so brings into view new ways, periodizations, and scales of studying the global Middle East in general and the Cold War in particular.

‘Satrah Din, Satrah Saal’: Media, Propaganda and Virtual Warfare in the India-Pakistan War of 1965

The 1965 India-Pakistan War, also known as the Second Kashmir War or the ‘Seventeen-Day War’, is usually understood through the lens of military history, regional geopolitics and the long-standing ‘Kashmir question’. This article looks instead to the construction of social and political meaning around the conflict through an examination of the war’s mediatisation in Pakistan. An analysis of different media forms—including radio broadcasts, news dailies, press photography and popular poetry—reveals how a war imaginary was shaped by both domestic crises and global ideological dissension, extending beyond the notion of a timeless Indo-Pak enmity. Taking place at a pivotal moment in the global Cold War, public narratives were built upon not only state agendas but also popular concerns regarding militarism, sovereignty and the politics of aid. These framings ultimately illustrate the deeper entanglements that exist between war, media and mass publics—extending beyond the goals of wartime propaganda alone to produce new national imaginaries and collective subjectivities.

Questionable Allies: British Collaboration with Apartheid South Africa, 1960–90

From 1960, as the horrors of the apartheid system in South Africa were steadily revealed to the world, the international community turned against a country once seen as a bastion of peace and prosperity on the African continent. The United Nations debated the imposition of comprehensive sanctions against South Africa, yet the USA, France, and Britain stood against such a drastic measure. Though the levers of government would change hands between Labour and Conservative Prime Ministers, Britain’s policy in opposing sanctions against South Africa from 1960 to the final fall of apartheid in 1994 would steadfastly remain. This article deploys archival material to examine the motivations behind this British policy, and highlights three key factors: anxiety about the potential impact of sanctions on Britain itself; the context of the global Cold War; and British aversion to what were perceived as the ANC’s ‘terrorist’ actions. These were the motivations behind Britain’s continued trade and collaboration with South Africa throughout the period of apartheid. The archival sources dealing with the background to this policy starkly reveal the darker legacies of colonialism that continued to shape British policies and the attitudes of those at the highest levels of British government over these years.

Afro-Asian resonances: Staging the Congo Crisis in 1960s’ Chinese theatre

AbstractIn the first half of the 1960s China witnessed an unprecedented florescence of theatrical works on Third World decolonization, which aimed to disseminate the ideology of Maoist internationalism and cultivate transnational and interracial solidarity among the Chinese public. Existing scholarship on Maoist internationalist theatre tends to understand the phenomenon as the domestication of Third World decolonization for China’s political ends. This article, by focusing on the heterogeneous processes of production, adaptation, and reception, illuminates the practical and epistemological challenges of representing an internationalist subject, the imperfect performance of foreign culture and history, and the porous process of meaning-making for Chinese performers and audiences. Using previously untapped historical materials, such as performance programmes, personal recollections, and newspapers, this article explores the staging of the Congo Crisis (1960–1965)—a widely mediated international event in Maoist China and a central conflict in the global Cold War—in the spoken drama War Drums on the Equator (1965), its many local variations, and a dance drama adaptation, The Raging Congo River (1965). By mediating and enacting ‘embodied and affective knowledge’ about Congo, these theatrical works made the political motif of internationalist solidarity into sonorous and kinaesthetic artefacts that engendered plural meanings to Chinese performers and audiences. This article further reveals flawed perceptions, processes of corrections, and the epistemological limitations in the performance of the Congo Crisis in Maoist China.

Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War by Jayita Sarkar (review)

Ploughshares and Swords: India's Nuclear Program in the Global Cold War by Jayita Sarkar (review)