War Policy Research Articles

Great Britain and the Romanian territorial concessions in Dobrogea and Transylvania (1940)

This study explores, based on Romanian and British diplomatic sources, some aspects of the international context in which Romania ceded to Hungary part of the historical region of Transylvania, and to Bulgaria - part of the historical region of Dobrogea. The British perspective on the Romanian-German, Romanian-Soviet, Romanian-Hungarian, and Romanian-Bulgarian relations was analyzed in the context of those territorial concessions, as well as the way in which this perspective, in turn, was influenced by the evolution of Romanian-British and Soviet-British relations in the context of British war policy - in general, and in south-eastern Europe - in particular.

Covering the ‘Scottish position adequately’: Planning Civil Defence in Post-war Scotland, 1948–59

Abstract This article brings together the histories of post-war Scottish policymaking, local civil defence governance, and the British security state in the first decade of the Cold War, 1948–59. The article addresses three themes: organizational responsibility, evacuation and shelter, and nuclear radiation to show that Scottish cultural, social, and political contexts were distinct from the English precedents set by Whitehall. In the context of developing Cold War security measures, and regional differences, the article argues that Scottish policy-makers negotiated independence over early civil defence planning, while exercising a conciliatory relationship with the central government. Issues raised around regionality posed important questions in Whitehall about the implementation of nuclear era civil defence nationwide. In assessing how this occurred the article augments the debate around Scottish autonomy and administrative distinction in the post-war era and makes a wider contribution to understandings of civil defence cultures in Britain’s Cold War. While studies of civil defence have provided important context to the history of the British Cold War state, local responses to such policy have not been adequately interrogated. This study shows that civil defence is not only an invaluable window onto local government perceptions of Cold War policy but is also a lens onto regional expressions of Second World War memory, post-war recovery, political power, and social organization.

'Kilmalough won't know itself': William Trevor's 'The Ballroom of Romance' as Cold War Fiction

Despite the recent attention of historians to the influence of Cold War politics in and on Ireland, literary scholarship has been more reticent when it comes to reading mid-century Irish writing as part of a broader international field of Cold War fiction. While some work has been conducted to situate individual writers, such as Samuel Beckett and John Banville, within an international political milieu, this essay proposes that the Cold War had a much broader impact on Irish writing than has previously been considered. This essay wades into the possibilities of this proposed area of interest through a reading of the Cold War political undercurrents moving within William Trevor’s 1972 short story ‘The Ballroom of Romance’. The story of Bridie’s disappointing evening in the eponymous dancehall has largely been read as an examination of rural disillusionment within an Ireland facing economic and cultural stagnation. Yet American influence suffuses the story. On the one hand, that influence can be felt in the presence of American cultural importation, or ‘soft power’; on the other hand, that influence can be found in the allusions to the shift in Irish economic policy in the mid-twentieth century away from protectionism and towards foreign investment. The most prominent dream amongst the locals who gather at the Ballroom of Romance – the rumours of American investment in a concrete factory in Kilmalough – places Trevor’s story firmly within the politics of global capitalism at the height of the Cold War in the early 1970s. Recognising that ‘Americanisation’ is bound up with Cold War policy affords the opportunity to read the dreams of rural Ireland within the context of global politics – and the failure of these dreams suggests that the reach of Trevor’s criticism need not necessarily be limited to boundaries of county and nation.

The Middle Belt Factor in the Nigeria-Biafra War, 1967–1975

Abstract The Middle Belt factor in the Nigeria-Biafra War is a new perspective in Nigerian historical scholarship. The intra-elite competition for power in the Middle Belt resulted in the Tiv revolts of the early 1960s which eroded the legitimacy of Nigeria’s post-independence government. This study is a knowledge-building effort to analyse how the pendulum of the Middle Belt politics from 1967–1975 factored the Zone’s participation in the Nigeria-Biafra War, its influence in the war-time policies, as well as the post-war policies. The thrust of this study, therefore, is to demonstrate how the Middle Belt politics shaped the success of the war and the formulation of war policies during, and after the war in Nigeria. The argument from this perspective is that the crises in the Zone precipitated the coup and subsequent events that snowballed into the war, and their cumulative contributions to the end of the war.

The Impact of the Cold War on the Afghan Society

The article is devoted to the policies of the global players of the Cold War using the example of Afghanistan. Noting the features of the Afghan policy of the Cold War, the author highlighted the key content of the very concept of the Cold War, political events in Afghanistan, internal and external challenges, ethnic problems and the problem of women during the Cold War. The influence of geopolitical processes on the development, internal and external interests of Afghan society in the 20th century, the social, economic and political consequences of the Cold War, features of the development of the political system and political culture of Afghanistan, ethnic problems in Afghan public discourse, etc. are considered. The author concludes that “The Cold War of the superpowers had a direct impact on internal political developments in Afghanistan, where parties and public organizations emerged as political structures with secular or Islamic ideology. The author comes to the conclusion that the internal political unity of Afghan society was not ensured for the reason that the Afghan elite was unable to form an ideology expressing national unity, and its individual parts preferred to serve the interests of one or another player without supporting the national interests of Afghanistan.The article was prepared according to the International Academic Mobility Program, organized by the National Research Institute of the Communications Development (Moscow) for young scientists from foreign countries.

Drug War Dragnet

This paper examines the multilayered dynamics behind the drivers of overdose deaths, criminal legal-system involvement, and the drug war infiltration of people’s everyday lives—especially for people under community supervision. While incarceration receives more media and academic attention because of its particular cruelty, almost twice as many people—3.7 million, or one in every sixty-nine U.S. adults—are under community supervision. Probation and parole are commonly understood as “alternatives to incarceration” or “lenient sentences,” but people on supervision must endure constant monitoring, perpetually under the threat of incarceration. Drug war policies and practices have profoundly shaped probation and parole. Regardless of someone’s original sentence, abstinence from drugs, drug testing, submission to warrantless searches, and court-ordered treatment are routine features of supervision. The putative goal of community supervision is to ensure successful reintegration; yet drug war surveillance enacts extensive barriers, while not reducing drug use or drug-related harms like overdose. In order to ensure health, financial security, and overall well-being of those under supervision, policymakers, probation and parole officers, clinicians, service providers, and researchers must work to identify and remove barriers to care, including routine drug testing, substandard or forced substance use disorder treatment, and poor-quality services and support.

HOW DID THE TET OFFENSIVE SERVE AS A PIVOTAL MOMENT THAT ALTERED THE COURSE OF THE VIETNAM WAR FOR THE UNITED STATES?

The Tet Offensive of 1968 stands as a watershed moment in the Vietnam War which compelled the United States to reconsider and alter its strategy. By analyzing the objectives, planning and execution of the offensive, this paper aims to shed light on how the Tet Offensive was successful in exploiting and exposing the gap between the official narratives and on-the-ground realities in America, which would in turn affect subsequent war policy decisions. Moreover, this paper examines how the Tet Offensive was significant in serving as a pivotal moment that altered the course of the war for the United States due to its role in influencing American public opinion, military strategies, political dynamics as well as the relationship between the U.S and South Vietnam.

The Ukraine War and nuclear sharing in NATO

Abstract Russian nuclear sabre-rattling following the 2022 invasion of Ukraine has reinvigorated debates over NATO deterrence. One of its key components—nuclear sharing—has been in place since September 1954, but support for it within the alliance has varied over time. Indeed, although Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey host American gravity bombs on their territory, there were fears during the 2010s that some of them would follow Canada, Greece and the United Kingdom's example and withdraw from the scheme. By examining why and how NATO's nuclear-sharing arrangements have changed since inception, we argue that they consistently serve deterrence, signalling, alliance cohesion and burden-sharing goals, which make them hard to dismantle. However, we also demonstrate, through our survey of post-Cold War policies, official statements and public debates, that there is more room in a low threat environment for political contestation within host states. Accordingly, nuclear sharing requires a high threat environment to escape domestic opposition, which effectively returned in 2022, cementing the nuclear status quo.

Unwriting the Future: Russell Hoban’s Stage Adaptation of Riddley Walker

This article contextualizes and analyses the text of Russell Hoban’s still unpublished 1986 stage adaptation of his prominent dystopian science fiction novel Riddley Walker (1980) and offers some directorial reflections on the practice of staging it. Hoban’s play and protagonist introduce the audience to their potential to avert an apocalyptic post-nuclear timeline, or future anterior (that which will have been). The eponymous Riddley acts as an emissary from this possible future, addressing the audience directly in order to present and stimulate speculation into how past and present events may emerge in different possibilities and contingent futures. Riddley has been born into a dystopian society where travelling puppet shows are deployed by the government as “truth weapons” to maintain a neo-religious and triumphalist interpretation of an American war policy that has had disastrous global consequences. An odyssey of discovery leads him to take up the trappings of this hegemonic culture industry and subvert its political foreclosures by reintroducing (anew) the anarchic figure of Mr Punch. In ways that anticipate more recent “multiversal” fictional writings and films, which present predictive futures and fractal possibilities, Hoban’s play in production presents the mapping of a future timeline as both precarious and malleable in such a way as to propose a dynamic contingency.

Reclaiming the Korean War Minor: Beyond a Politics of Childhood Innocence

Abstract: This essay employs the "Korean War minor" as a methodological lens to demonstrate the need for more Asian Americanist critique at the intersection of American childhood studies and empire studies. While scholars have shown how children and children's culture were central to advancing US Cold War policy at home and abroad, this body of research largely neglects to interrogate the centrality of whiteness to dominant constructions of children/childhood. Attending to childhood as a technology of racist, patriarchal, imperial power, I elucidate how the biopolitics of the Korean War produce juvenile Asian-raced and gendered bodies at the precarious boundaries of childhood, as not quite children but, rather, childlike . I grapple, in particular, with how to reclaim the "girl" from US military archives, as the rubric of the "boy-mascot" and "camptown woman" overdetermine and constrain how the girl is allowed to come into view. I develop and enact this decolonial practice of reclaiming the Korean War minor through an analysis of Nora Okja Keller's Fox Girl , a novel that is particularly invested in narrating the camptown girl into being. Fox Girl directs attention to the limits of a politics of childhood innocence and prompts a generative reconceptualization of childhood in relation to justice.

Between victory and peace: Unravelling the paradox of hope in intractable conflicts.

Previous research on group-based hope has predominantly focused on positive intergroup outcomes, such as peace and harmony. In this paper, we demonstrate that hope experienced towards group-centric political outcomes, such as a victory in a conflict and defeating the enemy, can be detrimental to peace. In Study 1, conducted among Israeli Jews, hope for victory over the Palestinians was uniquely associated with more support for extreme war policies, whereas hope for peace generally showed the opposite associations. In Study 2, we replicated these results among Muslim Pakistanis regarding the Pakistan-India dispute. Notably, in both Studies 1 and 2, only hope for victory significantly predicted personal violent extremist intentions. In Study 3, conducted with a representative sample of Israeli Jews, we found three latent profiles of hope: victory hopers, peace hopers, and dual hopers (hoping for both peace and victory). Finally, in preregistered Study 4, we longitudinally investigated how hopes for victory and peace changed from a relatively calm period in 2021 to the Israel-Hamas War of 2023, utilizing a Bivariate Latent Change Score analysis. Increases in hope for victory during the highly intense war explained the increase in support for violence. We discuss implications, limitations, and directions for future research.

The Curtis Report as a critical juncture in Canadian urbanism

ABSTRACT Canada's post-Second World War policies on urbanism were first outlined in an obscure government document – the 1944 report of the Subcommittee on Housing and Community Planning of the federal government's Advisory Committee on Reconstruction (known colloquially as the ‘Curtis Report’). This article uses the tools of Historical Institutionalism and extensive archival research to analyse the Curtis Report. It examines antecedent conditions in the Depression and war; permissive conditions during the wartime housing crisis; the actors and choice of options at the critical juncture; the reactions during implementation and the path-dependent municipal planning and suburbanization outcomes of the report. The Curtis Report is identified as a critical juncture for major changes in housing and community planning that set Canada on a different course than the UK or the USA.

ULUSLARARASI GÖÇ HAREKETLERİ ÇERÇEVESİNDE İNSAN HAKLARI VE İNSANİ GÜVENLİK KAVRAMI

Security has been evaluated within the framework of state-centered and military strategies until recently. However, new developments that emerged in the 1990s have led to a change in the classical understanding of security. The Human Development Report published by the United Nations in 1994 laid the groundwork for a new paradigm regarding human security. Considering that the concept of "security" has been narrowly interpreted for a long time, this report has been an indicator of the change in the classical understanding of security.
 Nowadays, the subject-based security understanding, which focuses on the individual, has come to the forefront. In particular, the increase in international migration movements has brought about a new area of discussion on security. As a result of international migration movements, human security has become one of the global world problems. Similarly, international human rights norms are related to the concept of human security. Therefore, understanding the connections between human rights and human security is of great importance in the contemporary world. For this purpose, the relationship between new security areas and the concept of human security, the changes in the understanding of security with international migration movements, and the processes of this change affecting human rights are emphasized in the study. It is also emphasized that human rights violations are directly related to the understanding of human security. When comprehensively evaluated, human security is related to the basic needs and human identity that affect individuals' living spaces. Threats to these areas also mean a threat to fundamental rights and freedoms. In addition, human mobility resulting from war policies leads to the emergence of the source problem. People are deprived of basic needs such as housing, food, and health. As a result, a threat to human security arises, and global problems increase this threat. In this context, international migration movements, human security, and human rights are being reinterpreted.

Jimmy Carter's cold war legacy

AbstractJimmy Carter's presidency lasted only one term before Ronald Reagan defeated him in 1980. Since then, scholars have debated—and many have maligned—Carter's legacy, especially his foreign policy efforts. The criticism of Jimmy Carter's foreign policies seems particularly mistaken when it comes to the Cold War. With the counsel of his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter exposed Soviet weaknesses, which included their global influence, economy, and record on human rights. Declassified government documents, census data, and the reflections of former policymakers and government insiders support a revised view of Carter's Cold War policies. The president's Soviet policies helped exacerbate the Soviets' domestic and international troubles, and were far more effective than earlier critics claimed in helping to end the Cold War and contributing to the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

Amnesty International’s Human Rights Campaigns and Transnational Democracy in South Korea in the 1970s

This article examines the intersection between Amnesty International(AI)’s global human rights expansion policy and South Korea’s pro-democracy movements in the 1970s. It argues that local pro-democracy actors vernacularized and mobilized AI’s concept of and global campaign for prisoners of conscience, thereby transforming their struggle into a transnational movement. In making this argument, the article highlights a multi-directional conflict over the meaning and uses of human rights between local and international actors. Against the backdrop of seeking to establish a local chapter of AI, pro-democracy actors challenged AI’s political neutrality policy by advocating for South Korean political prisoners as well as for prisoners in other countries; they also challenged the distinction that AI drew between political prisoners and prisoners of conscience. Finding the UN unresponsive to their appeals and recognizing the role of US Cold War policy in buttressing Park Chunghee’s authoritative regime, South Korean pro-democracy actors, acting in concert with liberal internationalists in the US Congress, shifted the primary stage for addressing international human rights abuses from the United Nations to the US Congress. This shift placed the spotlight on US foreign policies that facilitated the South Korean government’s human rights abuses, which in turn led both the US and South Korean government to devise counteractive human rights campaigns that drew on humanitarian and anti-communist rhetoric to preserve the status quo.

A Causal Analysis of the Promotion of Abstract Expressionism: On the Foreign Policy of the United States

It is well known that during the Cold War the United States focused on the promotion of Abstract Expressionism and regarded it as a powerful weapon for the improvement of its cultural status and capacity to compete with the USSR. An analysis of this phenomenon – its causes, characteristics, and effects – would be incomplete without studying the foreign policy efforts of that time and the special traits of Abstract Expressionism’s artistic influence. It can be concluded that the rise of Abstract Expressionism after the Second World War was aligned with the goals of American policy instructions and outward cultural promotion during the Cold War. In turn, the powerful implementation of foreign policy actively enhanced the international influence of American Abstract Expressionism during that historical period. This paper undertakes an analysis of the causes for Abstract Expressionism’s successful promotion, through the study of abundant first-hand literature and documents, historical analysis as well as complex analysis. The use of case studies is also applied to further explain the phenomenon from the perspective of American foreign policy in the Cold War.

Soft Power, Modernization, and Security: US Educational Foreign Policy Toward Authoritarian Spain in the Cold War

AbstractCold War strategic priorities led the United States to establish an enduring military alliance with General Francisco Franco's dictatorship in Spain between 1953 and 1975. This article examines the educational diplomacy carried out by the US government during the 1960s and early 1970s to foster Spain's stable modernization through the training of national development elites and the dissemination of US educational ideas. The work surveys US educational, informational, and cultural programs aimed at shaping an educational framework conducive to the expansion and legitimization of a US-oriented socioeconomic liberalization in Spain. On the one hand, this US soft power strategy sought to attract those groups who could play an important role in the capitalist modernization of the educational and economic structures of the Iberian country. On the other hand, it sought to reduce the identification of the United States with Franco's dictatorship and to link the image of the American superpower to the hopes for progress of the Spanish people. All of this was pursued in order to preserve US defensive interests in Spain. The piece also discusses US assistance to the crucial 1970 Spanish General Education Law, which allows us to explore how the US ideology of development and education was received by Spanish educational audiences. Thus, by delving deeper into the intersection between cultural diplomacy, international development, and the history of education, we aim to contribute to the integration of education into the histories of modernization and to deepen our understanding of US educational foreign policy in the Cold War.

THE POSITION OF INTERNATIONAL LAW AND INTERNATIONAL ORGANIZATIONS ON WARS IN INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS

The problem that the research deals with focuses on the fact that war is an act that contradicts the principles of the United Nations, which prohibit aggression and the use of force in international relations.
 The research aims to discuss the position of international law on resorting to war, in managing relations between states.
 The research concluded that the policies of the major powers tend to try to adapt the policies of war, in a way that does not contradict the position of international law, by developing new generations of wars, which do not entail responsibility on the state.

Mackinder's “heartland” – legitimation of US foreign policy in World War II and the Cold War of the 1950s

Abstract. The British geographer Halford J. Mackinder developed two different concepts of a dystopian new global order. The first, developed in 1904 and known as the pivot area concept, was adopted by German geopolitician Karl Haushofer in the 1920s. The second, developed in 1919, was named the heartland theory and was adopted in Great Britain and the USA. Haushofer reversed the dystopian vision of the pivot area concept into a utopian concept for German world power. Due to Haushofer's adaptation, interest in Mackinder's theories rose in the USA in the 1940s. Within the process of adaptation in the USA, both concepts were intertwined, resulting in the perception of the two as a monolithic bloc. Through this multi-layered process of intercontinental reception and adaptation in Germany and the USA, the term “heartland” became a generic spatial denomination detached from the geographical region it originally prescribed, integrable with various geopolitical concepts as the centre of an imagined world order. The reduction of complexity of the theory through the translation of text into maps led to its popularization among the US public during the 1940s and 1950s. Mackinder himself laid out the flexibility of the theory's interpretive possibilities by reflexively revising the theory and adapting it to the history of events over the course of the first half of the 20th century itself. In consequence, the generic spatial denomination “heartland” and the associated adopted theory served as a geopolitical argument for the strategic narrative legitimizing US foreign policy in World War II and during the Cold War.

U.S. Cold War Policy and the Italian Far-Right: The Nixon Administration, Republican Party Operatives, and the Borghese Coup Plot of 1970

Abstract The Nixon administration's attempt to promote a military coup in Chile after the election of a far-left president in September 1970 is a well-documented example of U.S. officials’ willingness do whatever was needed to curtail Soviet influence in the Third World. Drawing on declassified White House documents and records of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, this article examines the parallel but largely unknown story of U.S. dealings with right-wing extremists in one of the founding members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Italy, at around that same time. In December 1970, far-right activists in Italy staged an abortive coup that was intended to prevent further gains by Italy's leftist parties. The article draws on new and widely forgotten sources to examine the background and involvement of two private U.S. operatives for the Republican Party who were closely aligned with senior coup plotters in Italy. Their involvement with Italian neo-fascists should raise concerns about the dangers of private meddling in foreign policy and the potential for private actors to create misperceptions about critical U.S. government policies.