• Timeline: October 2013 - December 2017
• Funding organisation: Swiss National Science Foundation

Abstract

The dominant historiography of the last decades of the Cold War has depicted the 1970s as a period of Western decline and retreat. In contrast, the 1980s witnessed the ‘reaction’ of the West that ultimately led to the crumbling of the Soviet Union and the beginning of the post-Cold War era of Western primacy. This research project aims to challenge these views in three distinct but interconnected ways: (1) By reassessing major Western interventionist policies during the second half of the 1970s and asking whether the sense of pervasive decline and crisis reflected reality; (2) By connecting the policies of the 1980s to those of the previous years in order to unveil continuities in Western interventionism in key strategic areas of the Third World; (3) By evaluating the extent to which Western interventions in the 'arc of crisis' and Africa shaped the international system and set the stage for the post-Cold War era. The project will mainly draw on recently declassified documents from the Western countries engaged in the region (US, France and Great Britain). The project will result in three monographs, a series of journal articles, and two workshops and a final conference. In addition to shedding light on the historiographical controversies, the project’s findings will make an important contribution to the understanding of the complex inter-relationship between the Western world and areas of the ‘global south’.