Cold War Internationalisms of/in the Decolonized World
In recent decades, Cold War historiography has paid growing attention to the autonomy and agency of the players beyond the US-Soviet dichotomy. In the wake of Westad’s seminal The Global Cold War (2005), scholars have increasingly explored the episodes, events, and institutions that demonstrate the agency of the Global South. From the Bandung Conference to Pan-African networks, the so-called Third World assumes a pivotal role in the latest historiographies. Newly independent states, among others, are recast as actors in their own right and not mere pawns in a game played by two superpowers.
Cold War Internationalisms of/in the Decolonizing World advances this recentering of the narrative by focusing on decolonizing or newly independent states, along with related actors, as the makers and breakers of the Cold War world order. This special issue thus seeks to reframe the Cold War from the standpoint of Latin American, Middle Eastern, African, or Asian actors – where the US and Soviet Union appear not as the protagonists but as the dependent variables of decolonial world-making.
Programme DAY 1
Opening 10:30
10:45-12:15 - Panel 1 Militant Worlds and Connections
Chair: Alp Yenen, Leiden
- Yasmina Martin, (Yale) – “Haven of Refugees?”: Exile, Pan-Africanism, and Dueling Nationalism(s) in 1960s Tanzania
- Eraldo Souza dos Santos, (Sorbonne) – “Goa Must Be Kept Out of Cold War!” Tristão de Bragança Cunha, Goan Nationalism, and Anticolonial Worldmaking
- Deniz Cenk Demir, (Stanford) – An Overlooked Chapter in International(ist) Solidarity?: Revolutionary Foreign Fighters from Turkey in Palestine, 1960s-1980s
13:30-15:15 - Panel 2 Europe and Global South
Chair: Severyan Dyakonov (New York University)
- Nicholas Hafner, (IHEID) – The Geneva Africa Institute: Decolonization, Third World Solidarity and an Early Critique of Development During the Long Sixties
- Rita Narra, (IHC-NOVA FCSH) – Third-Worldism in the 1974-75 Portuguese Revolution
- Anne Marie Kroupova, (Vienna) – Brushes Across Curtains: Foreign Art Students in Czechoslovakia as Diplomatic Ambassadors in the Long Sixties
- Elizabeth Bishop (Texas State) - Amateur Ethnography and Orientalism as Decolonial Worldmaking (Online)
15:30 - 16:30 - Keynote speaker: Mark Kramer (Harvard University, Director of Cold War Studies Project)
Programme DAY 2
10:00 - 11:45 - Panel 3 Spreading the Revolution, Stopping the Revolution
Chair: Aidan Russell, IHEID
- Sorcha Thomson, (Birkbeck) – Tricontinentalism: A Praxis and its Limits, from Cuba to Palestine
- Isa Blumi, (Stockholm) – National Liberation, World Revolution, Anti-Colonial Networks or Globalization by War: Egypt’s Cold War campaign in Yemen and its Republican legacy 1958-1978
- Emily Snyder, (Cambridge) – Miskitu Anti-Colonial Politics, Indigenous Internationalism, and the Sandinista Revolution
- Linh Vu, (Arizona State) – Cold War Co-Prosperity Sphere: Science and Culture Exchange between Taiwan and South Vietnam in the 1960s (Online)
13:00-14:30 - Global South Diplomacies
Chair: Isa Blumi, (Stockholm)
- Darina Macková, (Bratislava) – The Group of 77: Tricontinental diplomacy for Third World development.
- Robert Steele, (Austrian Academy of Sciences) – Visions of Islamic Solidarity during the Cold War: The Rabat Summit Conference of 1969
- Antoni Grześczyk, (Warsaw) – Economists of Kalecki’s circle on Nehruvian planning: a case of heterodox approach to modernization
