Cold Wars: Asia, The Middle East, Europe

In 2005 The Global Cold War illustrated how the ideological struggle between Capitalism and Socialism influenced the social and political transformations far away from the developed world and advocated a shift in the research away from the superpowers. A few years later the Cambridge History of the Cold War integrated the suggestions for more global topics / diverse approaches thus setting the tone for the following decade. Fifteen years after Westad’s pivotal book and ten years after the CHCW, some rebalance has taken place. The Soviet Union and United States have left space to secondary actors while an increasing number of works have embraced a global dimension addressing more classical as well as less obvious actors and phenomena. Europe has benefitted from this trend to attract coherent scholarship on how the systemic confrontation affected, and blended into, changes in political economy and society. The Cultural Cold War has emerged as a very prolific field, capable of extending a sort of rétro fascination to films, literature, cultural exchanges of those times and also pioneering the exploration of specific regions.