The Soviet Union and Third World National Liberation Movements: The Soviet Role (1987)

Abstract The USSR and Socialist states played a crucial and still largely underappreciated role in the re-negotiation of international humanitarian law (IHL) in 1949 and 1977. Drawing on new multi-archival research, I demonstrate that the support of the Soviet Union and Socialist Bloc states was essential to the negotiation of key legal achievements with regard to non-traditional conflict forms and actors, including rules on internal conflicts, national liberation war, and irregular fighters. They exerted influence chiefly through concerted action to create or side with majority coalitions alongside neutral Western or Third World countries, forcing their principal Western foes to accept rules they found undesirable. Yet Soviet-Western interactions in the re-making of IHL were not simply confrontational. In the 1970s, as Cold War hostilities cooled, East and West engaged in partial backdoor cooperativeness, leading to critical features of the Additional Protocols I and II, including rules for the protection of civilians and IHL oversight.

Download Full-text

Foreign Policy Aspects of the National Liberation Struggle and the Geostrategic Place of the Ukrainian State in the Concept of the OUN-B

Diplomatic Ukraine ◽

10.37837/2707-7683-2021-2 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 51-70

Author(s):

Pavlo Hai-Nyzhnyk

Keyword(s):

Foreign Policy ◽

World War Ii ◽

Cold War ◽

Soviet Union ◽

National Liberation ◽

Eastern Front ◽

The Soviet Union ◽

Liberation Movements ◽

Balance Of Forces ◽

The Cold War

The article deals with the foreign policy aspects in the ideological concept of Stepan Bandera’s Organisation of Ukrainian Nationatists (OUN-B) during the period from the change of position and balance of forces in the Eastern Front of World War II in 1943 and its transformation during the following postwar decades until the eve of the restoration of Ukraine’s independence. The author examines the OUN’s geopolitical calculations for an armed confrontation between the USSR, on the one hand, and the allied United States and Great Britain, on the other; the beginning of the search for ways of the organisation’s cooperation with Western democracies; its attitude to the threat of a nuclear war, etc. Also analysed is the OUN-B leadership’s vision of the geostrategic place of the future Ukrainian state in the international arena and, in particular, in the post-Soviet space and on the map of Central and Eastern Europe. The article sheds light on the vision of the role and place of independent Ukraine in international politics, particularly with respect to possible military and political blocs, Ukraine’s role in the United Nations, its attitude to the prospect of united Europe, the war in Afghanistan, national liberation movements and the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the restoration of Ukraine’s state independence, and its place in the post-Soviet and European space. By way of conclusion, the author argues that the Cold War turned out to be helpful in the dissolution of the Soviet Union and allowed Ukraine to restore its national independence in 1991. Nonetheless, the modern national security agenda of Ukraine and the need for the world’s peace and balance necessitate curbing the imperialist, bellicose, and culpably terrorist actions and intents of Russia, the successor of the USSR. Keywords: OUN-B, Cold War, geopolitics, national liberation movements.

Download Full-text