The Cold War battle over global news in East Africa: decolonization, the free flow of information, and the media business, 1960–1980

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-356 ◽  
Author(s):  
James R. Brennan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International News ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Political Views ◽  
News Agencies ◽  
The Media ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Free Flow Of Information

AbstractThis article examines the news business in Africa during decolonization. While UNESCO stimulated enormous discussion about creating independent ‘third world’ alternatives for news exchange, African countries such as Kenya and Tanzania sought to secure informational sovereignty by placing international news agencies within their control. Reuters and other international news agencies, in turn, adapted to decolonization by reinventing themselves as companies working to assist new nation-states. In the subsequent contest over news distribution, the Cold War, and inter-agency competition, Africa became a battleground for disputes between Reuters’ capitalist vision of news as a commercial product and UNESCO's political conception of news. Ironically, decolonization enabled Reuters to gain greater control over information supply across Africa, because African leaders viewed the capitalist model of news as better suited to their diplomatic goals and political views.

Shining Futures, Imminent Dangers

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (6) ◽  
pp. 711-724
Author(s):  
Henk Schulte Nordholt
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Southeast Asian ◽  
Authoritarian Regimes ◽  
Mass Violence ◽  
Nation States ◽  
New Nation ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Impact

After a brief period of optimism that accompanied the emergence of new nation-states, Southeast Asian politics experienced the impact of the Cold War which turned the region into a hotbed of mass violence. An estimated number of seven million people lost their lives, while fragile democracies were replaced by authoritarian regimes, postponing further democratization to the end of the 20th century.

National Security and Public Anxiety: Our Changing Perceptions

2010 ◽  
pp. 32-40
Author(s):  
Sir Richard Dearlove
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Security Policy ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Security Threats ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Private Citizens ◽  
Russian Military ◽  
Full Force ◽  
The Cold War

This article discusses the changing perceptions on national security and civic anxiety. During the Cold War and its aftermath, security was rather a simple and straightforward issue. The countries knew their enemies, where they are and the threats they presented. On the event that, the enemies's secrets were unknown, probing techniques were employed to determine the weaknesses of the enemy. This formulaic situation which seeped through in to the twenty-first century left little room for innovation. In fact, in some countries, security maintained at the Cold War levels despite criticisms that new and emerging national security threats should be addressed at a new level. Of the powerful nations, America maintained the role of a world policeman and adapted its national security priorities according to its perception of a new series of strategic threats; however these new security strategies were without a sense of urgency. However, the perception of global threats and national security radically changed in the event of the 9/11 attack. The sleeping national security priorities of America came to a full force which affected the national security priorities of other nations as well. In the twenty-first globalized world, no conflict remains a regional clash. The reverberations of the Russian military action in Georgia, the Israeli intervention in Gaza, and the results of the attacks in Mumbai resonates loudly and rapidly through the wider international security system. While today, nations continue to seek new methods for addressing new security threats, the paradox of the national security policy is that nation-states have lost their exclusive grip of their own security at a time when the private citizens are assailed by increased fears for their own security and demand a more enhanced safety from the state. Nation-states have been much safer from large-scale violence, however there exists a strong sense of anxiety about the lack of security in the face of multiplicity of threats. Nations have been largely dependent on international coordinated action to achieve their important national security objectives. National policies and security theory lack precision. In addition, the internationalization of national security has eroded the distinction between domestic and foreign security. These blurring lines suggest that the understanding of national security is still at the height of transformations.

‘There shall be no musical servitude’: Towards a Multitudinous Shostakovich in the West

2020 ◽  
Vol 145 (2) ◽  
pp. 495-505
Author(s):  
EIRINI DIAMANTOULI
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Political Interests ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War

Ideologically motivated attempts to elucidate Shostakovich’s political views and to determine whether and how they may be coded into his compositions have come to characterize the Western reception of the composer’s works since his death in 1975. Fuelled by the political oppositions of the cold war, Shostakovich’s posthumous reputation in the West has been largely shaped by two conflicting perspectives. These have positioned him on the one hand as a secret dissident, bent and broken under the unbearable strain of totalitarianism, made heroic through his veiled musical resistance to Communism; and on the other hand as a composer compromised by his capitulation to the regime – represented in an anachronistic musical style. Both perspectives surrender Shostakovich and his music to a crude oversimplification driven by vested political interests. Western listeners thus conditioned are primed to hear either the coded dissidence of a tragic victim of Communist brutality or the sinister submission of a ‘loyal son of the Communist Party’.1 For those prepared to accept Shostakovich as a ‘tragic victim’, the publication of his purported memoirs in 1979, ‘as related to and edited by’ the author Solomon Volkov, presents a tantalizing conclusion: bitterly yet discreetly scornful of the Stalinist regime, Shostakovich was indeed a secret dissident and this dissidence was made tangible in his music.

Chairman cotton: Socialist Bulgaria’s cotton trade with African countries during the early Cold War (1946–70)

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Jan Zofka
Keyword(s):  
International Trade ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Foreign Trade ◽  
Economic Assistance ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Mutual Economic ◽  
Mutual Economic Assistance ◽  
Globalization Studies ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cotton Trade

Abstract This article follows Bulgarian officials engaged in cotton and textile exchange with African states in the early Cold War. These officials founded enterprises for carrying out transactions, collected information on prices at international cotton exchanges and attended meetings of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) to coordinate trade activities in capitalist markets. Exploring how Bulgarian foreign trade organizations positioned themselves on the scene of international trade, this article argues that cotton traders, instead of upholding the supposed bloc bipolarity of the Cold War, followed the logic of the markets they worked in. A focus on trade infrastructures in particular shows that early Cold War East–South trade was not as strictly bilateral as official agreements and statistics suggest and reveals the systematic embeddedness of the socialist traders’ practices in global capitalist structures. In the field of cotton, the globalizing economy of the early Cold War was not cut in half, as globalization studies have implied.

scholarly journals Politicizing Religion

2021 ◽  
pp. 73-99
Author(s):  
Uta A. Balbier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
The Media ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter defines Graham’s crusades in the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom in the 1950s as powerful cultural orchestrations of Cold War culture. It explores the reasons of leading political figures to support Graham, the media discourses that constructed Graham’s image as a cold warrior, and the religious and political worldviews of the religious organizers of the crusades in London, Washington, New York, and Berlin. In doing so, the chapter shows how hopes for genuine re-Christianization, in response to looming secularization, anticommunist fears, and post–World War II national anxieties, as well as spiritual legitimizations for the Cold War conflict, blended in Graham’s campaign work. These anxieties, hopes, and worldviews crisscrossed the Atlantic, allowing Graham and his campaign teams to make a significant contribution to creating an imagined transnational “spiritual Free World.”

Negativity, conflict and resistance: The Portuguese revolutionary process (1974–75) and its international mediations – Spanish newspapers and the Inter Press Service

2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Rita Luís
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Information Flow ◽  
Military Coup ◽  
International Debate ◽  
Foreign Correspondents ◽  
Dominant Logic ◽  
Internal Logic ◽  
The North ◽  
News Agencies ◽  
The Cold War

By considering the Portuguese revolutionary process of 1974–75 as a mediatic event, this article addresses aspects of the internal logic of information flow in the western context, heavily influenced and mediated by the frame of the Cold War. Initiated by a military coup, intended to put an end to 48 years of an authoritarian regime and thirteen years of colonial wars, the revolutionary process lasted about nineteen months and brought about such a change in the country’s social, political and economic structures that the constitution approved in 1976, included the goal of ensuring a transition to socialism. Meanwhile the hegemonic power of the main news agencies was the object of an international debate, with the UNESCO-sponsored MacBride Report (1980) offering proposals for the rebalancing of information. Focusing on this process as a mediatic event highlights the power of news agencies, influential even in contexts of informative restriction (as in the Spanish case) and responsible, to a large extent, for the dominant negativity of the event’s portrayal. This was the origin of increasing tensions between revolutionary political subjects and foreign correspondents, and also of the activation of forms of resistance, such as the agency Inter Press Service (IPS), whose aim to counter the dominant logic inscribes it in the North–South dialogue.

Ears

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alejandra Bronfman
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Political ◽  
Central Position ◽  
Audience Research ◽  
Research Techniques ◽  
Political Struggles ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter opens with an exploration of audience research techniques and the ways that even those conducting the research acknowledged the impossible nature of their task. This sets out the paradox that structures the chapter: even while there was no guarantee that listening publics were listening, they came to occupy a central position in the political struggles of the late 1950s and early 1960s. The notion of fidelity runs through the chapter as it traces the mediated strategies with which institutions and entities vied for the loyalty of listeners and laid the ground for the media battles of the anti-Batista struggle in Cuba. The “radio wars” that erupted in the Caribbean, a series of clandestine broadcasts urging the overthrow of Castro, Trujillo, and Duvalier in the early 1960s, speak to the centrality of mediated interventions in the changing geopolitics of the Cold War. The chapter ends with an emphasis on silence, as it attends to the ways that Jamaican broadcasting continued to speak only to limited publics and tendered a deaf ear to the creole-inflected sounds of politics on the eve of decolonization.

6. Cold wars at home

2021 ◽  
pp. 102-119
Author(s):  
Robert J. McMahon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Third World ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Third ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Third World ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
State Relations ◽  
At Home

‘Cold wars at home’ highlights the domestic repercussions of the Cold War. The Cold War exerted so profound and so multi-faceted an impact on the structure of international politics and state-to-state relations that it has become customary to label the 1945–90 period ‘the Cold War era’. That designation becomes even more fitting when one considers the powerful mark that the Soviet–American struggle for world dominance and ideological supremacy left within many of the world’s nation-states. The Cold War of course affected the internal constellation of forces in the Third World, Europe, and the United States and impacted the process of decolonization, state formation, and Cold War geopolitics.

scholarly journals The New Frontier: Religion in America’s National Space Rhetoric of the Cold War Era

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (11) ◽  
pp. 592 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glen E. Swanson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Postwar America ◽  
National Space ◽  
New Frontier ◽  
Religious Imagery ◽  
The Us ◽  
Cold War Era ◽  
Us Government ◽  
The Media ◽  
The Cold War

The origins and use of national space rhetoric used by NASA, the US government, and the media in America began during the Cold War era and relied, in part, on religious imagery to convey a message of exploration and conquest. The concept of space as a “New Frontier” was used in political speech, television, and advertising to reawaken a sense of manifest destiny in postwar America by reviving notions of religious freedom, courage, and exceptionalism—the same ideals that originally drove expansionist boosters first to the New World and then to the West. Using advertisements, political speeches, NASA documents, and other media, this paper will demonstrate how this rhetoric served to reinforce a culture held by many Americans who maintained a long tradition of believing that they were called on by God to settle New Frontiers and how this culture continues to influence how human spaceflight is portrayed today.

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