Third World Mass Communications: A Basic Bibliography

1982 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 94-103
Author(s):  
John A Lent

To produce a selected bibliography on Third World mass communications has become rather difficult in recent years, because of an abundance of materials. The controversy that led to and nourished the New World and International Information Order augmented the literature by many fold and in some cases impressively — though not always differently, as catch phrases and arguments on all sides of the debate were repeated almost slavishly in packaged articles and books reminiscent of the works of a public relations practitioner. The growth of journalism training, research and educational institutions — and a corresponding increase in teachers, researchers and writers — in Third World nations also produced a glut of information. Because of these factors and a space limitation, this bibliography is devoted almost entirely to books and monographs published between 1971 and 1981. A list of periodicals which carry Third World mass communications articles is added, with notations on special issues devoted to the topic. To do more than this concerning periodical literature is prohibitive in this article. Categories used are bibliographies; mass communications, broken down into general, advertising and public relations, broadcasting, film and press; communication and development in the Third World (including media's role in social change, national development and integration, rural development and revolutionary movements); communications, politics and governments in the Third World (including law of the press, political processes and ideologies, right to communicate and press freedom); and the New World and International Information Order and the Third World (including media imperialism, flow of news and information and national sovereignty). This listing in no way is meant to be exhaustive; instead, it is designed to serve as a basic bibliography of the most recent books and monographs written by researchers and scholars throughout the world, but mainly from the United States.

Author(s):  
Sergey Shenin ◽  

Introduction. This article is devoted to studying the influence of the Soviet “economic offensive” factor in the 1950s on the formation of the New World Economic Order by the American by the American ruling elite in general and the use of such an important tool as foreign assistance in particular in the framework of this process. The reconstruction of this process makes it possible to clarify the specifics of the foreign policy decision-making mechanism in the United States, to identify the ideological approaches of main political interest groups to the goals and methods of building a new world order. Methods and materials. The study uses a group analysis approach as well as American executive and legislative documents, press material, speeches by key politicians, etc., to identify the reasons for the differences among representatives of the three leading interest groups in interpreting the nature of the Soviet “economic offensive” in the Third World countries. Analysis. These differences were primarily due to the possibility of using the factor of the Soviet “aggression” for conducting domestic propaganda campaigns as part of the interest groups struggle for control over the foreign assistance program. Thus, the representatives of the atlantists group claimed that the main threat from the Communist world remained in the military sphere; the globalist-oriented progressives insisted that the Soviet “economic offensive” was a critical danger to U.S. interests, while conservatives declared that the “myths” about the Soviet-communist threats to the United States in the Third World were invalid. Results. In the second half of the 1950s the group of progressives used the factor of the Soviet “economic offensive” more effectively in the framework of their campaigns (there were four of them), which allowed them to take control over the foreign assistance program and begin to reorient the American strategic course from the prevailing ideology of “mutual security” towards the global developmentalism.


Author(s):  
Gregg A. Brazinsky

During the early 1960s, Beijing launched a new diplomatic effort to raise its visibility and promote its viewpoints in the Third World. Its goal was to assemble a radical coalition (or united front) of Afro-Asian states that opposed imperialism and revisionism. The PRC took advantage of the frustrations with the Great Powers harbored by Indonesia, Cambodia, Pakistan and some of the newly independent African countries to win allies in the Third World. The United States constantly sought to undermine these efforts by advocating more moderate versions of nonalignment and mobilizing public opinion against Chinese officials when they travelled abroad.


Author(s):  
Robert J. McMahon

‘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.


2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-325
Author(s):  
Guy Laron

In the last decade, influenced by current economic trends, Cold War historians have made an effort to de-center the story of the Cold War. They have shifted their gaze from the center of the conflict—the face-offs in Europe between the Soviet Union and the United States—and cast an observing eye on the Third World. Unlike many Middle East historians who seek to understand the Middle East in terms of its unique cultures, languages, and religions, Cold War historians treat that area as part of a revolutionary arc that stretched from the jungles of Latin America to the jungles of Vietnam. Rather than emphasizing the region's singularity, they focus on the themes that united guerilla fighters in the West Bank and the Makong Delta as well as leaders from Havana to Damascus: anticolonial and anti-imperial struggles, the yearning for self-definition, and the fight against what Third World revolutionaries perceived as economic exploitation. The sudden interest in what was considered, until recently, the periphery of the Cold War has undoubtedly been fueled by the zeitgeist of a new century in which the so-called peripheral regions are set to become more dominant economically. Southeast and Southwest Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East have a surplus of young skilled workers who are increasingly in demand by the global economy as the growth of world population slows and more prosperous countries in West Europe and North America are graying fast. The Third World consists today of the very regions where most of the economic growth in coming decades will take place. Dependency theory has gone topsy-turvy: leading economists now look with hope at countries such as China, India, Turkey, and Egypt and expect them to become the new engines of global growth. It is not surprising, then, that historians are now taking a stronger interest in the tangled history of the Cold War in the Third World and discovering the agency that these countries always had.


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