The Coldest City

Cold War II ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 95-111
Author(s):  
Ian Scott

The chapter examines the way the Cold War has been historicized in the mode of films like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Bridge of Spies but also how in other texts it has increasingly been filtered through the lens of nostalgic pop-culture referents. The locations are not simply backdrops but active signifiers, the characters less archetypes than reassembled studies in cinematic RPGs, the soundtracks no longer sombre diegesis but more a mix-tape of your favorite hit songs. This chapter, therefore, argues that, over the course of the 2010s, from Tinker Tailor to Atomic Blonde, art as the unconscious face of politics has never been more important. Reminiscence has thus shifted from a mode of nimble historical furnishings to one that contains a jumble of ideological contradictions designed to accentuate–and critique–the reassembled Cold War mentality of the Trump-Putin age.

2017 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Jenness

This paper explores the way American intellectuals depicted Sigmund Freud during the peak of popularity and prestige of psychoanalysis in the US, roughly the decade and a half following World War II. These intellectuals insisted upon the unassailability of Freud's mind and personality. He was depicted as unsusceptible to any external force or influence, a trait which was thought to account for Freud's admirable comportment as a scientist, colleague and human being. This post-war image of Freud was shaped in part by the Cold War anxiety that modern individuality was imperilled by totalitarian forces, which could only be resisted by the most rugged of selves. It was also shaped by the unique situation of the intellectuals themselves, who were eager to position themselves, like the Freud they imagined, as steadfastly independent and critical thinkers who would, through the very clarity of their thought, lead America to a more robust democracy.


Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.


Author(s):  
Maria Fernanda Affonso Leal ◽  
Rafael Santin ◽  
David Almstadter De Magalhães

Since the first peacekeeping operation was created until today, the UN has been trying to adapt them to the different contexts in which they are deployed. This paper analy- ses the possibility of a bigger shift happening in the way the United Nations, through the Security Council, operates their Peacekeeping Operations. The change here ad- dressed includes, mainly, the constitution of more “robust” missions and the newly introduced Intervention Brigade in the Democratic Republic of Congo. By presenting three missions (UNEF I, UNAMIR and MONUSCO) deployed in different historic periods, we identified various elements in their mandates and in the way these were established which indicate a progressive transformation in the peacekeeping model since the Cold War - when conflicts were in their majority between States – until present days, when they occur mostly inside the States.


Author(s):  
N. Megan Kelley

This chapter focuses on political passing, in which the specter of passing was utilized in Hollywood films produced in the context of the Cold War. Films about political passing called into question who was who and the nature of identity. The notion that somebody could pass politically mirrored fears about racial passing, complicated by postwar obsessions with Communism. The chapter examines how anti-Communist films such as My Son John and Woman on Pier 13 tackle the “enemy within” and portray Communists as caricatures, either gangster-like or hyperintellectual, thus making visible what was supposed to be an invisible threat. It also considers the way anti-Communism in Hollywood exploited anxieties that were linked to postwar ideas about identity.


Author(s):  
Georg Kerschischnig ◽  
Blanca Montejo

This chapter studies the original conception of the Security Council’s jurisdiction and contrasts it with the way its jurisdiction has developed and expanded in practice since the end of the Cold War. The Security Council’s jurisdiction—which is principally political and informed primarily by political rather than legal considerations—rests on a limited legal framework consisting of provisions in the UN Charter and of the Council’s own provisional rules of procedure. Nevertheless, the Security Council’s jurisdiction has expanded considerably since the end of the Cold War and has expanded into areas beyond international security. One notable area in which the Council’s competence has increased in this period is that of sanctions. These jurisdiction-related developments in the Council’s practice reflect a world in which the line between national and international jurisdiction are no longer clear or desirable. At the same time, the Council has also increased its interaction with UN Member States and with civil society.


2016 ◽  
Vol 75 (4) ◽  
pp. 1019-1029
Author(s):  
Michael H. Bodden

Alfred McCoy's paper offers a masterful analysis of the way in which the Philippines, and more generally Southeast Asia, were used as base and laboratory for extending US dominance—its hegemony—in the twentieth century, and in particular the Cold War era and its aftermath. He offers a succinct summary of the way in which US organs of global domination—the National Security Council, the CIA, the Defense Department—worked throughout the developing world and in Europe to ensure compliant, anti-communist regimes during the Cold War period, which also meant that more than once the United States was thwarting democracy in a number of locales and thus casting its own ideology of democratic progress and prosperity into doubt.


2016 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 58-82 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niklas Ammert ◽  
Heather Sharp

This article presents a comparative analysis of pupils’ activities dealing with the Cold War in Swedish and Australian history textbooks. By focusing on textbook activities to which pupils respond in relation to their learning of a particular topic, this study identifies knowledge types included in a selection of history textbooks. The study also focuses on the question whether, and if so how, social values are evident in activities concerning the Cold War. The authors develop a matrix that makes it possible to examine knowledge types and social values conveyed by activities. By analyzing textbook activities, this article exposes the hidden curriculum present in the textbooks on the basis of underlying and unstated values present in the activities, and at the same time identifies the way in which the selected textbooks incorporate these values.


Author(s):  
Keith Ewing ◽  
Joan Mahoney ◽  
Andrew Moretta

This title is concerned with the powers, activities, and accountability of MI5 principally in the period from 1945 to 1964. It was a body without statutory authority, with no statutory powers, and with no obvious forms of statutory accountability. It was established as a counter-espionage agency, yet was beset by espionage scandals on a frequency that suggested if not high levels of incompetence, then high levels of distraction and the squandering of resources. The book addresses the evolution of MI5’s mandate which set out its role and functions and to a limited extent the lines of accountability, the surveillance targets of MI5, and the surveillance methods that it used for this purpose, with a focus in two chapters on MPs and lawyers, respectively; the purposes for which this information was used, principally to exclude people from certain forms of employment; and the accountability of MI5 or the lack thereof for the way in which it discharged its responsibilities under the mandate.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 31-70
Author(s):  
Luca Falciola

This article examines the transnational ties between the Italian revolutionary left and Palestinian militants from the mid-1960s through the early 1980s. Some observers have cited these connections to explain the magnitude of Italian terrorism in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, in the absence of empirical research, the issue has remained murky. The archival sources and detailed interviews with protagonists used in the article shed light on this phenomenon by addressing four questions: first, the reception of the Palestinian cause within the Italian revolutionary left; second, the way Palestinian terrorist groups established roots in Italy and how the political context facilitated those efforts; third, the interactions between Italian and Palestinian militants both in Italy and in the Middle East; and fourth, the factors that strengthened or weakened the relationships between these entities. The evidence indicates that although Italian revolutionaries forged concrete ties with Palestinian militants and terrorists, these ties were not as extensively developed as some of the Italian leftists had hoped. The interactions encouraged radicalization but did not significantly foster violent escalation and terrorism in Italy.


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