scholarly journals Historical Network Analysis. A Local, Regional, and Global Approach to Soviet Church History

2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 7-17
Author(s):  
K. Boeckh

The article introduces historical network analysis as a fruitful approach for scrutinizing social and other relations in church and religious history. The goal is to broaden the methodology of studying events, dynamics and processes of the past with a new perspective. This concept will shed fresh light on complex confessional relations but will also take into account relevant contexts as well as comparative aspects. The approach is promising for broadening the horizon to find new observations especially for social milieus and arenas of actions. The concept allows to re-evaluate historical sources and to detect silenced spheres and unexpected layers of acting. It can trace hidden contacts, follow personal relations cross borders — local, regional and national describe interdenominational ties during the Cold War within the Soviet Union and abroad, the functioning of underground churches, methods and ways of clandestine communication and much more.

2013 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 114-139 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bogdan C. Iacob

This article presents a comprehensive review of the transnational perspective in the study of communism and the implications of this methodological turn for the transformation of the field itself. While advancing new topics and interpretative standpoints with a view to expanding the scope of such an initiative in current scholarship, the author argues that the transnational approach is important on several levels. First, it helps to de-localize and de-parochialize national historiographies. Second, it can provide the background to for the Europeanization of the history of the communist period in former Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Third, and most importantly, the transnational approach can reconstruct the international dimension of the communist experience, with its multiple geographies, spaces of entanglement and transfer, and clustered, cross-cultural identity-building processes. The article concludes that the advent of transnationalism in the study of communism allows for the discovery of various forms of historical contiguousness either among state socialisms or beyond the Iron Curtain. In other words, researchers might have a tool to not only know more about less, but also to resituate that “less” in the continuum of the history of communism and in the context of modernity. The transnational approach can generate a fundamental shift in our vantage point on the communist phenomenon in the twentieth century. It can reveal that a world long perceived as mostly turned inward was in fact imbricate in wider contexts of action and imagination and not particularly limited by the ideological segregationism of the Cold War.


2007 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 913-934 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL F. HOPKINS

ABSTRACTThe Cold War lasted for almost fifty years and ended nearly twenty years ago. A vast historiography continues to grow. In explaining the past and continuing debate, this article is necessarily selective. It has three aims. The first is to locate the main phases and trends in the debate about the Cold War. The second is to analyse the growing literature on the end of the Cold War. Thirdly, it attempts to identify a number of major themes by looking beyond geopolitical issues to various aspects of the cultural Cold War, to espionage and intelligence, and to the economic dimension. The review has three main conclusions. First, diplomacy and strategic issues have been extensively explored, though more is needed on the Soviet Union and especially on China. Secondly, analysis of the economic and intelligence dimension has improved, though, again, knowledge of the Soviet Union and China remains thin. Lastly, the growing coverage of cultural issues has deepened our understanding but needs to be integrated into political and strategic narratives.


1993 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Harrison Wagner

In spite of its widespread use, no one has ever stated clearly what the distinction between bipolar and multipolar systems refers to. Moreover, some common definitions of “bipolarity” imply behavior that is inconsistent with the behavior of states during the cold war. This article argues that the distinctive feature of post–World War II international politics was not that two states were more powerful than the others, as the literature on bipolarity would suggest, but that one state, the Soviet Union, occupied in peacetime a position of near-dominance on the Eurasian continent, a position that states in the past had been able to achieve only after a series of military victories. This fact explains the behavior that others have sought to explain by bipolarity, as well as behavior that is inconsistent with what common definitions of bipolarity would lead us to expect. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of the argument for structural theories of international politics and controversies about what lies ahead.


1992 ◽  
Vol 7 (0) ◽  
pp. 151-160
Author(s):  
Jung Koo Huh

For the past few years, the world situation has been changing so rapidly that it could be called a "The Revolution." For example, there are the changes in Eastern Europe, the unification of Germany, and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the leader of the Communist nations and a major participant in the Cold War during the 20th century, from the historical stage. Moreover, North-Korea which has pursued an open-door policy and armed revolutionary unification for half n century, has begun a step by step effort For the establishment of peace. It has produced an atmosphere of detente on the Korean peninsula. All these world wide changes and North-South Korea developments toward peace cause people to fantasize about the unification of Korea. With this fantasy In their mind, people demand to spend more on economic and social welfare, and cut down on NDE.


1997 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 137-152 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Kaufman Purcell

The past few decades have seen profound changes in the bilateral relationship between the United States and Mexico. The interests of the two countries, which often diverged during the Cold War years, increasingly began to converge following collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. With this convergence, bilateral relations seemed to enter a more cooperative stage. The signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1993 was deemed a fitting symbol of the new, mutually beneficial relationship between the two countries.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
Rebecka Lettevall

Cosmopolitanism is a value-loaded concept that seems to become popular in intervals. The latest cosmopolitan period started after the end of the Cold War and the breakdown of the Soviet Union and concentrated mostly on aspects such as “a new world order”, and often with reference to Kant. It might be questioned if the cosmopolitan period still exists. Here it is suggested that a historical understanding of cosmopolitanism together with experience from later social and political experiences might give a new perspective on the difficulties of creating a better world in a Kantian sense, including cosmopolitan education. Considering its history and taking concern of experience Kant’s cosmopolitanism still is relevant, not least in its broader sense.


This book uses trust—with its emotional and predictive aspects—to explore international relations in the second half of the Cold War, beginning with the late 1960s. The détente of the 1970s led to the development of some limited trust between the United States and the Soviet Union, which lessened international tensions and enabled advances in areas such as arms control. However, it also created uncertainty in other areas, especially on the part of smaller states that depended on their alliance leaders for protection. The chapters in this volume look at how the “emotional” side of the conflict affected the dynamics of various Cold War relations: between the superpowers, within the two ideological blocs, and inside individual countries on the margins of the East–West confrontation.


Author(s):  
Victoria M. Grieve

The Cold War experiences of America’s schoolchildren are often summed up by quick references to “duck and cover,” a problematic simplification that reduces children to victims in need of government protection. By looking at a variety of school experiences—classroom instruction, federal and voluntary programs, civil defense and opposition to it, as well as world friendship outreach—it is clear that children experienced the Cold War in their schools in many ways. Although civil defense was ingrained in the daily school experiences of Cold War kids, so, too, were fitness tests, atomic science, and art exchange programs. Global competition with the Soviet Union changed the way children learned, from science and math classes to history and citizenship training. Understanding the complexity of American students’ experiences strengthens our ability to decipher the meaning of the Cold War for American youth and its impact on the politics of the 1960s.


Author(s):  
Anne Searcy

During the Cold War, the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union developed cultural exchange programs, in which they sent performing artists abroad in order to generate goodwill for their countries. Ballet companies were frequently called on to serve in these programs, particularly in the direct Soviet-American exchange. This book analyzes four of the early ballet exchange tours, demonstrating how this series of encounters changed both geopolitical relations and the history of dance. The ballet tours were enormously popular. Performances functioned as an important symbolic meeting point for Soviet and American officials, creating goodwill and normalizing relations between the two countries in an era when nuclear conflict was a real threat. At the same time, Soviet and American audiences did not understand ballet in the same way. As American companies toured in the Soviet Union and vice versa, audiences saw the performances through the lens of their own local aesthetics. Ballet in the Cold War introduces the concept of transliteration to understand this process, showing how much power viewers wielded in the exchange and explaining how the dynamics of the Cold War continue to shape ballet today.


The armed forces of Europe have undergone a dramatic transformation since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Handbook of European Defence Policies and Armed Forces provides the first comprehensive analysis of national security and defence policies, strategies, doctrines, capabilities, and military operations, as well as the alliances and partnerships of European armed forces in response to the security challenges Europe has faced since the end of the cold war. A truly cross-European comparison of the evolution of national defence policies and armed forces remains a notable blind spot in the existing literature. This Handbook aims to fill this gap with fifty-one contributions on European defence and international security from around the world. The six parts focus on: country-based assessments of the evolution of the national defence policies of Europe’s major, medium, and lesser powers since the end of the cold war; the alliances and security partnerships developed by European states to cooperate in the provision of national security; the security challenges faced by European states and their armed forces, ranging from interstate through intra-state and transnational; the national security strategies and doctrines developed in response to these challenges; the military capabilities, and the underlying defence and technological industrial base, brought to bear to support national strategies and doctrines; and, finally, the national or multilateral military operations by European armed forces. The contributions to The Handbook collectively demonstrate the fruitfulness of giving analytical precedence back to the comparative study of national defence policies and armed forces across Europe.


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