Nasser's Gamble

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Arab Spring

This book draws on declassified documents from six countries and original material in Arabic, German, Hebrew, and Russian to present a new understanding of Egypt's disastrous five-year intervention in Yemen, which Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser later referred to as “my Vietnam.” The book argues that Nasser's attempt to export the Egyptian revolution to Yemen played a decisive role in destabilizing Egypt's relations with the Cold War powers, tarnishing its image in the Arab world, ruining its economy, and driving its rulers to instigate the fatal series of missteps that led to war with Israel in 1967. Viewing the Six Day War as an unintended consequence of the Saudi–Egyptian struggle over Yemen, the book demonstrates that the most important Cold War conflict in the Middle East was not the clash between Israel and its neighbors. It was the inter-Arab struggle between monarchies and republics over power and legitimacy. Egypt's defeat in the “Arab Cold War” set the stage for the rise of Saudi Arabia and political Islam. Bold and provocative, this book brings to life a critical phase in the modern history of the Middle East. Its compelling analysis of Egypt's fall from power in the 1960s offers new insights into the decline of Arab nationalism, exposing the deep historical roots of the Arab Spring of 2011.

The Middle Eastern Cold War: Unique Dynamics in a Questionable Regional Framework

2011 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 320-322
Author(s):  
Jeffrey James Byrne
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Middle Eastern ◽  
International History ◽  
War Narrative ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Ideological Identity

One of the more prominent themes to emerge from this roundtable is the desire to integrate the history of the modern Middle East with broader trends in international history, particularly with regard to the recent emphasis on “decentralizing” and “globalizing” the Cold War narrative. My own research interests are consistent with this approach, as one of the central concerns of my current project is to show how Algeria's revolutionary nationalists defied the regional categories imposed on them from the outside by pursuing overlapping diplomatic initiatives under the rubrics of Maghribi unity, African unity, Arab unity, Afro-Asianism, and Third Worldism. After independence in 1962, the Algerian foreign ministry's main geographical divisions differed significantly from those used by the U.S. State Department—and most history departments’ hiring committees—by dividing the world into “the West,” “the Socialist Countries,” “the Arab World,” “Africa,” and “Latin America/Asia.” These categories were the product of both practical considerations and ideological/identity politics on the part of Algeria's new leaders, and to my mind suggest that the “Middle East” may itself be a particularly arbitrary and misleading geographical framework, even in comparison to other parts of the developing world where European imperialism exerted a heavy cartographical influence.

The crisis of Arab states, ethics and citizenship

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 357-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Georges Corm
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Political Purpose ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Arab States ◽  
Arab Societies ◽  
The Cold War

The present article constitutes an attempt to analyse the historical causes of the present crisis affecting the Arab world and the failure to build modern states in this region. It has to be noticed that from the three main ethnic groups constituting the pillars of the Middle East, i.e. the Persians, the Arabs and the Turks, the Arab failure and the generalization of violence in Arab societies and between Arab states is to be adequately analysed in order to be able to contribute to peace, reform and a dignified life for Arab citizens. Different historical factors are identified in the article, some of them internal to Arab societies, but inextricably linked to massive foreign interferences in the region. The last of these interferences are linked to the instrumentalization of religion in the last period of the cold war in order to stop the extension of Soviet and communist influence in the Arab and Muslim world. Since then, this use of religion for political purpose in the conflicts about supremacy in the region has destroyed ethics and citizenship and given rise to generalized violence and acts of terrorism, in addition to other economic and social factors that are identified in the article.

Cold War Pavlov: Homosexual aversion therapy in the 1960s

2020 ◽  
pp. 095269512091159
Author(s):  
Kate Davison
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Single Case ◽  
Knowledge Exchange ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Success Rates ◽  
Success Stories ◽  
Psychological Medicine ◽  
British Commonwealth ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

Homosexual aversion therapy enjoyed two brief but intense periods of clinical experimentation: between 1950 and 1962 in Czechoslovakia, and between 1962 and 1975 in the British Commonwealth. The specific context of its emergence was the geopolitical polarization of the Cold War and a parallel polarization within psychological medicine between Pavlovian and Freudian paradigms. In 1949, the Pavlovian paradigm became the guiding doctrine in the Communist bloc, characterized by a psychophysiological or materialist understanding of mental illness. It was taken up by therapists in Western countries who were critical of psychoanalysis and sought more ‘scientific’ diagnostic and therapeutic methods that focused on empirical evidence and treating actual symptoms. However, their attitude towards homosexuality often played a decisive role in how they used aversion therapy. Whereas Czechoslovakian researchers cautioned readers about low success rates and agitated for homosexual law reform in 1961, most of their anglophone counterparts selectively ignored or misrepresented the results of ‘the Prague experiment’, instead celebrating single-case ‘success’ stories in their effort to correct ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation. In histories of queer sexuality and its pathologization, the behaviourist paradigm remains almost entirely unmapped. This article provides the most detailed study to date of aversion therapy literature from both sides of the East/West border. In doing so, it contributes to the project not only of ‘decentring Western sexualities’, but of decentring Western sexological knowledge. Given its Pavlovian origins, the history of homosexual aversion therapy can be fully understood only in the context of Cold War transnational sexological knowledge exchange.

The Sultan's Communists

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alma Rachel Heckman
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Jewish History ◽  
Arab World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Cold War

Structured around the stories of five prominent Moroccan Jewish Communists (Léon René Sultan, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Abraham Serfaty, Simon Lévy, and Sion Asssidon), The Sultan’s Communists examines how Moroccan Jews envisioned themselves participating as citizens in a newly independent Morocco. It also explores how Communism facilitated the participation of Moroccan Jews in Morocco’s national liberation struggle with roots in the mass upheavals of the interwar and WWII periods. Alma Heckman describes how Moroccan Communist Jews fit within the story of mass Jewish exodus from Morocco in the 1950s and ’60s, and how Communist Jews survived oppressive post-independence authoritarian rule under the Moroccan monarchy. These stories unfold in a country that, upon independence from France and Spain in 1956, allied itself with the United States (and, more quietly, Israel) during the Cold War all while attempting to claim a place for itself within the fraught politics of the post-independence Arab world. Heckman’s manuscript contributes to the growing literature on Jews in the modern Middle East, filling in the gaps on the Jewish history of 20th-century Morocco as no other previous book has done.

4. The Middle East since the Cold War: The multi-layered (in)security Dilemma

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bahgat Korany
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
International Relations ◽  
Domestic Politics ◽  
Regional Security ◽  
Security Dilemma ◽  
Security Challenges ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Arab Spring

This chapter examines the evolving regional security situation in the Middle East since the end of the Cold War. While longstanding issues like the Arab–Israeli conflict and the nuclearization of Iran still characterize the regional security context, the biggest game changer has been a series of domestic events that came to be known as the Arab Spring. The chapter considers old and new security challenges — economic, political, and social — faced by the Middle East during the period, focusing on the role of ‘intermestics’: the close connection between the international and domestic politics of the region. It also explores other key themes that have come to dominate the contemporary international relations of the region, including oil, globalization, and religio-politics. Finally, it discusses the notion of ‘Arab exceptionalism’ and the winds of change that continue to persist throughout the region.

Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British Spy Dramas of the 1960s

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Scientific Background ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cultural Fantasy

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.

Land of Blue Helmets

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
United Nations ◽  
Arab World ◽  
International Conflicts ◽  
Member States ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Past ◽  
The United Nations ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Political Mediation

Born in 1945, the United Nations (UN) came to life in the Arab world. It was there that the UN dealt with early diplomatic challenges that helped shape its institutions such as peacekeeping and political mediation. It was also there that the UN found itself trapped in, and sometimes part of, confounding geopolitical tensions in key international conflicts in the Cold War and post-Cold War periods, such as hostilities between Palestine and Iraq and between Libya and Syria. Much has changed over the past seven decades, but what has not changed is the central role played by the UN. This book's claim is that the UN is a constant site of struggle in the Arab world and equally that the Arab world serves as a location for the UN to define itself against the shifting politics of its age. Looking at the UN from the standpoint of the Arab world, this volume includes chapters on the potential and the problems of a UN that is framed by both the promises of its Charter and the contradictions of its member states.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Systems Thinking ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Future Visions

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.

Hegemonic Disarray—American Internationalisms and World Disorder

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Deudney
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
International Order ◽  
The World ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
At Home

The end of the Cold War left the USA as uncontested hegemon and shaper of the globalization and international order. Yet the international order has been unintentionally but repeatedly shaken by American interventionism and affronts to both allies and rivals. This is particularly the case in the Middle East as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as the nuclear negotiations with Iran show. Therefore, the once unquestioned authority and power of the USA have been challenged at home as well as abroad. By bringing disorder rather than order to the world, US behavior in these conflicts has also caused domestic exhaustion and division. This, in turn, has led to a more restrained and as of late isolationist foreign policy from the USA, leaving the role as shaper of the international order increasingly to others.

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