Review of Beyond and Between the Cold War blocs

• Main Author: NGOEI, Wen-Qing (WEI Wenqing)
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2016
• Subjects: Cold War; non-alignment; bloc politics; sovereignty; International and Area Studies; Political Science
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/3216; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/soss_research/article/4473/viewcontent/Review_of.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

In their introduction to this special issue of The International History Review, Janick Marina Schaufelbuehl, Sandra Bott, Jussi Hanhimaki and Marco Wyss state that this collection of papers examines “what independent pathways” existed for peripheral states, independence movements, or regional alliances “within the Cold War system that were not directly subjected to the East-West confrontation” (902).And there is, in principle, much to recommend this endeavor. As the introduction rightly points out, there is abundant evidence of middle and smaller powers as well as non-state actors who pursued their objectives through “an extensive array of strategies” that “did not easily fit into binary” Cold-War dynamics (901). Though the big powers exerted preponderant influence upon world affairs, the history of the global Cold War remains incomplete without acknowledging the agency of those who operated “in the Cold War, but not of it,” those who escaped the gravity of the superpowers’ agenda to achieve their own goals.