Introduction

This book should command the attention of all Cold War historians. It is a book of prodigious research and immense erudition. Lorenz Lüthi has visited archives in the United States, England, Russia, China, Australia, India, Germany, France, Switzerland, and Austria, among other places. His aim is noteworthy: to “de-center” the Cold War. He argues that, for the most part, developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe had roots not in the global Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union but in “structural” changes in each of these regions that presaged the Cold War's end. He rejects the triumphalist narrative of some U.S. writers, minimizes the role of President Ronald Reagan, and claims that Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the Soviet Union, did not want to end the Cold War and instead yearned to win that conflict. Overall, Lüthi stresses the agency of local actors and regional dynamics and claims that the capacity of Moscow and Washington to shape events was circumscribed by “decolonization, Asian-African Internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab-Israeli hostility, and European economic developments” (p. 1).Despite the ambition and learning that inform every page of this tome, the book is beset with interpretive ambiguities and conceptual problems. Lüthi argues that the Cold War was not predetermined but was the collective result of “ideological clashes, unilateral decisions, political disagreements, and misperceptions” (p. 13). Its origins rest in the desires of the USSR to “overthrow the imperialist-capitalist world system and the establishment of a stateless and classless society across the globe” (p. 3). In contrast to Odd Arne Westad's The Cold War: A World History (New York; Basic Books, 2017), Lüthi pays scant attention to the economic contradictions within global capitalism in the late nineteenth century, the cyclical fluctuations of business cycles in the early twentieth century, the rise of the Left, the yearnings for structural change within capitalism, and the disillusionment spawned by two world wars and the Great Depression. Rather, Lüthi's focus is on imperial aspirations and ideological conflict. He elides geostrategic motivations, the underlying dynamics of global capitalism, and the legacy of World War II. He does not explain that controlling German power in Europe and harnessing Japanese power in Asia were key components of the global Cold War as well as the regional Cold Wars in Europe and Asia. He does not show how the perceived structural dynamics of global capitalism impelled policymakers in North American, Europe, and Japan to focus on integrating the core industrial areas of global capitalism with markets and raw materials in the “periphery”; that is, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and Africa. He does not illustrate how socioeconomic unrest and political turmoil stemming from the Great Depression and World War II created perceptions of threat and opportunity in Moscow and Washington that set the conditions for the Cold War.The great attribute of this volume is Lüthi's detailed description of developments in the Middle East, Asia, and Europe. Cold War historians will be surprised by his decision to place developments in the Middle East at the forefront of the volume (chapter two), even while he argues that the Cold War did not come to the Middle East until the Suez crisis (chapters 8–10). The Middle East commands initial attention because Lüthi focuses on the legacy of British imperialism and the desires of officials in London to remake their empire in the aftermath of World War II with the help of the Arab League. In this context, Lüthi luminously describes inter-Arab dynamics, Arab-Israeli hostilities, and the rise of pan-Islamism. He stresses Anwar el-Sadat's desire to expel Soviet influence from Egypt, the complex dynamics spawned by the Palestinian quest for statehood, and the repercussions of the Iranian revolution. By the early 1980s, he writes, “the Cold War ceased to be the critical structure that shaped the regional system in the Middle East” (p. 518). But it is not clear what he means by the “regional system,” or whether the Cold War had ever shaped it. It is also not clear what constituted the regional Cold War in the Middle East when so many of the wars were hot, not cold. The role of oil in shaping the local, regional, and international dynamics of the different versions of Cold War in the region goes totally unexamined.Lüthi's discussion of Asia is central to the overall thesis of his book. “Three countries,” he writes, “played major roles in Asia's Cold War. China, Vietnam, and India all were dynamic agents in the shaping of their own fates and not just passive battlegrounds in the global competition between the United States and the Soviet Union” (p. 115). Lüthi shows how the Sino-Soviet split, the Chinese rapprochement with the United States, the unification of revolutionary Vietnam, and “the collapse of communism as a unifying program for national liberation” (p. 537) reshaped the Asian Cold War during the 1970s. But here again it is not clear precisely what the Asian Cold War was, and why Japan is totally omitted from its discussion. Perhaps Lüthi would argue that Japan lacked agency, but even if that was the case the country was crucial to the trajectory of the Vietnam War and the U.S. role in it. Numerous historians—Howard Schonberger, Michael Schaller, Andrew Rotter, William Borden, and Robert Blum, among others—have shown in great detail how the goal of reconstructing and stabilizing Japan impelled U.S. officials to thwart Communist gains in Southeast Asia, create an independent South Vietnam, establish the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, and support the rightwing military coup, crackdown, and massacres in Indonesia. While ignoring these dimensions of the Asian Cold War, Lüthi presents fascinating chapters on China, Vietnam, and India, on Asian-African internationalism, and on nonalignment. He shows that the Asian Cold War had many manifestations and permutations. At different times, in different ways, these trajectories affected the U.S.-Soviet global conflict and were influenced by that conflict. But Lüthi also acknowledges that “the end of the global Cold War primarily required a strategic rethinking in Moscow which would only come in March 1985 with Mikhail S. Gorbachev's ascent to power” (p. 537).Strategic rethinking was necessitated by developments in Europe. Lüthi incisively describes the successful integrationist initiatives in Western Europe and the concomitant failures in the Soviet-imposed Council for Mutual Economic Assistance. He emphasizes the ability of Western economies to recalibrate, innovate, and adjust to changing economic and monetary conditions, and he highlights the failures of centrally managed systems to do so. He minimizes the role of the United States in the reconstruction of Western Europe, mentioning that it “provided a stable and supportive framework” (p. 380). Ultimately, the failure of Communist economies to compete and modernize contributed to the flagging popular support for Communist regimes in Eastern Europe and the end of the Cold War. But Lüthi does not make much of an effort to analyze the basic shortcomings in Communist systems, nor does he examine why and how liberal capitalist and social-democratic market economies were able to adapt successfully. For example, he describes the impact of declining oil prices in the 1980s and the constraints that imposed on Moscow's ability to subsidize the economies of its East European satellites, but he rarely makes an attempt to analyze the dysfunctionality of Soviet agricultural policies or the flawed operations of central planning. He stresses the resilience of West European economies but barely mentions the creation of social welfare states and the role of governments in providing minimal social provision and expanding educational opportunity, access to medical care, and support for basic research.This volume is a monumental attempt to de-center the Cold War and restore agency to middle-level powers and local actors. What it does is de-center international politics. It illuminates that much was going on in the latter half of the twentieth century that was not the product of the U.S.-Soviet Cold War but at times intersected with it and contributed to its denouement. Small powers had their own agendas, and regional dynamics had their own logic. In complicated ways, developments in one region influenced those in another. Thanks to the prodigious research of an author with staggering linguistic skills and breathtaking knowledge of multiple literatures, one comes away much better informed about the complexities of international politics but not equally enlightened about the Cold War itself.

The Cold War: A World History

The Second Cold War: Carter, Reagan, and the Politics of Foreign Policy

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Acknowledgments Bryan E. Vizzini received his PhD in history from UNC—Chapel Hill in 1999, and has been teaching at West Texas A&M University since 2001. In addition to teaching survey courses in Latin American history, World history, and American history, Bryan regularly teaches courses in film and history and graduate seminars in cultural history. Bryan's research interests include film and literary appropriations of the Mexican Revolution, Cold War themes in 1950s science fiction, and the use of graphic novels and comics in teaching history. Notes 1. Brian Neve, for example, cites the production and release of at least 42 anti-communist films between 1951 and 1953 alone. See Neve, Film and Politics in America: A Social Tradition (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 187. See also Linda K. Fuller, “The Ideology of the ‘Red Scare’ Movement: McCarthyism in the Movies,” in Paul Loukides and Linda K. Fuller, eds., Beyond the Stars, (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1990), 229–248. 2. See Peter Nicholls’ entry for “Politics”, in John Clute and Peter Nicholls, eds., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, (New York, NY: St. Martin's Griffin), 1995. 3. See Roger A. Berger, “‘Ask What You Can Do for Your Country’: The Film Version of H. G. Wells's The Time Machine and the Cold War,” Literature/Film Quarterly, 17.3 (1989): 177–187; Peter Biskind, “Pods, Blobs, and Ideology in American Films of the Fifties,” in Georg Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, eds., Shadows of the Magic Lamp: Fantasy and Science Fiction in Film (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), 58–72; James B. Gilbert, “Wars of the Worlds,” Journal of Popular Culture, 10.2 (1976): 326–336; Cyndy Hendershot, Paranoia, the Bomb, and 1950s Science Fiction Films (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999); and Patrick Lucanio, Them or Us: Archetypal Interpretations of Fifties Alien Invasion Films (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1987). 4. When the Chinese Communists took control of China in 1949, Republican legislators charged Democrats with having “lost” China. Senator Joseph McCarthy quickly charged that the “loss” had resulted from communist infiltration of the U.S. State Department. The now-famous senator went on to accuse the Truman administration and even the Army of harboring communist sympathizers and subversives. See David Caute, The Great Fear (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 562–567. 5. “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” <http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0049366/>. 16 August 2005. 6. John Foster Dulles, “A Policy of Boldness,” reprinted in Hugh Ross, The Cold War: Containment and its Critics (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1963), 22–24. 7. Adlai Stevenson, “Labor Day Speech,” reprinted in Hugh Ross, The Cold War: Containment and its Critics (Chicago, IL: Rand McNally, 1963), 27–28. 8. See Daniel J. Leab, “How Red Was My Valley: Hollywood, the Cold War Film, and I Married a Communist,” Journal of Contemporary History, 19.1 (January, 1984): 59–88. 9. See Teresa Alves, “‘Some Enchanted Evening’: Tuning in the Amazing Fifties, Switching Off The Elusive Decade,” American Studies International 39.3 (2001): 25–40. 10. See Kirshner, “Subverting The Cold War In The 1960s: Dr. Strangelove, The Manchurian Candidate, And The Planet Of The Apes,” Film & History 31.2 (2001): 40–44.

Here, in a total of 1,723 pages of text and annotated bibliography is the combined wisdom of 75 major scholars from 18 countries (though most of them live in either the United States or the United Kingdom) of the period of world history known as the Cold War. An epigraph for the entire enterprise would be J. R. McNeill's observation, at the opening of his essay on “The Biosphere and the Cold War,” that the Cold War “is one of the handful of subjects that can keep hundreds of historians busy all their lives” (3:422). In effect, these volumes comprise a history of the postwar world from 1945 to 1991. Origins concludes, by and large, in 1962; Crises and Détente runs roughly from 1962 through mid to late 1975; and then there is Endings. Each volume includes both transnational thematic essays as well as country studies. Not surprisingly, no single theme unifies the essays in any given volume, though Odd Arne Westad's opening essay, “The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century,” establishes the ambitious scope and fundamental conviction at the base of the entire enterprise. For Westad, understanding the Cold War “is very much about understanding global processes of change.” The “very promise of modernity” that the wars of the first half of the twentieth century had brought into question was at the heart of the Soviet-American rivalry that consumed its second half. Westad argues that the “superpowers' post-1945 models of development seemed, each in its own way, to rescue two key aspects of that promise: individual freedom and social justice” (1:17). Over its long course, the Cold War was “a significant part of the history of the twentieth century and … an important ingredient in most of its other parts” (1:19).

The Poetics and Politics of Translation in Contemporary Drama, 1960s-1990s Avishek Ganguly This dissertation studies a group of twentieth-century plays from India, Ireland, Nigeria and Britain that have rarely been read together. Through close readings of dramatic texts by authors like Utpal Dutt, Brian Friel, David Edgar and Wole Soyinka and, I examine the significant place of translation figured as dramatic technique in contemporary drama and theatre. The dissertation, therefore, adopts a more formal rather than substantive logic of comparison. Translation, in drama and theatre studies, is usually invoked to either describe the transformation of a literary text from page to the stage, or by way of a more general understanding, as the literal transfer of plays from one language into another. I look at translation within rather than of a dramatic text. This approach allows me to address the insufficient attention that figurative uses of translation have received in drama and theatre studies, and make two critical interventions: first, to demonstrate how a dramatic technique figured in translation disrupts the assumptions of what appears to be a constitutive monolingualism in the writing and reception of drama and theatre. Since the ascendancy of performance studies in the nineteen sixties, critical work on drama and theatre has taken an anti-text, and by extension, anti-literary stance. By contrast, my reading is mindful of the performative aspect of these plays without necessarily privileging it at the expense of the literary in so far as such a distinction can be consistently sustained. The second critical intervention is to locate moments in the texts when acts of translation create new social collectivities and hence serve as a point of departure for a political reading. The emergence of social protest movements on the one hand, and the fall of communism at the end of the Cold War on the other frame the different imaginations of collectivity that I trace in these texts. The first and second waves of decolonization in Asia and Africa, and their subsequent postcolonial predicaments productively supplement this framework. My dissertation also relates to the category of translation as it organizes the prevalent concept of ‘world literature,’ which in its focus on the novel has been insufficiently attentive to drama. I trouble as well as extend the logics of classification by recontextualizing the authors beyond their dominant national-literary configurations.

Despite its centrality at a pivotal crossroads of both land and sea of East-West trade, communications and travel, the region now known as Southeast Asia provides very few scholarly works situating or featuring it in an international context. Because of this paucity, there is immense scope for exploration. But prior to further explorations, justification is needed to establish that Southeast Asia, as a region, is a subject of interest, relevance, and significance in a global context. Southeast Asia was home to several empires whose reach transcended the region and beyond. Southeast Asia in, and as part of international history as an area of study is therefore justifiable. Moreover, other factors come into play, viz. geography, resources, migration, diffusion of ideas and beliefs from without and accommodation from within, shared experience of imperialism and colonialism, decolonization, and the Cold War, and the collective fate under the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), that further bolster its rationalization as a component of international history. Explorations, on the other hand, examine issues and obstacles that contribute to the paucity of works on Southeast Asia in international history. Furthermore, in contextualizing Southeast Asia in international history, there might appear challenges that need to be identified, confronted, and resolved.

Reviewed by: The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917–1991 by Silvio Pons, and: Debating Modern Revolution: The Evolution of Revolutionary Ideas (Debates in World History) by Jack R. Censer, and: A History of the Barricade by Eric Hazan, and: Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions ed. by Keith Michael Baker and Dan Edelstein Mark Jones The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917–1991. By silvio pons. Translated by allan cameron. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 400 pp. $25.00 (hardcover). Debating Modern Revolution: The Evolution of Revolutionary Ideas (Debates in World History). By jack r. censer. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016. 224 pp. $19.95 (paper). A History of the Barricade. By eric hazan. Translated by david fernbach. New York: Verso Books, 2015. 132 pp. $17.95 (hardcover). Scripting Revolution: A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions. Edited by keith michael baker and dan edelstein. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015. 448 pp. $29.95 (paper). A Publisher's Cliché? Global Approaches to the History of Revolution In 2015 Natalie Zemon Davis observed that "global" was becoming something of a publishers cliché.1 For the first book under review here, Silvio Pons's The Global Revolution: A History of International Communism 1917–1991, it is a case of guilty as charged. Originally published in Italian as Stato e Rivoluzione (State and Revolution), Pons's book is not a global history of revolution. It is largely a study of the leadership of the Soviet Union. How did Soviet decision makers think about their state's relations with the Communist movement beyond the borders of the Soviet Union? Was revolution coming in Western Europe in the 1920s and 1930s? What international organization should exist to manage the relations between Communist parties? Should the Soviet state's security take precedence over the need to spread revolution elsewhere? Why was there a breakdown in unity between the Communist countries during the Cold War? These are the questions that dominate Pons's narrative. He explores them through an examination of the positions of key actors, placing those [End Page 266] positions within a wider context provided by a traditional history of international relations. The book's six chapters are organized chronologically: Revolution (1917–1923); State (1924–1939); War (1939–1945); Empire (1945–1953); Decline (1953–1968); and Crisis (1968–1991). With a key role in three of the six chapters, Stalin is the book's dominant figure. Indeed, up to 1945, the roles of Communist leaders outside of Russia remain largely peripheral to Pons's story. It is only really in the book's final chapters, when a combination of the rise of Third Worldism and Communist China force Pons away from his central preoccupation with Europe. But even then, such excursions are largely temporary. The text is dense. It never really succeeds in bringing together the narratives. Instead, it jumps from overly detailed discussion of Moscow's position, before skimming through other issues which this reader thought could have been more central. For example, even though it was essential to the international politics of the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War is dealt with briefly.2 The approach is drawn from a conception of power that leaves little room for the intervention of anyone beneath the highest levels of leadership, something that feels quite strange, given that so much of the book is about reactive politics that occurred as a result of crises in legitimacy that were driven from below. There is a striking contrast between Pons's approach and recent work by Jeffrey Roberts, whose essay in the Oxford Handbook of the History of Communism shows how Soviet policies were also formulated from the bottom up.3 On other issues covered by Pons, general readers will find their interests better covered elsewhere. Among many examples, Tony Judt provides a much more readable introduction to European Communism post-1945 while Arne Westad's The Global Cold War remains the standard bearer for global histories of the Cold War.4 Having said all of that, however, despite its misleading title, The Global Revolution is not a bad book. The parts dealing with repression within the Comintern...

The genres of world literature: the case of magical realism

Cold War Crucible: The Korean Conflict and Postwar by Masuda Hajimu. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2015. vi, 388 pp. $39.95 US (cloth). The time has long past when 1950-1953 conflict in Korea could be called the forgotten Of course, war has never been forgotten on Korean peninsula itself, where a heavily fortified armistice line still separates two mutually hostile regimes more than sixty years after ceasefire. In China, Aid Korea, Resist America as it is called, remains a source of pride for People's Republic even if relations with both Korea and America have changed radically since war. In West, including United States that contributed by far largest number of United Nations forces to conflict (followed by Britain and Canada), scholarship and memorialization of war has recently come into its own, after decades of being overshadowed by World War II and Vietnam. Masuda Hajimu's Cold War Crucible is a unique and valuable contribution to historiography of Korean War--or more precisely, to history of Cold War and Korean War's central place in emergence of that global conflict. Masuda Hajimu, a US-trained Japanese historian based in Singapore, admits that his book is not about Korean War itself. Rather, it explores how war functioned as a catalyst in crucible of postwar and contributed to materialization of Cold War world (6). Hajimu reverses usual logic about relationship between Korea and Cold War: rather than see Korean War as an effect of emerging Cold War, Hajimu argues that Korea in important ways produced Cold War. As Bruce Cumings and others have long pointed out, Communist invasion of South Korea in June 1950 justified rapid and long-lasting expansion of US forces around and hardened geopolitical lines of Cold War conflict between Soviet Union and China, on one side, and United States-led Free World, on other. But Hajimu is not primarily interested in Cold War geopolitics. He focuses instead on effects of Korean War on domestic societies in Asia, North America, and Europe. The Korean War, Hajimu claims, turned domestic societies into battlefields in which people were forced to choose sides in a global conflict expressed at local level. Cold War Crucible is interested less in geopolitical realities than in discursive imaginings. The Korean War created bipolarity within societies on both sides of East-West divide, and bipolar division of Cold War became a simplified prism for seeing a postwar, decolonizing, post-imperial whose realities were far more multi-dimensional and complex. …

This essay reflects on the paradox of how the twenty-first-century opening up of comparative literature to non-Western literatures under the aegis of world literature has coincided with the age of global Anglophone and the virtual minoritization of all non-Anglophone literatures. This is a remarkably different outcome from earlier globalized conjunctures – of orientalism and empire, or decolonization and the Cold War. This essay argues that a comparison with the dynamics of those earlier moments can bring into relief the difference of the current Anglocentric position – a position that assumes that anything not already visible in English is probably not worth knowing. The second half of the essay moves beyond a comparative critique of these practices of invisibilization and illustrates five of the many ways of looking at the minor that are at the heart of this special issue. These are: the cultivation of an attitude of curiosity and a sense of unknowing; a robust use of the traditionally disparaged practice of indirect translations; a strong and explicitly avowed political interest; the cultivation of a multilingual sensibility; and, lastly, the active signalling of literary works and worlds beyond English in Anglophone works. This last practice goes beyond exhibiting traces of other languages, either explicitly or implicitly. The essay develops one example of Anglophone world literature that does not minoritize other literatures and in that way cuts across traditional vertical accounts of the relation between major and minor: the writings of English and Urdu writer Aamer Hussein, which actively works in traces and references to other language texts and traditions, and features characters who live across language worlds and are nourished by different literary traditions. By discussing alternative modes of reading, translation, circulation, and writing, the essay explores the interplay between critical and aesthetic discourses of minority.

Animals have prowled literature from its beginnings in the ancient world through medieval bestiaries and out from the margins of the novel in the modern era. In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, animals’ literary presence has generated increasing critical interest. Animal studies, a relatively new interdisciplinary field, calls attention to the accelerating exploitation of animals in the period of industrial modernity and questions what it is possible to know about animals’ own experiences. Foundational theoretical approaches to understanding the historical and philosophical condition of thinking about animals—John Berger’s “Why Look at Animals?” (1972), Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” (1974), and Jacques Derrida’s “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)” (2002)—propose a fundamental aporia or gap between human and animal experiences, and they caution against the projection of anthropocentric categories onto animal lives. Many novels from this recent period likewise treat animals as charismatic strangers. Yet other contemporary literature sometimes reimagines human-animal relationships to insist on affinity and continuity. In such novels, animals prompt diverse and often experimental stylistic choices that put pressure on the novel’s traditional association with everyday life, the individual self, the boundaries of the nation, and empirical observation more broadly. Still, many recent novels remain essentially committed to a realist tradition. Some of these—most notably by J. M. Coetzee—depict relations of care between humans and often vulnerable or dependent animals that prompt reflection on the meaning of ethical action. In novels that purport to narrate from animals’ own perspective, writers likewise meditate on the ethics of interspecies relations as they use language innovatively in an effort to realistically evoke the sensorium of another species. Pushing the boundaries of realism, other novels reinvent the animal fable, using varying degrees of fantasy to imagine wild or domesticated animals as tropes that reflect upon human embodiment, community, and politics. Whether realist or fabulist, the novels of contemporary postcolonial and world literature particularly explore the power and limits of mapping histories of human belonging and domination onto animal figures, even as they often highlight the limitations of these comparisons. Not all of these approaches are equally invested in creating a literature that could materially impact the lives of animals in an era of diminishing biodiversity. However, uniting this varied and ever-growing array of novels is a question of how literature can represent the lives of intimately entangled bodies in a globalizing world.

In the summer of 2003, as the mounting costs and difficulties facing U.S. and British forces in Iraq became ever more apparent, ministers and officials responded to growing international criticism by invoking a plea: the challenge of administrating postwar Iraq following the collapse of Saddam Hussein's odious regime was so unique, so wholly different from what had gone on elsewhere and before, that no amount of prewar planning could have prepared them adequately for the realities now confronting troops and civilian administrators in that vast, inhospitable, and war-torn country. More time was needed before judgment could be passed. This self-exculpatory plea should not be dismissed out of hand. The violent overthrow of a deeply entrenched and despotic regime by an external military force has created a set of challenges that are, arguably, more akin to those faced by the victorious Allies in Germany and Japan at the end of World War II than they are to those with which international administrators have had to grapple after the Cold War. And yet, there is something plainly disingenuous about the claim that the problems now encountered in Iraq could not possible have been anticipated. The fact is that allied officials, especially in Washington, underestimated the complexity of the postwar administrative and, above all, political challenges presented by an economically weakened, communally fragmented, and religiously divided Iraq. They did so in spite of important lessons that could have been sought from the rich and varied history of international administration in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The much more recent experience of international administration after the Cold War also appears to have played little, if any, role in informing and sensitizing officials involved in planning for the postwar reconstruction of the country. This in spite of the fact that governing Iraq has thrown up challenges the nature of which bear strong similarities to those encountered elsewhere in the 1990s, even though the scale of the undertaking in Iraq is clearly more daunting and the wider issues at stake for more critical in terms of both international security and regional stability. It is with these more recent experiences that this special issue of Global Governance is concerned. The period since the early 1990s has witnessed an extraordinary, though still understudied, phenomenon in international relations: a growing willingness on the part of the international community to entrust the United Nations and other international organizations with the authority to govern and administer, on an interim basis, war-torn and contested territories. In Eastern Slavonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and East Timor--all covered in detail in this special issue--the responsibilities assumed by external actors have been so extensive as to warrant the politically and historically sensitive labels of trusteeship and protectorate. In these four cases, the remit of international administrators has covered, inter alia, the creation and enforcement of new legal systems; the management and rebuilding of the local economies; the appointment and dismissal of officials; the reconstruction and operation of public utilities; the establishment of effective customs and police services; and, not least, the provision of public security. In other cases, notably Cambodia in 1992-1993 and more recently in Afghanistan, the governance functions assumed by international bodies have been less extensive, though still unprecedented by the standards of the postcolonial period. Not surprisingly, these experiences have generated an impressive body of literature on individual operations and, especially, on the technical and operational challenges that have had to be overcome. The key questions with which much of this literature has been concerned are similar to those that have informed writings on the increasingly complex and demanding character of modern peacekeeping: How does one go about recruiting troops and civilians with the necessary skills to administer war-torn territories? …

The article discusses the relationship between global history and Brazilian history and suggests an agenda for future research. It argues that global history scholars could profit from Brazil's great scholarly tradition, which conceptualises key topics of global history such as global encounters and cultural identities, power asymmetries and spatial orders. Scholars interested in Brazilian history, on the other hand, will find a set of approaches and questions from a global history perspective helpful for research on central fields of Brazil historiography such as the coffee economy, scientific racism, the Cold War and the Amazon.

Notes on Contributors