This chapter canvasses coalitions for and against pluralism that emerged with the foundation of the Republic of Turkey. It shows that while the early nation-builders pursued a unitary, ethno-nationalist project, Kemalism also entailed an “embedded liberalism” inherited from late Ottoman modernization, including resources for eventual democratization. Throughout the twentieth century, political actors sought to mobilize these resources toward pluralizing the political system across a series of critical junctures (e.g., the 1920s’ cultural revolution; the 1950 transition to multiparty democracy; successive coups in 1960, 1971, and 1980; and a 1997 “postmodern coup.”) Across these junctures, the chapter argues, there were only two pronounced periods of secularist/Islamist cleavages. More often, conflict was driven by significant, cross-camp cooperation and intra-camp rivalry. Tracing when and why pluralizing and anti-pluralist alignments succeeded or failed, the chapter captures a key dynamic: the installation of an ethno(-religious nationalist project – the Turkish-Islamic Synthesis (TIS) – as national project, even as ideas and actors invested in pluralization continued to mobilize.

During the war, American industries depended on a steady stream of Chinese hog bristles, tungsten and tin ore, alongside a whole host of other raw materials. This chapter focuses on how demand for these products prompted the US government to forge new connections to Chinese businessmen and government agencies. These connections served as the foundation for lucrative postwar trans-Pacific business networks between American and Chinese that enriched Chinese and American businessmen alike and continued throughout the 1940s. The Chinese case served as the blueprint for an idealized postwar economic order that, envisioned by Wilsonian liberals in the US government, was anchored by free trade, private business, and the circulation of American dollars.

This chapter looks at the ways how, from 1948 onwards, the meaning of the trials changed in light of the broader Cold War context internationally and intensifying criticism domestically. Administratively, the trials were coming to an end. They had, from the perspective of the public authorities, succeeded in their original purposes of securing inner peace and stability during the early months following the liberation. Yet, from 1948 onwards, they became acutely relevant in light of the new political threats and challenges the Norwegian state faced, at the same time as the authorities sought to defend their legacy in light of mounting criticism from some sentenced collaborators and public intellectuals. This chapter therefore argues that the final stages of the trials assumed a renewed demonstrative dimension as the government sought to reassert its administrative and interpretative authority over the trials in a changed political context.

Chapter 5 analyzes the evolving security structures in East Asia since the end of World War II. What counts as security for the countries in the region and beyond, and the policy choices made accordingly, have made East Asian security the way it is today. Evolution shapes every component of international security, specifically the nation, the nature of politics, and epistemology. Conventional security theories such as the security dilemma and alliance apply to East Asia partly because Western practice and theory have become parts of East Asian practice and theoretical thinking. At the same time, East Asia had a much longer history, and was not a blank canvas for outside influence. The mixture of the old and new explains why East Asian security concepts and practices seem partly familiar and partly strange, which is characteristic of East Asian international relations.

Initially neutral in the Second World War, Iran was drawn into the conflict due to its strategic location and economic importance, particularly its oil resources. After the German attack on the Soviet Union, Iran’s position south of the Soviet borders became crucial for supporting the eastern front. Consequently, British, and Soviet forces occupied Iran in August 1941, transforming it into the ‘Bridge of Victory.’ This geopolitical significance post-war laid the groundwork for the Cold War. The narrative then shifts to explore Iran’s role during and after the war, focusing on the Iranian oil industry. It delves into the working and living conditions of the oil workers, the organisation of labour, the rise of political radicalism, and the involvement of political parties. A detailed analysis of the bloodiest labour conflict in 1946 highlights the long-term impact of labour radicalism on the social lives of workers and probes the persistence of these radical movements. By connecting Iran’s wartime role to post-war developments, the analysis illuminates the profound effects of global conflicts on local industries and social structures.

Delving into ‘Development Sociology,’ the 1960s are labelled as the ‘Development Decade’ in United Nations parlance, a period recognised for its widespread economic and political reforms globally, particularly in the Global South. During this transformative period, a critical linguistic shift occurred: societies once labelled ‘underdeveloped’ were now referred to as ‘developing countries,’ a designation symbolising their potential to surmount longstanding economic stagnation and poverty. The driving forces behind this development were the developmental states, which, through authoritarian and swift modernisation efforts, aimed to ascend to the ranks of developed nations. Iran exemplified such nations, where a surge in oil revenues, significantly bolstered by OPEC, laid the foundation for rapid, albeit uneven, economic growth. This growth catalysed profound transformations in the working and living conditions of workers, particularly evident in Iran’s oil industry. Reflecting on this period, the examination of the daily lives of these workers reveals how the uneven pace of development markedly influenced their existence, offering insights into the intricate interplay between national development strategies and their palpable effects on the labour force amid global economic shifts.

The framing of the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) in relation to the postwar Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region grafted a political geography onto a broad range of ecological areas. Planners, drawing on climate models, classified the region in agro-ecological terms devised in reference to the tropics. Functionally, their logic shored up a focus on rainfed, or unirrigated, agriculture in semi-arid and arid lands. But their rendering of dry areas masked the geopolitical framing of international agricultural research in the postwar period. Born of the Cold War, ICARDA emerged from exercises of European imperialism, Great Power rivalries, and the improvisation of modern nation-states in Western Asia and North Africa. The chapter charts the imperial origins of international agricultural research in Syria, the Cold War on hunger, and CGIAR’s classification of arid regions, towards an account of (1) the geopolitical logic of international agricultural research and (2) dryland agricultural science as the ground for technological and political intervention in decolonized lands.

Many Jews coming from various parts of Eastern Europe found refuge in Germany, of all places, in huge “displaced-persons camps.” They made up as many Jews as had lived in the country before the war, only they were younger and unexpectedly active. While few German Jews returned to the “land of the murderers,” the new migrants took their place. This chapter tells the tale of their settlement in Germany, parallel to the building up the Federal Republic, especially under the the US military occupation. They could only observe with unease the signs of antisemitism in the new German state, and support the early acts of restitution as well as the financial agreement with Israel signed in 1952. They were also the first to demand some sort of confrontation with the Nazi past. Fritz Bauer, a Jewish jurist who fled to Denmark and later to Sweden during the war and finally returned to Germany afterwards, took it upon himself, as the Prosecutor of the State of Hessen, to organize and then serve as prosecutor in the so-called Auschwitz trials. The chapter ends with his life-story.

The International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) exists as a lonely island in a sea of corporate sugarcane. Standing at the gates of CIAT outside Palmira, Colombia, one absorbs the contrast between the research orientation of the CGIAR’s global food system model and the reality of corporate monoculture. This chapter situates CIAT’s history globally and locally. It introduces Colombian precursors, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Colombian Agricultural Program (1950–64), and the pivot to globally oriented international agricultural research centres in the 1960s. It contextualizes how CIAT came into existence amid broader Cold War and Green Revolution transitions. Just as scholars of the Colombian conflict have examined the effect of “deterritorialization” in the intensification of conflict, the chapter shows how the CGIAR network further internationalized and detached agricultural science from local contexts and applications. Paradoxically, despite the Green Revolution’s well-known Cold War geopolitical aspects, the creation of CIAT and CGIAR inadvertently contributed to the specific geographic, political, and economic conditions that fed armed conflict in Colombia.

The epilogue begins with a brief overview of the ebb and flow of state power at the Sino-Vietnamese border since the mid-1970s onward, revealing the patterns of state-society relations at the border during the decade-long conflict between the two countries and the ensuing era of rapprochement and reform, when the two states had to be “rebuilt,” again collaboratively. It then discusses the broad themes this book illuminates. The interaction between the Chinese and Vietnamese states on a daily basis underlines the significance of the mundane aspect of the territorialization of state and inter-state relations. The story told in this book highlights the necessity to examine the impacts of revolutionary ideology and the global Cold War on Asia against the broader political changes that Asian societies underwent, as well as the striking continuities in the objectives and strategies of state building in the modern era.

This chapter periodises the British historiography of international law in five parts. Its first period extends from Robert Ward’s Enquiry into the Foundation and History of the Law of Nations in Europe (1795) to Thomas Erskine Holland’s Oxford inaugural lecture on Alberico Gentili (1874), and traces the gradual professionalisation of the discipline and its historical strain. The second part examines the entanglement of empire and historicism in British international legal historiography from around 1870 to roughly 1920. The third part treats the symbolic coming of age of British international legal historiography, between the founding of the British Yearbook of International Law in 1920, and Hersch Lauterpacht’s pivotal enunciation of the so-called ‘Grotian’ tradition of international law after the Second World War. The fourth part explores the history of international law in the succeeding ‘age of Lauterpacht’ up to c. 1960, when historiographical advances came increasingly from the semi-periphery rather than the centre and from disciplines other than international law. The fifth part takes stock of the transdisciplinary ‘turn’ to the history of international law in the British world and the chapter concludes with reflections on the nascent field of comparative international legal history in the light of British developments over the longue durée.

Departing from the conventional narrative that views borders exclusively as a source of hostility in inter-Asian relations, this book tells a story of how two revolutionary states launched movements and pursued policies that echoed each other as well as collaborated in extending their authority to the border to temper the transnational tendencies there – a process that the author characterizes as “joint state invasion,” which challenges both the Scottian narrative of state evasion and the Tillyan model of state formation. The Guangxi-northeastern Vietnam border is geographically, economically, and ethnically diverse and includes highlands, lowlands, and access to the Gulf of Tonkin. State activities at the border in the second half of the twentieth century were initiated in the context of historical precedents of successful, and equally importantly, unsuccessful state intrusions into the borderlands. There was a qualitative difference between state activities on the Sino-Vietnamese border that began during the Cold War and those that came before, where “distracted states” facing continuous wars were often unable to devote adequate resources to the task of border making. More importantly, limited coordination between the successive Chinese governments and the French colonial state left the border people significant “wiggle room” to circumvent the political authority.

Central America was a “hot spot” in the Cold War, constituting a strategic zone for US campaigns against communism from the 1960s to the 1980s. During the same period, the region was also a “hot spot” due to the critical nutritional situation of its poorest populations. Informed by the idea of a “protein gap,” international organizations and scientific institutions carried out field investigations and nutritional surveys to identify dietary deficiencies, their causes, and possible solutions. This chapter explores the role that bean varietal improvement played in this situation of war and nutritional crisis, and the political and social conditions under which bean research took shape. It describes the research programs that the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) promoted in Latin America through the 1980s and Central American countries’ participation in these. It reviews the bean program established by CIAT in Latin America and Africa and a regional program created specifically for Central America and the Caribbean. It then interprets the evolution of these programs in the context of civil war and economic crisis in Central America between 1970 and 1990.

Historians have tended to view postwar labor migration, including the Turkish-German case, as a one-directional story whose consequences manifested within host country borders. This chapter complicates this narrative by arguing that Turkish migrants were mobile border crossers who traveled as tourists throughout Western Europe and took annual vacations to their homeland. These seasonal remigrations entailed a three-day car ride across Central Europe and the Balkans at the height of the Cold War. The drive traversed an international highway (Europastraße 5) extending from West Germany to Turkey through Austria, socialist Yugoslavia, and communist Bulgaria. Migrants’ unsavory travel experiences along the way underscored East/West divides, and they transmuted their disdain for the “East” onto their impoverished home villages. Moreover, the cars and “Western” consumer goods they transported reshaped their identities. Those in the homeland came to view the Almancı as superfluous spenders who were spending their money selfishly rather than for the good of their communities. Overall, the idea that a migrant could become German shows that those in the homeland could intervene from afar in debates about German identity amid rising racism: although many derided Turks as unable to integrate, they had integrated enough to face difficulties reintegrating into Turkey.