This conference panel asks panelists to consider where the Cold War was centered, from the point of view of their own empirical work.
Did the Cold War have a geographical direction, or rather a differing determining dynamic shifting between power politics to civic and international organizations, or to the transformation to democracy? In other words, could the global Cold War have contained multiple simultaneous dynamics at play?
The conference addresses the agency of the less powerful states and papers delivered throughout the event pose questions such as: What were the preferable instruments of smaller states and non-state actors for exerting international influence? This panel asks key historians of the era to reflect upon the historiography and their expertise on the conflict and to place of small states and directions in the conflict or reject their influence.
This is the first of two public events which are part of a conference 'Influence of Choice: Alternative histories of non-hegemonic foreign policy in the Cold War', co-hosted by the Cold War Studies Project and the Peace and Security Project based at LSE IDEAS. The second event is The Concept of Feminist Foreign Policy as a Global Strategy Alternative on Friday 4 December.
Click here to view the full conference programme.
Event hashtag: #LSEColdWar
Rinna Kullaa is Associate Professor in Global History in the Faculty of Social Sciences at Tampere University. She works in global history, international relations and European Union's foreign and security to policy.
Lorenz Luthi is Associate Professor at McGill University. He is a leading historian of the Cold War. His first book The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (2008) won the 2008 Furniss Award and the 2010 Marshall Shulman Book Prize.
Wolfgang Mueller is Professor and Chair of Russian History at the University of Vienna and a Professorial Lecturer at the Diplomatic Academy Vienna.
Federico Romero is Professor of History of Post-War European Cooperation and Integration at the European University Institute.
Arne Westad is the Engelsberg Chair at LSE IDEAS for 2020/21. He is the Elihu Professor of History at Yale University.
Roham Alvandi is Associate Professor at the Department of International History, LSE. He is Director of the Cold War Studies Project at LSE IDEAS.
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