The Cold War, as a historical period, ranged from 1947 to 1991. During this time when the United States and the Soviet Union confronted each other, this interstate rivalry was the stage on which both superpowers sought to bring the other to its knees. As Andreas Glaeser underscores, on both sides, Cold War politics was “an intentional effort to maintain or get an advantage in the balance of power while at the same time avoiding any direct military confrontation.” The United States was a liberal, capitalist state that espoused political democracy; the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was a communist state with a centralized economy that ignored political democracy. Both sought to create their own empires as part of their struggle. Empire building and decolonization both took place during these years. For generations, the rest of the world was faced with only three choices: to be on the side of the United States, to be on the side of the USSR, or to try to be nonaligned.

The ontological complexity of the twentieth-century Cold War motivates this special issue’s investigation of how social scientists conceptualize institutional novelty and change. We begin by noting the peculiar elision of the Cold War as an explanatory mechanism in mainstream sociology, even while sociologists have theoretical tools for making sense of the phenomenon: war, schema, field, world systems, and empire. All are useful; none are sufficient. We locate the explanatory problem in a tension between notions of structure and event that has organized debate in historical social science for several scholarly generations, and offer a new intellectual tool – medium durée – as a way forward. Medium durée describes phenomena that have sufficient cohesion as ideas and relationships to endure over time, yet remain sufficiently unfixed and ambiguous as to enable multifarious action and sensemaking. Our notion of medium durée is substantially informed by the articles and commentaries assembled for this special issue, which represent three years of dialogue among the authors as well as audiences in serial panels at the 2022 and 2023 annual meetings of the Social Science History Association.

Wars make states, but the conclusion of conflict is critical for the trajectory of state-building that follows. At the end of World War II, both conservatives and progressives in the United States recognized the potential for ongoing statist development fueled by the wartime introduction of mass taxation and the expansion of regulatory intervention into the lives of citizens and the activities of firms. Entrenched traditions of anti-statism in American politics resurfaced forcefully only to encounter the new threats of a nuclear-capable Soviet Union and the onset of what came to be known as the Cold War. This conjuncture both reoriented and fractured trajectories of state development, leading to reliance on mechanisms – capitation, categorical eligibility, regulation of organizations, and limited duration – that enabled expansive federal intervention in the form of funds attached to rules but minimized the construction of new bureaucratic organization. These governing practices are evident in both the Serviceman’s Readjustment Act of 1944 (the G.I. Bill) and the European Recovery Act of 1948 (the Marshall Plan). The result was the development of a powerful postwar state that was deeply marked by anti-statist politics, a configuration that shaped future waves of both policy expansion and openings for renewed efforts to constrain the capacity of the American state.

This article analyzes the Romanian transition to communism in the late 1940s. The cultural turn in political sociology shows that state building has a strongly symbolic and performative element. Less attention has been paid to the symbolic aspects of regime change, which involves the need to not just accrue power but also diminish that of others. This article starts with a processual understanding of the state, one where a regularity such as the state needs to be validated with reference to time and space. Preexisting understandings, however, are sticky and potentially path-dependent. Regime change is therefore not simply (or always) a matter of failing to validate old understandings – but also actively elaborating and promoting their replacement. To justify regime change, Romanian communists thus worked to elaborate new historical and contextual understandings of the state, engineering a turning point that effectively established a new version of the Romanian state. Without reifying institutions, we can nonetheless make space for process itself to accumulate and (momentarily, incompletely) stabilize, such that social change is a difficult though not impossible achievement.

With the Cold War’s epicenter shifting from Europe to the Third World, the Eisenhower administration’s foreign policy concerns of containing the Soviet bloc were tied to questions of socioeconomic development. Besides “trade and aid,” the appeal of this shift rested on the apparent complementarity between ideas of rural modernization and the practices of agrarian democracy. “Community development” referred to a series of projects initiated by the Ford Foundation and postcolonial governments toward this cultural-political end. This article examines the contested meanings, practices, and outcomes of such a project in East Pakistan (present-day Bangladesh). Drawing on the project’s archives and published sources, it addresses how and why a disjuncture between the political-societal aspirations of decolonization and the hardening Manicheanism of Cold War competition came to characterize the contested trajectory of this project. As its proponents and detractors negotiated competing expectations, inter-regional tensions, and geostrategic interests, this disjuncture gave way to a developmental ideology envisioned around the technocratic nodes of population control and food production. Consequently, the supposed complementarity between “agrarian democracy” and modernization was relegated to the margins of developmental thinking, even as growing rural unrest and Cold War realpolitik propelled its need for legitimizing new claims on political power. The prism of community development enables a novel analysis of the conjunctural dynamics of mid-twentieth-century decolonization and the contingencies of Cold War politics of agrarian modernization.

This article tries to explain the flourishing of geopolitical alternatives to the nation-state form and foreign policies organized around giant militarized power blocs during the two decades after World War II. The first section presents these new approaches to organizing the world. The first set of alternatives consisted of ideas and practices of the federation and the amalgamation of states into larger political units. These included Senghor’s vision of a postcolonial federation in which France and its former colonies would be equals; Nkrumah’s vision of a United States of Africa; and various short-lived amalgamations of states, including the Mali Federation and the United Arab Republic. These new geopolitical alternatives also included nonalignment, which originated with Jawaharlal Nehru of India and culminated with Josip Broz Tito of Yugoslavia but also encompassed Ireland between 1957 and 1961 and France in the early Fifth Republic. One of the distinctive features of this conjuncture is that these experiments were not limited to the global peripheries, colonies, and recently decolonized states, but also characterized certain nonhegemonic European core countries. The second section examines a set of four factors in this period that created an opportunity structure or space of possibilities for geopolitical experimentation: (1) late colonialism; (2) the Cold War; (3) the character of decolonization; and (4) the United Nations. The coexistence of these factors opened spaces of maneuver and autonomy for a flourishing of geopolitical imaginaries. The final section discusses possible reasons for the end of this period of experimentation.

In the mid-20th century, The Cold War structured possibilities for politics across the Global South. These strategies were articulated through three competing means to realize the justice and equality promised by newly won independence from colonialism. Global South states could choose from among the following three options, which had many overlaps and intersections: alignment with the United States, alignment with the Soviet Union, and non-alignment. By the 1970s and into the 1980s, left- and right-wing alternatives developed to oppose the limitations of these three perspectives. On the left, Maoism inspired anti-imperialists of the Global South and also sympathizers in the North who stood in solidarity with anti-imperialist struggles. On the right, newly oil-wealthy Saudi Arabia developed a puritanical Islamic alternative to Maoist anti-imperialism and promoted these ideas across Africa and Asia. These ideas did not fall from public consciousness with the formal collapse of the Soviet Union and live on today. My article assesses the different templates for political and economic development that the Cold War engendered, focusing on the legacy of left and right alternatives developed in reaction to their failures. I conclude that these ideological contestations from the Global South reveal that the Cold War was not a mere rivalry between the United States and Soviet Union, it was a global ideological contestation over liberalism; the constituting ideology of capitalism.

The articulations of science and politics in the Cold War in the United States are well studied in histories of American political culture. However, these histories are often given focus and coherence via concepts and understandings taken from political realism and sociological institutionalism, thereby underestimating the transformations in the very idea of political reality that helped form the Cold War era in the United States. This paper launches an investigation of the relationship between speculative fiction and scientific and political discourse during that era to explore how the political culture of the United States came to be structured not only by a certain imagination but also by a particular set of fantasies. Building on the history of war-gaming at the RAND Corporation, the author conducts a close reading of a RAND Corporation report turned popular science publication. This suggests that, during the Cold War, a new standpoint from which to view the political world – the view from outer space – began to organize how the American political project for the globe represented its own modernity to itself. This view, drawn from science fiction but made real in its ethos and its political consequences, projected an understanding of “mankind” as but an infant in the early stages of what would become its interstellar destiny. A baleful consequence of this view was its tendency to free political actors and intellectuals from the urgent problem, identified acutely by Hannah Arendt in her essay “Man’s Conquest of Space,” of creating a world in common on earth.

The scandal of the Cuban Missile Crisis lies in the fact that it brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war for actions associated with relatively minor strategic and political gains. In this article I will treat this crisis as a diagnostic event to identify two significant interinstitutional dynamics that drove Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy to this rationality-defying precipice. The first of these dynamics explores the consequences of transitioning military units from peacetime routines to crisis-level field deployment, which quickly created considerable command-and-control problems for both political leaders. Yet each believed that the other side remained in control of its forces, erroneously understanding local action by the other side as strategic moves ordered by central command. This created the potential for uncontrollable escalation. The second dynamic resulted from the interaction of two institutional arrangements in the United States. American presidents are simultaneously the country’s highest decision makers in foreign affairs and political campaigners interested in their own reelection. Foreign policy decisions thus become potential campaign moves. After World War II, a campaigning tradition emerged in which both parties felt compelled to outdo each other with anticommunist rhetoric and policies. This strategy built on deeply instituted anticommunism in the electorate, which politicians felt compelled to further cultivate. This dynamic significantly limited Kennedy’s response options, making it more likely than not that he would have called for an invasion of Cuba if Khrushchev had not backed down. The consequences would have been disastrous. The article concludes with tentative lessons to learn from these two dynamics.

In this article, I discuss the Cold War as a label, meaning, and referent in academic research. I consider how the label “the Cold War” focuses attention on the conflict between the United States and USSR and draws attention away from the Global South. I show how academics often use the category the Cold War as a diminished subtype of interstate war, with the adjective cold calling attention to the absence of direct military combat. I analyze the meanings and referents associated with different ways of “casing” the Cold War: a case of cold war, a case of interstate rivalry, and a case of empire building. I also examine the separate meanings of the Cold War when it is treated as a world-historical time versus an event. Using the essays in this special issue, I examine how sociologists study the Cold War as an empirical referent. I find that the cultural orientation of sociology emphasizes symbolic and performative aspects of the Cold War that are not traditionally emphasized in work on the Cold War.