For quite a while now, historians have discussed whether our understanding of the global Cold War should remain focused on the diplomatic-military confrontation of the two (former) superpowers or whether we should broaden our interpretation towards a more multi-layered and de-centralised approach. In the context of the rapidly growing body of literature, this edited volume deserved particular attention as an important and enriching plea for the latter.

In his clear and well-argued introduction, Masuda Hajimu drafts both a comprehensive and ambitious agenda implemented in case studies on Southeast Asian and, to a lesser extent, also South Asia (India, Burma) and East Asia (Japan). Moving away from an understanding of the Cold War in Asia as a mere reflection of larger, international dynamics, Masuda suggests framing the Cold War as social warfare. In this perspective, ideological, political, and military-strategic tensions conventionally associated with this era appear strongly interwoven with ‘people’s social conflicts and culture wars on the ground’ (p. 7). As a consequence, the Cold War can no longer be separated from mainly two historical elements: social relations and conflicts within Asia’s local communities, villages, towns, and regions; and socio-cultural patterns that characterise Asian societies much longer than the antagonism between capitalist and communist world views. Those include regional traditions of state evasion or the role of ethnicity and religion within and between societies.

The Cold War, understood not primarily as a transatlantic political event but as a socially constructed phenomenon, directs our historical understanding towards a range of questions and aspects so far under-represented in historiography. The volume, for example, seeks to enrich Cold War historiography with the history of emotions, particularly of women. Luong Thi Hong’s chapter on Vietnamese Women Volunteers during the Vietnam War is an illustration not only of how women perceived the violence but also what their multiple contributions were on the ground. Memories are another important but underacknowledged element of the Cold War era that affected not only direct witnesses but families and communities over generations (chapter on the Philippines by Mary Grace R. Concepcion).

The range of experiences made during this era by ordinary Asians centrally includes the multiple ways through which people observed, interpreted, suffered from, but also made use of Cold War dynamics. The second part of the book contains fascinating case studies on the Naxalites in South India or vernacular anti-communism in Laos to uncover ‘local imaginings and identity politics’ (p. 113). One could add here that, together with other chapters, these cases demonstrate the importance of people’s aspirations for how they positioned themselves towards and got involved in translocal processes. Individuals from Cold War Okinawa, Japan, used new opportunities to study abroad which shaped their worldviews, ambitions, and practical strategies in the context of US-occupation (Chapter 8 by Kinuko Maehara-Yamazato). Similarly, during the 1960s and 1970s people in Burma joined the Red Guards less for ideological reasons but to pursue their aspirations to improve their ‘current, seemingly hopeless lives’ (p. 270) in a society haunted since long by colonial exploitation, economic disruptions, and ethnic tensions (Chapter 10 by Bin Yang).

Corresponding with its framing of the Cold War, the volume puts its methodological focus on oral history archives and sources produced in local languages. The case studies are a rich collection of unconventional narratives, unheard voices and undocumented actors in the continent’s rich Cold War histories. A final section called reflections contains comments by established scholars of global Cold War historiography who provide some additional placement of the volume’s insights in the context of other regions (Latin America) and Asian history more generally.

As the editor’s introduction sets the terms for this volume so well, the case studies primarily implement this agenda with a clear emphasis on the empirics. This provides the volume with an admirable degree of cohesion but also makes the collection conceptually front-heavy (Kisho Tsuchiya’s chapter on theorizing the Cold War being a notable exception). In addition to realising Masuda’s framework, several chapters invite further conceptual-theoretical discussions. For example, Imam Muhtarom’s illuminating chapter on the conflict between Nahdlatul Ulama and the Communist Party in Indonesia (PKI) around the mass murder in 1965/66 contains valuable lessons for the social root causes of mass violence more generally. Connecting this case study not only with Cold War narratives but also with the growing literature on the role of social upheavals in (the preparation of) mass violence would have been a worthwhile addition. In a similar manner, the contribution of the case study on Vietnamese Women Volunteers to the evolving debate among historians on the role of women in communist movements remains unexplored.

A second area where I see room for more investigation concerns the question how these local Cold Wars, their narratives, imaginaries and memories were situated in a larger context. The volume is convincing in its effort to demonstrate how they were interconnected with larger processes of international relations, transnational tensions and warfare. Less clear remains whether and, if so, how they were entangled among themselves. Two examples must suffice. I was surprised to see that the framework suggested in this volume does not engage with established notions of the Cold War as a social conflict. Together with others, Robert Saull suggested already a while ago to situate the Cold War more centrally in the history of colonialism, capitalism, and social revolution in the Global South. A question derived from this approach is which social patterns, tensions and disruptions postcolonial Asian societies share that help us understand distinct patterns of the Cold War era. Such a discussion would align well with this volume’s framing of the Cold War as social war.

Another example is decolonisation. Given that most of the societies discussed in the chapters are postcolonial societies (and also Thailand and Japan have been deeply influenced by imperialism and occupation), the question what this experience was about and how it structured Asianness in the Cold War era seems important.

Overall, though, these underexplored areas of investigation only underline the rich contribution Masuda Hajimu and his co-authors delivered with this volume. I wholeheartedly recommend its close reading to students and scholars interested not only in Cold War Asia but twentieth century Asian and global history more generally.