Chapter 4 explores how diplomacy was practiced during the Cold War, focusing on how the period reshaped diplomacy and international law. The chapter challenges the view of the Cold War as merely a diplomatic struggle, suggesting instead that it was a struggle over the nature of diplomacy itself. It examines three key struggles: the relationship between openness and secrecy, diplomacy as performance and the concept of neutrality. The Cold War saw a return to secret diplomacy – public diplomacy was intertwined with intelligence and covert operations. In contrast, anti-colonial diplomacy emphasised openness and solidarity, using international institutions as platforms for lawful encounters. The chapter also discusses the contest over neutrality, with European international law protecting neutrality, while the Amero-Soviets disparaged it. The Non-Aligned Movement embraced active neutralism, rejecting Cold War bipolarity. The chapter highlights the diplomatic style of the Third World, which sought to assert a different international law and world order. It critiques the Western response, characterised by anti-diplomacy, relegation, and interventionism. The chapter concludes by emphasising the importance of recognising the plurality of diplomatic practices and international laws during the Cold War, and the ongoing struggle to reconfigure global politics and law after empire.

In this chapter, the starting point is the Bandung conference and the early development of Third Worldism as an ideology. Many socialists and social democrats in the West saw Israel as a progressive force in the years before and after the Jewish state was established. From the mid-1950s, however, there emerged new perspectives on the conflict between Israel and the Arabs as the relationship was increasingly seen in the context of global anti-colonialism and anti-racism. The Suez crisis of 1956 contributed significantly to this interpretation as the conflict was seen as a clash between old imperialist powers and an emerging Third World. Through the 1960s and 1970s, this perspective came to dominate the view of Israel on the political left. Lines were drawn between the conflict between Israel and the Arabs and other conflicts, such as the war in Vietnam and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. The conflicts were increasingly understood as local expressions of a global war between white oppressors and oppressed peoples of color. In this worldview, the Jews were eventually to take the place as the whitest of white oppressors.

This chapter highlights the interlaced histories of race-making and warfare in the early twentieth century, exploring how the emboldened demands for racial equality emerging across the globe during the First World War altered the conceptual foundations of white supremacy in the United States. Knitting together the case studies of Mexican rebels in southern Texas and Indian anti-colonialists in San Francisco and New York, it recounts the international origins of a coalescing national security logic used to justify unequal categories of citizenship. Namely, white Americans’ successful denunciation of various quests for increased social rights as inherently foreign not only enforced a racially exclusionary definition of loyalty to the nation and its war effort but also fueled the rise of discriminatory investigative practices at the hands of the modern surveillance state. Indeed, the First World War triggered a dramatic and permanent transformation in the American intelligence apparatus, which increasingly essentialized nonwhite groups as untrustworthy on the basis of their assumed liability to foreign subversion.

The first decade of the nineteenth century was a crucial period in the development of Haiti and Black identity in the Caribbean. This chapter focuses on the first half of the decade: L’Ouverture’s reign during the abolition of slavery, his capture and exile, and Dessalines’s declaration of Haitian independence. I trace evolving attitudes towards architectural destruction and renovation, focusing on three stages: uncertainty about violence; creolization, mimicry, and renovation; and acceptance of the obliteration of the architectural archive as an anti-colonial act. Drawing on texts by Romantic authors including John Thelwall, William Wordsworth, Marcus Rainsford, and Leonora Sansay, I recover how Romantic ideology and revolutionary practice were not merely transmitted across the Atlantic then passively accepted in the Caribbean. Haitians actively adapted and complicated Romantic and revolutionary ideology, using the common tropes of the period to reimagine their place in the world and assert their rejection of objectification and colonialism

Revolutionary theories were paradigms for transforming future modes of production, social relation, and cultural representation, and for assessing past and existing relations of inequality and unfreedom. In this light, revolutionary theory was its own form of speculative fiction. Contemporary speculative fiction and film by Indigenous and Latinx creatives is a continuation of this revolutionary theorizing. If 20th-century revolutionary movements “failed” Latin American, Latinx, and Indigenous subalterns, then speculative fiction responds to this failure with a 21st-century anti-colonial/decolonial hermeneutic for understanding social relations of power as legacies of colonialism, while the aesthetic conventions of speculative fiction reanimate the genre as a vision of future worlds. Latinx and Indigenous authors and directors of science fiction, neo-gothic, adventure and dystopic/utopic genres explore the legacies of colonialism, neocolonialism, dispossession, and extractivism by creating shared public visions for their audiences of these events, as well as visions of future worlds yet to come.

This chapter explores the origins, nature, and persistence of Cold War liberalism in U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East by analyzing the writings and policies of U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles (1953–59). Dulles was both a pivotal and archetypal figure in the history of U.S.–Middle East relations. The chapter posits three pillars of Cold War liberalism that, with some variation, have undergirded U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East since Dulles’ tenure. First, the United States is preoccupied with the establishment of a global order predicated on a preponderance of American power. This is not a “rules-based” order but rather one upheld by security alliances constructed to advance America’s perceived interests, often in defiance of international laws or norms. Second, Cold War liberalism’s raison d’être is couched in and sometimes shaped by discourses of freedom and self-determination. Third, rhetorical commitments to promoting democracy notwithstanding, Cold War liberalism fuels skepticism, even hostility, toward genuine expressions of democracy and mass politics in the Middle East. Finally, the chapter argues that Cold War liberalism in the Middle East is not limited chronologically to the Cold War. All three pillars have Wilsonian antecedents and continue to shape US–Middle East relations.

Where Clarke examined examples from Rwanda and the 2013 intervention in Libya in order to protect civilians, Boyd van Dijk reminds us that the means of war have long been regulated by humanitarian aspirations quite apart from the humanitarian ends cited for launching it. And, as van Dijk reveals, there have been persistent attempts to “fuse” such humanitarian concern with the concept of human rights or with the legal framework or mobilizational strategies associated with it. Like Clarke, van Dijk does not want to tell an uplifting story, for the fusion of human rights and war could equally produce what he calls “human rights warriors.”

Chapter 4 uses assemblage theory, which is an anti-colonialist theory of social and spatial construction that has traction in the Global South, to show how urban inequalities become assembled, disassembled, and reassembled over time and yet how grassroots activism for social and environmental justice and for community resilience can change the form and functions of cities. Buchanan arose at a time when the role of urban planning in the US cities was growing but largely conceived as the top–down imposition of order and dominant values on urban space. However, we are increasingly aware of just how contested and evolving the practice of urban planning and urban development are. Case studies of green gentrification from Los Angeles, California and Accra, Ghana illustrate the competing ideological perspectives on resilience in cities and the potential for and yet tentativeness of progress towards social justice in urban planning. The chapter explores the connections of racism in American land use with colonialism in the Global South, and the commonalities in the experiences of grassroots social-justice movements across cities worldwide.

Chapter 4 follows the trajectory of Ernst Frey and other European anti-fascists, who enlisted in the Vietnamese Army after defecting from the French Foreign Legion. It focuses on the complicated relationship between the soldiers who survived the anti-fascist struggles in Europe and the new generation of soldiers of the anti-colonial wars in the Global South. After 1945, many Spanish Civil War veterans followed events in Algeria and Indochina with great interest and sided with those fighting for national self-determination. Notwithstanding the visibility of both causes, notable armed support materialised only in Indochina, where foreign volunteers were initially well-received and saw their military influence grow much beyond what their modest careers in the French Foreign Legion might indicate. With time, however, they were also seen as a challenge to the nationalistic Vietnamese leadership, who, thanks largely to Chinese support from the early 1950s onwards, were radically altering their military structure, leaving little or no space for French Foreign Legion defectors.

How did those Britons who believed that free trade and the gold standard had effortlessly made Britain a world hegemon in 1885 lose the faith by 1931 when their Empire was the largest in the world?

Britain remained the world’s superpower in 1931, so how did it lose its Empire, become dependent upon the USA and reimagine itself as a European nation by 1976 and how did Briton’s respond?

This chapter explores those transformations in intimate lives that have been collectively shorthanded with the term “sexual revolution.” Whether thought of as a gradually evolving process spanning the 1950s to the 1990s or rather understood as referring to the briefer era of heightened incitement and excitement around sex that reached its heyday in the 1960s-1970s, the story of sexual developments in the second half of the twentieth century has long been written in a linear, teleological fashion. Scholars emphasize the rise of reproductive freedom, women”s equality, rights for sexual minorities, and a more general attitude of sex-positivism. However, by reconceiving the story of the sexual revolution as a global one, inextricable from tectonic geopolitical shifts in both East-West and North-South relations – from the Cold War to decolonization and development projects and obsession with the purported dangers of “overpopulation” in the global South, and from the eventual collapse of Communism to the rise of a neoliberal economic order – this chapter challenges the “liberalization paradigm” and instead explores the sexual revolution as a multi-form, multi-sited, but also profoundly ambivalent process, met with recurrent backlashes as well as marred by its own intrinsic complexities.