The Global Sixties: An Interdisciplinary Journal invites submissions for a workshop and an ensuing special thematic issue on Internationalism of the Decolonizing World in the Cold War.

In recent decades, Cold War historiography has paid growing attention to the autonomy and agency of the players beyond the US-Soviet dichotomy. In the wake of Westad’s seminal The Global Cold War (2005), scholars have increasingly explored the episodes, events, and institutions that demonstrate the agency of the Global South. From the Bandung Conference to Pan-African networks, the so-called Third World assumes a pivotal role in the latest historiographies. Newly independent states, among others, are recast as actors in their own right and not mere pawns in a game played by two superpowers.

Cold War Internationalisms of/in the Decolonizing World advances this recentering of the narrative by focusing on decolonizing or newly independent states, along with related actors, as the makers and breakers of the Cold War world order. This special issue thus seeks to reframe the Cold War from the standpoint of Latin American, Middle Eastern, African, or Asian actors – where the US and Soviet Union appear not as the protagonists but as the dependent variables of decolonial world-making.

In addition, we seek contributions to highlight the decolonizing world’s agency in defining and/or shaping various ideologies – including, but not limited to, Communism, Socialism, Social Democracy, Nationalism, or Liberalism. We want to explore how actors from the postcolonial sphere assigned new meanings to the political vocabulary of the Cold War and created their own vocabularies.

Submissions including, but not limited to, the following topics are welcome:

• Anti-imperialist networks

• South-south diplomacies

• Biographical or multi-biographical studies

• Revolutionary organizations linked to post-colonial powers

• Women’s organizations, labor, intellectual, cultural, medical, educational, and humanitarian groups

• Politics of anti-colonial nationalism

• Non-Soviet communisms

• International repercussions and transnational afterlives of novel variations of ideologies or stand-alone ideologies emerging from the decolonizing world (Maoism, Nasserism, Juche, Jamahiriyya, Latin American Developmentalism, Nkruhmaism, Nehruvianism, etc.)

Contributions from all levels, including graduate students and independent scholars, are greatly encouraged.