The Global Cold War

Odd Arne Westad is Director of the Cold War Studies Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His recent publications include Decisive Encounters: The Chinese Civil War, 1946–1950 (2003) and The Cold War: A History in Documents and Eyewitness Accounts (2003).

• Introduction; 1. The empire of liberty: American ideology and foreign interventions; 2. The empire of justice: Soviet ideology and foreign interventions; 3. The revolutionaries: anti-colonial politics and transformations; 4. Creating the Third World: the United States confronts revolution; 5. The Cuban and Vietnamese challenges; 6. The crisis of decolonization: Southern Africa; 7. The prospects of socialism: Ethiopia and the Horn; 8. The Islamist defiance; 9. The 1980s: the Reagan offensive; 10. The Gorbachev withdrawal and the end of the Cold War; Conclusion: Revolutions, interventions and Great Power collapse.

'This is a genuinely 'international' history … few genuine research monographs are so wide ranging chronologically and geographically, while also trying to absorb insights from sociology and social anthropology … taken as a whole no historian has dealt with the links between the Cold War so fully, so broadly and so thoughtfully as Westad in this new account … a truly seminal work, whose findings will exercise those researching the Cold War for many years.' Reviews in History