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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 April 2011
The new Cold War history has begun to reshape the ways that international historians approach the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) during the post-1945 era. Rather than treating the region as exceptional, a number of scholars have sought to focus on the historical continuities and transnational connections between the Middle East and other areas of the Third World. This approach is based on the notion that the MENA region was enmeshed in the transnational webs of communication and exchange that characterized the post-1945 global system. Indeed, the region sat not only at the crossroads between Africa and the Eurasian landmass but also at the convergence of key global historical movements of the second half of the 20th century. Without denying cultural, social, and political elements that are indeed unique to the region, this scholarship has drawn attention to the continuities, connections, and parallels between the Middle Eastern experience and the wider world.
1 I use the term “Third World” to refer to the widespread notion in the second half of the 20th century that Africa, Latin America, Asia, and the Middle East constituted a sociopolitical unit on the order of the First and Second worlds of the Cold War. In this sense, the Third World functioned as a concept rather than a clearly delineated geographical region. Like a growing number of scholars, I do not see the term as pejorative in part because leaders in the so-called Third World embraced the idea and used it for their own ends. The term first appeared in an article by Alfred Sauvy in L'Observateur in 1952 and carried deliberate connotations linking it to the notion of the French Third Estate under the ancien regime: an underrepresented majority destined to seize power and influence.
2 One of the earliest calls for this new Cold War history came with the publication of Gaddis, John Lewis, We Now Know (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997)Google Scholar. On pericentricism, see Smith, Tony, “New Bottles for New Wine: A Pericentric Framework for the Study of the Cold War,” Diplomatic History 24 (2000): 567–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Westad, Odd Arne, The Global Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 Prashad, Vijay, The Darker Nations (New York: New Press, 2008)Google Scholar.
5 Chamberlin, Paul, “The Struggle Against Oppression Everywhere,” Middle Eastern Studies 47 (2011): 25–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and The Global Offensive: The PLO, the United States, and the Making of the New International Order, 1967–1975 (New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
6 While my own work focuses on the 1960s and 1970s, Laleh Khalili has written a fascinating piece that examines the global implications of counterinsurgency in Palestine during earlier decades. See Khalili, Laleh, “The Location of Palestine in Global Counterinsurgencies,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 42 (2010): 413–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar.