Cuba’s shift to a more pragmatic and Soviet-aligned foreign policy in the early 1970s had major implications for its relationship with North Korea. Moreover, it influenced radical changes in North Korea’s own foreign policy. Pyongyang announced the “era of chajusŏng” (independence) and an apparent new faith in what could be achieved through peaceful diplomacy, multilateralism, and non-alignment. Key events influencing these shifts were the de-escalation of the Vietnam War, the defeat of the Latin American insurgencies of the 1960s, Nixon’s troop withdrawal from South Korea, Sino-US rapprochement, and the growing power of the Third World in the United Nations General Assembly. As both North Korea and Cuba adapted to a rapidly changing international environment in the early 1970s, the basis for their special partnership dissolved. Cuba and Vietnam moved closer to the Soviet Union, and North Korea reconciled with China, while repositioning itself as a member of the non-aligned Third World. The possibility that the militant Third Worldism of the Tricontinental Conference might grow and coalesce to constitute a real force in global politics appeared to fade away with the 1960s.

The Fiscal Commission story and prehistory call for a revision to prevalent understandings of international tax history. The development of international tax law could well have taken a very different turn had the Commission not been eliminated. Startling parallels and lessons of the Commission story remain pertinent amid the revival of global multilateral cooperation under the OECD/G20 Inclusive Framework on Base Erosion and Profit Shifting.

In September 1961, Munu Sipalo circulated a conspiracy pamphlet at the founding conference of the Non-Aligned Movement in Belgrade. Chapter 5 thinks through the motif of conspiracy to ask how this cohort responded to the challenges of the global Cold War, particularly in the context of the Congo Crisis of 1960–1961. Congo had a particular resonance for this regional cohort, laying bare the high stakes of ‘nominal’ political independence in a time of Cold War neo-colonialism. In London, the Committee of African Organisations commented on the unfolding crisis and its implications for decolonising knowledge production, as Chango Machyo and Dennis Phombeah launched pamphlet ventures in the aftermath of an All-African Students Conference. For many in this cohort, engagement with the contours of the Cold War happened through youth and student internationals. Samuel Kajunjumele attended the 1959 Vienna World Youth Festival with the International Union of Socialist Youth at a pivotal moment: just as these organisations increased their contacts in the region, the uncertainty of independence negotiations made students abroad appear a liability – in notable contrast to the early 1950s.

During the 1960s, the effects of the Cuban Revolution – especially in terms of support for guerrilla warfare against U.S. allies – became all too evident, and the United States pursued interventionism with new vigor. This renewed use of power included economic and diplomatic pressures, veiled threats, covert operations, and even invasion. U.S. officials framed the Cold War as a valiant struggle to protect freedom in the hemisphere, and the cases of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Guatemala epitomized the lengths to which the United States would go to fight what it considered to be security threats. In Latin America, many elites supported U.S. policy, but a growing undercurrent of discontent also emerged, which pushed for negotiated conclusions to war and protested against the treatment of so many citizens caught in the middle. They did not share the notion that leftist or even Marxist governments necessarily constituted a threat to national security and global order. This chapter ends with a discussion of the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989.

In the 1960s, Algeria and Cuba became global archetypes of revolution. Opposed to the international system, militant, and loosely allied with the Soviet Union, the two countries challenged Western security in both the Caribbean and North Africa. This similarity created an important if superficial solidarity that emphasized regional support for armed revolutionary movements as a way of safeguarding their states from US intervention. Nevertheless, the Cuban and Algerian positions in Third World affairs started to diverge in the late-1960s as the two countries politico-economic positions changed and they adopted distinct strategies for advancing a radical Third World agenda. Algeria became increasingly invested in using established structures and norms to adjust the international order. In contrast, Cuba championed a global armed militancy, sometimes targeting Third World governments associated with such groups as the G-77 but viewed as insufficiently dedicated to Tricontinental goals. This divergence in international perspectives and tactics reveals the complexity of the Tricontinental ideology, as well as the evolution of radical diplomacy as revolutionary states matured.

The afterword focuses on the surprising connections of a century of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) history to larger global developments outside of China, considering the potential future development of the Party, either towards more democratisation and power sharing, increasing focus on domestic challenges, or a new Marxist-Leninist world order with Beijing at it’s ideological center. The fate of international socialism is contrasted with the purges of both Stalin and Mao, which are shown to have led directly to the Sino-Soviet conflict from the late 1950s on. The lasting significance of the collapse of the Soviet Union for the CCP provides context for the increasingly close relationship between Xi and Putin, who share a mutual concern over Muslim separatism and demographic shifts within their countries. Connections are drawn between the more positive impacts of the Non-Aligned Movement of the 1950s and 1960s and the Belt and Road initiative, and darker history of global Maoism in Peru and Cambodia, with the latter spurring modernization following a successful Vietnamese intervention. The CCP’s long-standing difficulty of separating Party from ethnicity, particularly in its Southeast Asian allies, is contrasted with inspiration drawn from Japan and Korea in the post-Mao era and the legacy of falling regulation in global trade over the subsequent three decades. The afterword concludes with an exploration of the gradual end of China’s “peaceful rise” during the Xi era, touching on the daunting problems of a declining workforce, environmental degradation, and continuing wide income gaps which face the country’s leaders today, while also praising its pragmatic macroeconomic policies, impressive technological development, and openness to trade relative to the increasingly divided, insular, and unstable US under Trump.

From its inception, the Communist Party of Kampuchea (better known as the Khmer Rouge) emerged as one of the most violent and brutal apparatus of state terror and murder since the Nazi party held power in Germany. Between April 1975 and January 1979, approximately 2 million people died from starvation, disease, exposure, torture, murder, and execution. The dominant interpretation of the Cambodian genocide presents the CPK as a totalitarian, communist, and autarkic regime seeking to reorganize Cambodian society around a primitive, agrarian political economy. From this vantage point, the victims of the regime perished because of misguided and irrational economic policies, a draconian security apparatus implemented to instill terror, and the central leadership’s fanatical belief in the creation of a utopian communist society. It is no so much that previous accounts are inaccurate as much as they are incomplete and theoretically vapid. To this end, I argue that CPK policy pivoted around surplus agricultural production and a selective engagement with the global economy as informed by its allegiance to the Non-Aligned Movement. Accordingly, I challenge the standard historiography of the Cambodian genocide by providing an analytical overview of the structures of violence set in place by the Khmer Rouge.

This chapter has attempted to explore three ideas. First, that there was in fact considerable work and effort invested in regulating and prohibiting landmines since the end of the Second World War, and the 1997 treaty in large part rested on that earlier work. Indeed, the success of the Landmines Convention cannot be properly understood without this historical context. Second, the longer history in turn reveals an important story of the developing world actively engaged in pursuing limits on indiscriminate weapons, and actively engaged in the pursuit of disarmament. While this changed across time as the developing world itself fractured and shifted, it remains an important part of the story of disarmament efforts in the Cold War, much of which has yet to be explored. Finally, the story exposes the fallacy that ‘humanitarian disarmament’ is a creature of the post–Cold War era in the sense that especially from the South (but generally as well), there was deep and abiding concern about the humanitarian impacts of indiscriminate weapons.