Search Results (133)

On 24 February 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified a broader sense of precarity across Eastern Europe, including Romania, and longstanding anxieties related to threat, instability, and loss—rooted in the Cold War past—resurfaced with renewed urgency. This article examines how, since 1989, Romanian contemporary dance has responded to these conditions, functioning as a site for expressing and processing the physical and emotional “edginess” of the body and psyche in the post-socialist present. Drawing on archival research, audiovisual materials, and interviews, the study argues that Romanian contemporary dance operates across multiple temporalities. Looking to the past, it preserves and reactivates the memory of bodies that shaped its history, resisting their erasure amid shifting national and transnational identities. Rooted in the present, dancers and institutions navigate a fragile social terrain marked by regional conflict, migration, economic instability, and ongoing debates surrounding diversity and gender. At the same time, they confront the resurgence of nationalist, xenophobic, and exclusionary discourses within Romanian society. Through performance, pedagogy, institutional initiatives, and collaborative projects, contemporary dance in Romania emerges as a critical space of reflection and intervention, actively engaging social tensions while contributing to the reimagining of political and cultural futures. Full article

This article theorises Hmong migration through the concept of resettled histories, understood as the social and political processes through which histories of war, flight, loss, survival, and belonging are carried into new places, translated into new institutional languages, and contested across generations. Rather than approaching Hmong mobility as a linear movement from Southeast Asia to Western resettlement countries, the article situates Hmong migrations within longer histories of upland mobility, imperial and colonial governance, Cold War militarisation, refugee camps, and contemporary diasporic reconstruction. In response to scholarship on collective memory, postmemory, diasporic memory, refugee critique, digital diaspora, and Asian American studies, the article clarifies that resettled histories are not simply memories preserved after migration. They are histories that become socially active after resettlement through community organisations, veteran memorialisation, Hmong New Year celebrations, oral-history projects, clan networks, digital platforms, political mobilisation, and intergenerational debate. The article also foregrounds differences among Hmong communities by gender, generation, religion, class, political position, national location, and relations to Laos, China, Thailand, France, Australia, and the United States. By engaging contemporary Hmong scholarship and Hmong-produced archives alongside foundational migration and memory theory, the article shows how displaced communities do not merely adapt to host societies; they also struggle to have their histories recognised, narrated, and transmitted. The Hmong case demonstrates that resettlement may provide legal security without ending the historical life of displacement. It therefore offers a lens for rethinking migration as the movement and reconstruction of histories, not only the movement of people. Full article

The long-term transformation of mono-industrial cities has become a critical issue in sustainable urban development, particularly where urban growth was initially shaped by state-led industrialization and strategic security concerns. This paper examines China’s Third Front Construction, a large-scale Cold War programme that relocated industrial and defence facilities to inland regions, through a paired comparison of Yuan’an and Xiaogan in Hubei Province. Focusing on Base 066 as a city-forming enterprise, the study combines archival research, local gazetteers, factory records, field investigation, historical satellite imagery, and urban morphological analysis to examine how policy shifts reshaped urban form, industrial layout, infrastructure, and public facilities. The findings show that Yuan’an developed as a dispersed, mountain-based industrial enclave structured by concealment, air defence requirements, and work unit organization, whereas Xiaogan evolved into a more compact and integrated urban industrial district after the relocation of Base 066. This transformation changed not only production space but also urban–rural relations, residential organization, and public service provision. The study demonstrates that Third Front cities should be understood as policy-produced urban systems whose later decline or integration reflects the changing relationship between security, industry, and urban sustainability. It further suggests that industrial heritage, adaptive reuse, and intercity memory networks can support the regeneration of former mono-industrial settlements. Full article

How did exchanges between the architecture, engineering, and construction sectors of postcolonial states challenge dominant patterns of North–South technology transfer, and actively begin to construct the substantive scaffolding of an alternative international order? This article proposes a theoretical framework for understanding South–South exchange as a distinct spatial practice in postcolonial architectural history, recovering previously unexplored patterns of circulation—construction technologies, professional expertise, contracting capacity—that connected allegedly peripheral geographies spanning from Southeast Asia and Africa to the Caribbean and Southeast Europe. It draws on Doreen Massey’s concept of ‘power geometry’, Anna Tsing’s theorization of ‘friction’, and Édouard Glissant’s ‘archipelagic thinking’ to develop three analytical movements: Geometries, Powers, and Archipelagic Relations. Together these map the lateral circulation of expertise, technology, and labor among postcolonial nations operating outside the North-South and East–West axes around which twentieth-century architectural history has largely been organized. The paper argues that the prevailing diffusionist model resembles a two-body gravitational system that forecloses the possibility of lateral force, and treats South–South exchanges instead as orbital anomalies, persistent deviations from predicted paths that reveal an unseen distributed gravitational field. Rather than organizing around a metropolitan vertex, this field constitutes what computational geometry calls an ‘unstructured mesh’: contingent, uncentered, and variable in its local density. The mesh’s topology traces across a range of exchanges drawn from the forthcoming edited volume South–South: Non-Alignment and Cooperation in the Construction of the Global South, which brings together contributions from a dozen scholars of postcolonial architecture. The case studies include triangulations in which prefabrication technology traveled between Yugoslavia, Cuba, and Angola, and professional expertise looped between India, Africa and Europe. The motivational fields and frictions that drove and transformed each exchange are examined in turn. The article culminates in a reading of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) and the Afro-Asian Housing Organisation (AAHO) through Glissant’s concepts of relation and opacity—the right of postcolonial actors to participate in exchange without becoming fully legible to Cold War systems that demanded every alignment be declared. By challenging prevailing narratives that position the ‘Global South’ primarily as recipient rather than generator of innovation, the article contributes to a decolonial architectural historiography that shows how the political project of Non-Alignment was substantively materialized in the production of the built environment. Recovering these alternate forms of architectural flow demands a South–South historiographical orientation as a corrective to the field’s persistent centeredness, and offers historical insight no less relevant today for rethinking the potential, and the challenges, of contemporary transnational cooperation. Full article

This article explores how historic avant-garde works can be considered as aesthetic technologies or time machines conditioning an audience to experience the future differently. Rather than revisiting well-known Western scholars, it turns to perhaps lesser known “Cold War” theorists and critics: Polish art scholar Andrzej Turowski, Yugoslavian–Croation literary scholar Aleksandar Flaker, and Russian–Estonian semiotician Juri Lotman. In rather different ways, these thinkers considered avant-garde works as artefacts that, in an audience’s phenomenological encounter with them, model and yield different experiences of the future. In the closing section of the article, Gerrit Rietveld’s model for the Rietveld Schröder House in Utrecht is discussed. Rietveld’s model reminds us that theoretical speculation should always be accompanied also by historical contextualization, in part because many of the historic avant-garde’s projected futures are now also futures anterior, the history of which might further shed light on the avant-garde’s actual futurity. Full article

In her fiction, Joan Didion crafted female protagonists who embodied the strange stirrings documented by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique, as common among mid-century White, educated women. Didion’s protagonists are all daughters, wives, and mothers who come to realize their lives are built on empty compromises. However, in her late 20th-century novels, their awareness leads to actual changes: the Didion Women who confront the void in Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted find their lives impacted by the machinations of U.S. Cold War policies. These novels specifically trace the impact of American imperialism on wives and daughters at home—those that the policies claimed to protect. These protagonists, and their witnesses, refuse to be passive casualties. Their narration by an embedded professional female journalist adds weight to the journeys of these overlooked women. Through her protagonists of privilege, Didion unflinchingly documents the physical and psychological damages of patriarchy—both personal and political—presenting female models of awareness and resistance. This essay will examine Didion’s Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted as the capstones of her woman-centered fiction, presenting detailed portraits of matrons who deliberately disentangle themselves from history. Full article

This study adheres to a logistic regression modeling protocol originally developed for long-range intelligence analyses and employs data from UN demographic estimates (the 2024 revision) to generate a set of statistical functions that suggest a moderately strong relationship between increasing median age and the probability of a persistently positive international net migration rate (NMR). According to this relationship, the post-Cold War probability (data from 1990 to 2015) of experiencing a persistently positive net migration rate (defined as a +NMR, directly followed by five consecutive years of +NMRs) rose from less than 0.12 at a population median age of 15 years, to a probability greater than 0.55 at 36 years, and then to more than 0.77 at 45 years. The author hypothesizes a speculative set of predictions aimed at providing long-term tests for this model. These predictions assume that, by a median age of 36.0 years, at least one country in the hypothesized cluster of countries will have shifted to experiencing a series of +NMRs. If, as this model predicts, the age-structurally associated transition to sustained +NMRs transpires by 2055, there could be a substantially larger pool of migrant net-receiving states in parts of Asia, Latin America, and North Africa than the UN’s future scenarios currently project. Full article

Non-alignment was officially born at a conference in Brijuni, Croatia (then Yugoslavia), in 1956 and then formalized in Belgrade in 1961. Yet its origins go back to the independence struggle of Indonesia in 1945–1949 and especially to diplomacy around the Korean War in 1950–1953. During that conflict, United States unilateralism pushed India, Indonesia, and Burma (now Myanmar) into forming an Asian bloc aligned for diplomatic purposes in the goal of peace. The search for peace in turn formalized a bloc of Asian states that would initiate the Bandung Asian–African conference of 1955 and finally the Non-Aligned Movement. This article explores the emergence of non-alignment in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a conscious rejection of both Cold War alignment and earlier European concepts of neutralism in favour of an “active and independent” non-aligned diplomacy that would lead to the emergence of a bloc of non-aligned states. Full article

With the collapse of the post-Cold War bipolar world order, religious institutions regained their public role in the socialist and people’s republic states of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Religion not only regained its social influence, but also once again became a decisive factor in shaping national identity. During the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, religion did not merely attempt to fill the ideological void left by the crisis of the socialist value system; it also actively contributed to the reconfiguration of national values, culture, identity and political discourse. This study examines the religious factors that contributed to the sacralisation of national identity; the consolidation of the ‘Us’, ‘Them’, and ‘Us versus Them’ narratives; and the justification of wartime violence during the disintegration of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). In this context, ‘Us’ refers to the dominant religious/ethnic community of a given member republic, while ‘Them’ denotes the ethnic majority and their confessional affiliations living in other member republics. This mainly refers to the three largest religious/ethnic communities, Orthodox Serbs, Catholic Croats, and Bosnia and Herzegovina Muslims. The ‘Us versus Them’ confrontation escalated tensions and ultimately played a central role in the disintegration of the SFR of Yugoslavia. The study concludes that religion played a dual role: on the one hand, it supported the preservation of community identity and social cohesion; on the other hand, it fostered exclusion, the ethnicisation of loyalty, the political instrumentalisation of religion, and the legitimisation of war discourses on the other. Full article

In 1967, the Soviet government altered its expectations and procedures for mandatory military service by reducing the overall length of service and instituting biannual call-ups. This article looks at the demobilization albums created by several generations of conscripts as their time in the army or navy approached its end. These sources have received little attention to date, despite the wealth of information that they contain. The focus here will be on the artistic styles and different media commonly employed by the young men who made such scrapbooks and how these connect to the overall commemorative aspects of their creations. After discussing how some soldiers literally used parts of their uniforms to fashion their albums, thereby establishing an embodied memory of their time in the armed forces, the focus shifts to the ways in which picture postcard collages commemorated geographic locations and introduced a touristic aesthetic into the albums. Next the article considers the ways in which paintings and cartoons were employed to express concepts of time as experienced by the conscripts. The final section of the article is devoted to the private photographs that were included, specifically those taken to commemorate the friendships built while the young men endured a common rite of passage. Full article

In his 17 novels, Kjartan Fløgstad (born 1944) has analysed the traces of WWII and possible continuations of right-wing ideology into post-war politics and ideology. In my article, I focus on four novels: Dalen Portland, U3, Grense Jakobselv, and Due og drone (Dove and Drone). Dalen Portland and U3 were published in the context of the Cold War, whereas Grense Jakobselv and Due og drone were published in a context in which history was claimed to have reached its end after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Fløgstad has opposed the end-of-history thesis since it was introduced in the influential study by Francis Fukuyama in 1992. From Fløgstad’s perspective, history has reached a dead end, as democratic ideals are being challenged and economic disparities are widening—even within the welfare states of Northern Europe. In all the novels being discussed, Fløgstad has consistently focused on factual and possible interlinks between right-wing figures of thought and stakeholders of political and economic power. Thus, the only consistent superpower, the United States, has also been an object of Fløgstad’s interest. The importance of the United States is even indicated in the well-chosen title for the English translation of Dalen Portland: Dollar Road. The interpretation of Fløgstad’s novels is simultaneously an interpretation of history. Given the threats to democratic ideals that have emerged in the 2020s, Fløgstad’s analysis has demonstrated notable foresight. Full article

This paper addresses the knowledge gap on the beginning of the history of contact with extraterrestrial intelligent beings in international astronautics. In the mid-1950s, the world’s space law practitioner, Andrew G. Haley, proposed the concept of Metalaw, the law governing interactions between all beings in the Universe, as he represented the American Rocket Society in the International Astronautical Congress, the single largest gathering of space-faring nations. Haley, with experience in radio communications law dating back to the 1930s, played a pivotal role in pushing for the international allocation of radio frequencies in space. Haley was, too, an agile mediator with the Soviet Union and its bloc, acting across various organizations and forums. This article, in contextualizing Haley’s introduction of Metalaw, shows how the onset of the Space Age coincided with the emergence of a contact scenario involving extraterrestrial intelligence enabled by the corresponding techno-scientific capabilities of the time. It demonstrates how extraterrestrial intelligence discursively addressed outer space regulation as a bone of contention between the two geopolitically divided parts, a regulation upon which the US’s global satellite system would depend. The analysis in this article recounts the birth of the Metalaw concept at the intersection of outer space imaginary, law, international organizations, science and technology, diplomacy, the Space Race, the Cold War, and radio astronomy’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. Full article

Gerald Horne’s explication of Cold War-era political history as negotiated white supremacy leads to an enhanced understanding of Japan in the Cold War. Although subject to important qualifications, Japanese anti-racism and solidarity with non-white peoples before, during, and after World War II contextualizes the view held by American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois—and complicated and in places contested by Horne—that Japan was, in many ways, a champion of anti-white supremacy. The experiences of Black American servicemen and -women who served in Japan during the Cold War provide important historical grounding for Du Bois’ initial, state-centered insights about Japan as an anti-racist power. This modified “Du Bois Thesis” in turn guides the Horne Thesis, on the role of white supremacy in modern global history, into a deeper harmony with the history of Cold War Japan. Full article

(1) Background: We propose that cfDNA levels may serve as a valuable biomarker for monitoring the progress of liver transplant recipients, reflecting the quality of the donated organ, and predicting patient prognosis and survival. Thus, we analyzed the relationship between total cfDNA levels during the first 48 h post-transplantation, ischemia–reperfusion injury, and patient outcomes. (2) Methods: cfDNA quantification was applied to 115 liver transplant patients using real-time quantitative PCR at the time of transplantation (during reperfusion) and throughout the first month post-transplantation. (3) Results: Significantly higher early cfDNA levels were observed in patients who suffered liver damage or post-transplantation complications during the first month. High cfDNA levels were also associated with prolonged ICU stays and reduced survival. Kaplan–Meier analysis revealed a significantly lower survival rate in patients with elevated cfDNA. CRP levels were elevated and significantly correlated with cfDNA values. Regarding organ preservation prior to transplantation, prolonged cold and warm ischemia times were significantly associated with high cfDNA levels in the early hours post-transplantation. (4) Conclusions: Elevated cfDNA levels in the early hours following liver transplantation are associated with poorer patient outcomes. Therefore, determining total cfDNA levels post-transplantation may be a valuable tool for patient management and early intervention. Full article

This paper examines the period of rapid economic growth that followed World War II. The main focus of the analysis is on the factors that contributed to this era of prosperity, including economic reconstruction through the Marshall Plan, Keynesian policies of full employment and state intervention, and technological advancements that increased productivity and boosted international trade. At the same time, the paper explores the expansion of the welfare state, which improved living conditions, raised wages, and ensured social stability. The present research analyses economic inequalities between social groups and countries, the intersection between environmental degradation and intense industrial development, and structural weaknesses that arose during the studied period. Particular reference is also made to the social and political tensions associated with the labor movement and the rise in social demands, as well as the geopolitical challenges of the Cold War. Finally, the paper connects the Golden Age with the subsequent economic instability of the 1970s, marked by the collapse of the Bretton Woods system and the oil crises. While the 1950–1970 period left a positive legacy, it also revealed the limitations of a development model that was not entirely sustainable, leading to a gradual transition towards a new economic reality. Full article