Introduction
Up until a few years ago, the history of the Cold War was dominated by interpretations that focused solely on the ideological and geopolitical conflict between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., capitalism and socialism. The advent of the “global turn” in Cold War studies came to expand the foci of the field well beyond the American, European, or Soviet borders by encompassing the histories of the “Third World”, and eventually adding postcolonialism and decolonization into the research mix. In this short piece, I will present the major online repositories that highlight the connection between the global Cold War and decolonization, and suggest further projects that would enable scholars and non-academic audiences to research and view this conflict and its repercussions for the decolonization of Asia and Africa from a fresh angle.
Digital Archives: Where the Cold War and Decolonization Converge
The Wilson Center Digital Archive
One of the major stops for anyone interested in the crossing of paths of these two major research fields is the Wilson Center Digital Archive. With a collection spanning the entire chronological, geographical, and thematic spectrum of the Cold War, this archive features declassified primary sources (transcribed and translated into English) related to major events in Asia and Africa of the time, highlighting the linkage between the global ideological struggle and local developments. Of particular interest are collections of documents that underline the connections among “Third World” countries and regions such as the archives on China and the Middle East / North Africa, Cuba and Southern Africa, and Inter-Korean relations.
The Digital Archive recently added a new Data Visualization Discovery Tool that enables all interested parties to look up a specific term included in the online database and visualizes a network of items related to the term. This tool is exceptional at highlighting often ignored linkages among events, places, and people related to a specific term and might prove especially insightful for those interested in exploring relationships that might have been pushed to the sidelines by the extant historiography.
Image 1: Screenshot of Data Visualization Tool from the Wilson Center Digital Archive
Overall, the Wilson Center Digital Archive manages to bring together the many strands of primary sources that inform the current historiographical discussion on the global Cold War and decolonization, while providing an engaging online experience for its users.
Reconceptualizing the Cold War: On-the-ground Experience in Asia
The project Reconceptualizing the Cold War is another digital platform that examines the various common grounds between the Cold War and decolonization. It consists of transcripts of oral history collections and aspires to create an archive of experiences-from-below that showcases how major and minor developments in Southeast, East, and South Asia were perceived by ordinary people.
Exploration of the archive is facilitated through a search map that allows users to click on a country of their preference and view a list of all oral history interviews conducted with that country in focus.
Image 2: Screenshot of Archive Map from Reconceptualizing the Cold War
Beyond the search map, archival contents are organized in specialized sub-collections that explore topics ranging from Religion and the Cold War in the Philippines and the Fishermen’s Lives Across the Taiwan Strait, to the Khmer Rouge and Its Legacies. Each transcript is accompanied by a brief summary of its contents, notes on the interview itself as well as connections to other transcripts within the archive, and the main questions that the interviewee was asked during the recording. Finally, the team behind the project organizes an annual workshop on Cold War Oral History that discusses the latest works in the field.
All in all, this project manages to provide an invaluable trove of everyday stories that emphasize the need to acknowledge the connection between the global and the local for those that experienced the Cold War in its various forms in Asia.
Other Digital Archives
Besides the two major digital repositories discussed above, there is a number of open-access digital archives with a broader or narrower scope that may be of interest to anyone wishing to delve deeper into the primary sources of the era. The following overview in no way constitutes an exhaustive list on the subject, but may be of interest to anyone wishing to delve deeper into developments of the era in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia.
The Bandung 60 website explores aspects of the 1955 Bandung Conference that were crucial for the development of the Non-Aligned Movement, and provides access to the Asian-African Conference Bulletin in digitized format.
Focusing on the modern history of Iran, the Iranian Oral History Project includes numerous interviews (mainly in Persian) of people involved in important events that shaped the history of the country.
Turning to Africa, the African Online Digital Library consists of thematic collections of thousands of digitized images, documents, videos, maps and interviews that cover both the colonial and the Cold War era on the continent. In a similar vein, the African Studies Collection contains thousands of images taken in the post-war period that showcase everyday life in Africa. In addition to the above, a rather more specialized collection of documents can be found in the Emerging Nationalism in Portuguese Africa project, which includes numerous digitized primary sources related to anti-colonial developments in Angola and Mozambique.
Finally, the South Asia Open Archives host tens of thousands of digitized documents related both to the colonial and the Cold War era and could be a great starting point for anyone interested in the history of the region.
Digital Projects, the Cold War, and Decolonization
Despite the variety of digital repositories of documents and interviews attempting to link the global Cold War with decolonization and on-the-ground developments in the “Third World”, there appears to be a glaring absence of digital projects available to non-academic audiences that utilize digital methods to support a specific historical argument or engage the attention of the public towards new findings in the field.
This part of the article will suggest two digital methods that may be used by anyone seeking to create engaging and interactive public history projects that explore underrepresented facets of the global conflict: geospatial analysis and network analysis.
Geospatial Analysis
As the historiography of the Cold War expands and the global transformations that took place in Africa and Asia during the conflict become more readily apparent, one of the most effective ways to communicate newly discovered global connections is through geospatial analysis and the creation of digital (interactive) maps.
Tools that may facilitate the examination of the global post-war world include ArcGIS Pro, ArcGIS Online, their open-source counterpart QGIS, as well as StoryMaps JS and Leaflet.
Through the creation of respective map layers, a scholar may choose to explore a variety of questions that seek to explore the links between the Cold War and decolonization, such as: What was the geographical dispersion of local interests and revolutionary groups in Africa aligned with either of the two blocs? How and to what extent was the natural landscape affected by the numerous ideological proxy wars that shook both Asia and Africa? What patterns can be observed in the evolution of global sea lanes between the two blocs and the “Third World” during the Cold War?
When approached through digital mapping, the study of such inquiries necessarily transcends the confines of national history and highlights the spillover of global strategies into local concerns and revolutionary struggles and vice-versa. Two examples of projects that utilize GIS for global history are:
Globalization of the United States (1789-1861)
Image 3: Screenshot of interactive map “From Colonialism to Independence” from Mapping History
Network Analysis
Network analysis might be another effective way to explore the connections between global and local struggles during the Cold War, since the nodes and edges of a network are perfectly suited for representing the actors and their relationships of the time. More specifically, different aspects of such relationships can be highlighted through the examination of the centrality measure of each node, that is, the number of connections of each node to others in the network.
Some great open-source tools for doing network analysis are Gephi and Graphviz, while another extremely versatile option for data visualization and network analysis is Tableau.
Examples of historical network analysis projects:
Image 4: Screenshot of interactive network map from The Inner Life of Empires
When it comes to analyzing the relationship among and beyond states and communities within the “Third World”, network analysis becomes particularly useful, especially through its ability to highlight the existence of communities that might have remained unseen had specific events and actors been examined solely through the close reading of sources. For example, network analysis could be applied to address questions such as: Are distinct communities of “Third World” countries visible within the coalition of G77 or did the group constitute a cohesive whole throughout the Cold War, and, if so, did geographical or ideological proximity play a role in the formation of such communities? What observations can be made by comparing the community of countries in Africa and Asia that had closer ties with the capitalist bloc of countries and the community of countries that chose to maintain closer bonds with the socialist bloc?
Conclusion
The tools and methods discussed here offer some suggestions on how the global Cold War and decolonization may be explored through digital means. As this piece suggests, geospatial analysis and network analysis are ideal for exploring the connections and interactions that shaped this global ideological conflict. They do so by providing a complementary and comprehensive bird’s eye view of the conflict’s development and transnational reach and by highlighting interactions between global and local actors that may have remained unnoticed if viewed solely through the lenses of traditional historiography and the close reading of sources.
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