Socialist Internationalism and the Gritty Politics of the Particular: Second-Third World Spaces in the Cold War

This collection takes a case study approach to enter into and explore spaces of ’Second-Third World’ interaction during the Cold War. From the dining halls of a university, to hospital wards, construction sites, military barracks, pubs and more, the chapters drop the scale down from the global to the particular to better see, understand and interpret the complex nature of these spaces.

These ordinary spaces are examined to understand how they were conceived, constructed, shaped and reshaped by people over time. Many are physical places of encounter, while others are more abstract, embodying ideological goals. In exploring these spaces the contributors show how the Second and Third World actors understood them and connected them to ideas such as gender and space, the space of the nation, of the modern and of the self. Essentially, it seeks to unravel how these spaces between Second and Third Worlds worked, and what, if anything, was distinctive and consequential about them.

Second-Third World Spaces in the Cold War explores the ways in which these Second and Third World actors collaborated and clashed in these everyday spaces, and brings these multi-faceted, multi-actor histories to a vital centre ground.

Kristin Roth-Ey is Associate Professor of Modern Russian History at the UCL School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, UK. She is the author of Moscow Prime Time: How the Soviet Union Built the Media Empire that Lost of the Cultural Cold War (2011). Her current research focuses on Soviet media and cultural diplomacy in the Third World during the Cold War.