Between 1956–68 economic expertise became Poland's key export product in the decolonizing world. India, a broker of social science in the Cold War, became a geopolitical gateway for Polish economists’ spread of developmental thinking that revived heterodox Marxism and peasant studies. In this article, Małgorzata Mazurek investigates epistemic and intellectual effects of Polish – Indian encounters and how they evolved separately from Soviet Third World politics. Mazurek argues that during de-Stalinization and decolonization, failures and obstacles to planning and land reforms came to be seen as a common ground between eastern Europe and South Asia. This shared perception also revived the historical legacy of central and east European social science, which was internationalized in new ways both because, and in spite, of the Cold War.

In the 1950s, films like Sergei Yutkevich's Velikii voin Albanii Skanderbeg symbolized Albanian-Soviet friendship, which was said to be undying. The Soviets brought their reels and their famous actors to this corner of the Mediterranean, and they also designed the country's first film agency, baptized “New Albania.” By the early 1960s, however, the friendship was dead. Albania's communist regime sided with Mao's China during the dramatic Sino-Soviet schism. From instruments of friendship, films turned into weapons in a global battle over the soul of socialism. Unexpectedly, Albanian war films assumed revolutionary meaning—far away from the Balkans—during China's Cultural Revolution. Recapturing these zigzags, this article shows how globalized socialism interacted with national imperatives. Bringing about exchange on a cross-continental scale, socialism encouraged constant mental mapping, and it also produced competing temporal frameworks. Going beyond nationalized histories of cinema, the article draws on archival sources from three countries, including previously classified Albanian materials.

In the 1960s, the Catholic Church underwent a revolution in the teaching and practice of its faith, known as aggiornamento. Catholics responded by pioneering new forms of agency in world affairs in the Global Sixties. This was a cross-Iron Curtain story, affecting communist and non-communist countries in Europe, as well as developing countries across the world – a story of transfers and encounters unfolding simultaneously along multiple geographical axes: “East-West,” “North-South,” and “East-South.” The narrative anchor for this story is the year 1968. This article explores the seminal role of east European Catholics in this story, focusing on Polish Catholic intellectuals as they wrote and rewrote global narratives of political economy and sexual politics. A global Catholic conversation on international development stalled as sexual politics reinforced Cold War and post-colonial divisions, with the Second and Third Worlds joining forces against First World critics of a new papal teaching on contraception, Humanae Vitae. Paradoxically, the Soviet Bloc became the prism through which the Catholic Church refracted a new vision of international development for the Third World.

This article examines Bulgarian cultural relations with India and Mexico in the 1970s to explore the role of cultural diplomacy in the relationship between the Second and the Third Worlds during the Cold War. In 1975, Liudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of the Bulgarian leader, became the head of the Committee for Culture; under her patronage, Bulgarian officials organized literally hundreds of exhibitions, concerts, academic conferences, book readings, cultural weeks, and visits that involved the three countries in an intense cultural romance. Even though Bulgaria was known as the “Soviet master satellite,” culture provided a considerable level of independence in Bulgarian dealings with international actors, which often caused Soviet irritation. In the end, by using culture, in addition to political and economic aid, Bulgaria managed to forge its role as an intermediary between the Second World and the Global South, and to project its notions of development on a global scene.

The article examines the imaginary geography of Jerzy Żuławski's The Lunar Trilogy – On the Silver Globe (1903), The Conqueror (1910), and The Old Earth (1911) – focusing on the relationship between the author's modernist sensibilities and the trilogy's adoption of the nascent science fiction genre. While modernism and popular fiction are usually placed on opposite ends of the literary spectrum, the example of Żuławski demonstrates that popular fiction was a valuable tool for modernist authors who sought to overcome the limits of realist conventions but were reluctant to alienate the mass readership. Drawing inspiration from the broadly-conceived spatial turn in the humanities, the article positions Żuławski and his work within the literary tradition that utilizes the romance mode (as defined by Northrop Frye, Fredric Jameson, and others) to reflect on modern subjectivity and its relations with what Max Weber called the “disenchanted world.”

The national narrative spun around Ivo Andrić has held firm in both academic circles and popular imagination, despite several comprehensive attempts at correcting appropriations of his oeuvre for national narratives. This article critiques nationalist readings of Andrić by showing how in his most famous novel, The Bridge on the Drina, key passages most often associated with nationalist appropriation speak against rather than for national mythopoesis. Antić does so by re-focusing on the literary rather than historiographic reading of the novel, which is to say, by analyzing narrative strategies that illuminate Andrić’s resistance to nineteenth-century romantic nationalism. In particular, Antić focuses on the scene of Radisav's impalement in order to unravel its many misinterpretations, from those that see in this scene the portrayal of Serbian national victimization and thus a justification for the 1990s genocidal war, to the ones that stay within the fictional text but still overlook ways in which Andrić qualifies the mythical/epic view of Radisav's execution. Antić shows instead that Andrić uses this scene, among others in this novel, to disrupt epic narrative models that underwrite much of South Slavic national invention of tradition, and thus challenge rather than affirm national(istic) models of Bosnian history.

This article examines why Ukrainian women participated in the 2013–14 anti-government protests, widely known as the EuroMaidan. Based upon in-depth interviews with female protesters, the study uncovers a wide range of motivations for women's engagement in the revolution, including dissatisfaction with the government, solidarity with protesters, motherhood, civic duty, and professional service. Political discontent was the most cited reason for protesting. Solidarity with protesters was another major catalyst for political engagement. In addition, women who were mothers invoked the notion of mothering to provide a rationale for activism. The study contributes to the growing literature on women's participation in contentious politics in non-democracies.