This chapter explores Stalin's approach to China, in particular his difficult relationship with Mao Zedong. It shows Stalin at pains to redefine his strategy as the Chinese Civil War produced an unexpected set of victories for the Communists. By delving into the details of Anastas Mikoyan's negotiations with Mao in Xibaipo, and later Mao's talks with Stalin in Moscow, the chapter brings out hidden tensions between would-be allies while explaining how and why, despite these tensions, Beijing and Moscow managed to conclude a treaty of alliance. The chapter also explores the road to the Korean War, highlighting Stalin's reasons for permitting North Korea's Kim Il Sung to invade South Korea in June 1950. The war allowed Stalin to both strengthen the Sino-Soviet alliance and keep the Americans occupied, postponing the possibility of a conflict in Europe.

This chapter offers a brief overview of US relations with the Korean Peninsula from the late nineteenth century through the Trump administration to provide a historical framework for understanding the chapters that follow. While laying out this framework, this chapter also advances the argument that the policies of the Trump administration toward the Korean Peninsula were not the dramatic breaks with the past the administration often claimed they were. President Trump was hardly the first American president to be skeptical of the US alliance with the ROK and attempt to change it – though the bluntness with which he did this was unprecedented. While Trump’s three meetings with Kim Jong-un could rightly be called historic in a narrow sense, there is ample evidence they were just the latest installment of what some scholars refer to as “entrepreneurial diplomacy” with the DPRK. In the broader historical context of US relations with the Korean Peninsula, President Trump’s policies toward the ROK and the DPRK appear more as variations on a theme than dramatic breaks with the past.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) seeks to end impunity for the world’s worst crimes to contribute to their prevention. But what is its impact to date? This book takes an in-depth look at four countries under scrutiny of the ICC: Afghanistan, Colombia, Libya, and Uganda. It puts forward an analytical framework to assess the impact of the ICC on four levels: on domestic legal systems (systemic effect); on peace negotiations and agreements (transformative effect); on victims (reparative effect); and on the perceptions of affected populations (demonstration effect). It concludes that the ICC is having a normative impact on domestic legal systems and peace agreements, but it has brought little reparative justice for victims, and it does not necessarily correspond with how affected populations view justice priorities. The book concludes that justice for the world’s worst crimes has no “universal formula” that can easily be captured in the law of the ICC.

The period from 1945 to 1960 was a mixture of the darker aspects of the time and the brighter aspects of the succeeding period. While there were disorder, division, and war, many of the conditions for the subsequent development were provided during this period. South Korea became an exception among the ex-colonies by escaping from socialism and being closely integrated with advanced capitalist countries. The country built a system whereby private enterprises faced workers with poor labor rights while carrying out the land reform. After the war, the growth rate was not impressive, as the prevalent government failure made it impossible to overcome the market failure. Yet import-substituting industrialization proceeded, through which chaebol emerged as a major player in the economy. The country implemented disinflation, enhanced education level, and began to promote exports, providing a condition for future growth, but the former two rather helped precipitate a crisis in 1960.

This chapter gives brief descriptions of Post-WWII interstate conflicts linked to the main phases in great power tensions: the bipolar Cold War, with Korean war 1950, the Viet Nam war 1965, Interventions, Cuban Missile Crisis 1962, the Détente and unipolar conflict resolving world that followed the break-up of the Soviet Union and the multipolar world that is emerging thereafter with terrorism, Russian intervention in Georgia and war in Ukraine and sharp tensions between the Koreas and in the East and South China Seas.

This chapter discusses the emergence of the Cold War, the containment policy, and the Cold War consensus (and its challenges) that were developed against the expansion of international communism.

By early 1965, new dynamics were taking shape within the international communist movement. Cuba and North Korea were at the forefront of this challenge. Relations between the two countries date back to the Korean War, when many Cubans, like young people across Latin America, mobilized to prevent their countries from joining the US-led war effort. When the Cuban Revolution of 1959 brought the island into the socialist camp, a bond began to grow between the Cuban and North Korean leaderships reflective of their shared history of anti-colonial struggle, and their common interests as small countries within a community of socialist states dominated by the Soviet Union and China. Political, cultural, and economic cooperation between Havana and Pyongyang grew steadily, including Che’s historic visit to North Korea in December 1960. By 1965, a nascent Third Worldist tendency affirming its independence from the two major socialist powers was coalescing around North Korea, Cuba, and North Vietnam. At its core was the conviction that it was those on the frontlines of the anti-imperialist struggle which most clearly recognized the true historic task at hand: the defeat of US imperialism.

How did the concept of an international military become a popular diplomatic option in the twentieth century? Chapter 1 establishes how international organisations, such as the League of Nations and the UN, disrupted the state monopoly on war thus helping to pave the way towards the armed peacekeeping project. It traces post-war debates on the UN’s role in nuclear disarmament and examines the UN leadership’s experiments in intervening directly in conflict contexts. Inspired by the UN’s observer presence in the Israel/Palestine conflict, the first secretary-general, Trygve Lie, proposed the creation of a UN Guard to protect the organisation’s field-based staff. Although the UN Guard failed to achieve meaningful diplomatic support, the idea of an international force - organised, trained, and uniformed by the UN - demonstrated the UN leadership’s aspirations for the organisation to shift into militarism. The chapter concludes by examining the diplomatic negotiations and logistical construction of the UN Command in Korea, examining how the UN leadership’s efforts to involve the organisation in the field were limited during this period by US hegemony and logistical superiority.

The United States contemplates terminating the Fiscal Division and Fiscal Commission but relents. The financing of economic development in underdeveloped countries becomes a priority agenda item in the Economic and Social Council. Inter-American relations deteriorate and the US tax treaty programme with underdeveloped countries takes a nosedive.

Chapter 3 focuses on the poetry of the Iranian Aḥmad Shāmlū and his pioneering imagination of what would eventually come to be called the Third World in his second collection of poetry, The Manifesto, from 1951. Shāmlū’s committed poetry goes beyond Nīmā’s prosodic innovations to reach past the borders of Iran in a bid to build solidarity with, for instance, a Korean soldier fighting against the United Kingdom and United States in the Korean War. The Manifesto, therefore, represents Shāmlū’s attempt to forge a Third World literary network within the Global South that predates later moves in this direction following the Bandung Conference in 1955. However, Shāmlū’s idealism was cut short in 1953 only weeks after the Korean War ended when these same imperial powers staged their coup against Mohammad Mosaddegh on August 15–19. The 1953 coup represents a momentous turning point not just for local politics in the Middle East but also for cultural production. Shāmlū tempered his political engagement following the coup, and the Iranian Left suffered a general malaise from which it never recovered.

This chapter examines Protestantism’s relationship with human dignity in South Korea against the backdrop of the country’s modern history from the early stage of Protestant mission to the country’s democratization. Protestantism enshrines the biblical view of humankind as God’s creation. Since the first Protestant missionaries were sent to Korea in the late nineteenth century, Protestantism has influenced Koreans to respect the intrinsic value of every person. Protestant churches even played a vital role in protecting and promoting human dignity during the course of the country’s modernization, democratization, and economic development. This chapter demonstrates how Korean Protestants adopted and practiced the idea of human dignity, mainly focusing on their complicated responses to the country’s unstable political and social situations. Despite the risk of oversimplification, the chapter investigates this crucial topic by dividing the history of modern Korea into the three distinct periods: 1) early Protestant mission through Japanese colonization, 1884–1945; 2) independence through the Korean War, 1945–53; and 3) postwar national reconstruction through democratization, 1953–87.

From the 1950s on, Sino-Swiss relations were unique in Western Europe. Switzerland’s early recognition of China and its neutrality led to a great deal of goodwill in China and extraordinarily amicable relations in the 1950s. China also used its diplomatic missions in Switzerland as political, economic, and cultural hubs for Western Europe and in some cases even for the entire world. For Switzerland, Sino-Swiss relations were supposed to establish Switzerland as an internationally respected, neutral mediating power. However, China mistrusted Swiss neutrality, and it also used Switzerland as a European hub for embargo goods deals. It was only with the Geneva Conference and China’s use of ‘peaceful coexistence’ as the official basis for its foreign policy that Chinese official statements on Swiss neutrality improved.

This chapter examines military attitudes toward “emotional injuries” resulting from the end of romantic relationships. Evaluations of why some men “cracked” evolved substantially from World War I to the present. Often, however, psychiatrists attributed servicemen’s maladies to deficient female love: whether that of mothers or romantic partners. In Vietnam, psychiatrists construed romantic rejection as a “narcissistic injury”: a blow to the ego that led men to decompensate in various ways. Alcoholism, going AWOL, self-harm, and violence directed toward others were all associated with Dear John letters. The chapter considers how the military medical and legal establishments adjudicated unlawful acts perpetrated by servicemen whose intimate relationships had recently been severed by letter. It focuses on two court-martial cases: a Korean War POW who briefly rejected repatriation to the United States in 1953, citing a Dear John as his motive for defection, and a Marine Corps private court-martialled in 1969 for killing four Vietnamese peasants. In the latter case, military lawyers deemed the defendant to have been temporarily insane after his fiancée sent him a Dear John.

Australia’s war effort during the last two years of the Second World War has been the subject of considerable criticism, much of it ill-informed. Some historians have claimed that the operations in Bougainville and New Guinea were part of an ‘unnecessary war’. The British historian Sir Max Hastings went further when he claimed that ‘as the war advanced, grateful as were the Allies for Australia’s huge contribution towards feeding their soldiers, there was sourness about the limited contribution by this country of seven million people’. According to Hastings, the Australians were ‘bludgers’, claiming, for example, that the government cut the army’s size by 22 per cent because of the ‘unpopularity of military service’.

Since the turn of the millennium a number of novels that look back to the Korean War have appeared in English including Ha Jin’s War Trash, Hwang Sok-yong’s The Guest, Chang-rae Lee’s The Surrendered and Jayne Anne Phillips’s Lark and Termite. These works issue address a location, the Korean peninsula, that interrupts putatively global frameworks for understanding the contemporary. Korea’s postcoloniality remains suspended as it has manifested in two still divided nation-state and its ongoing civil war testifies to the fact that the Cold War’s putative end is not an entirely global phenomenon. Moreover, these works illuminate how the “contact nebulae” (to use Karen Thornber’s phrase) that define East Asia—the formations of transculturation indigenous to that region—are not only shot through by complex asymmetries of power but also intertwined with more global histories of war and empire. As such, the network of literary examined in this essay contribute to a theorizing of the contemporary and of world literature that is attuned tracking the dynamic interaction of the multiple temporal and spatial registers—global, regional and national—in which various modalities of worlding take place.

Looking at the Korean and Vietnam Wars, we evaluate the influence of casualties disaggregated by space/hometowns and time on mass opinion in both the Korean and Vietnam wars and on individual opinion in the Vietnam War. We find a powerful connection between US casualties and public support for a war consistent with our expectations about the importance of casualty trends, the geographic locations of casualty hometowns, and the interaction of these dynamics. Disaggregated casualties are better able to capture variation in mass public and individual wartime opinion than are logged cumulative national casualties – the standard wartime measure employed. We also find that the wartime information-opinion process operates more strongly in the ex ante identifiable early stages of a conflict, and less effectively later in a conflict when casualty expectations (and thus the value of new information) begin to harden. These results strongly support the general notion that casualty patterns act as an observable proxy for our RP/ETC process by capturing information that individuals draw on to generate ETC and formulate wartime positions, improving our ability to understand and predict wartime opinion.

Chapter 3 continues to tell a cultural history of the nuclear destruction by examining how US survivors reconnected with their families in the United States in the two decades after the war, often through relatives and friends stationed in Japan as part of the American occupation force, the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC; a research institute dedicated to the study of radiation effects on humans), or the US Army at war in Korea. I illuminate how these US institutions in Japan not only offered US survivors employment opportunities (frequently as translators), but also became a major obstacle to quietly hiding and healing from the bomb’s effect. The ABCC was particularly problematic in this regard, because scientists treated all survivors as Japanese whose bodies victorious Americans were entitled to examine, when in fact American survivors were trying to reestablish their US citizenship. American medical scientists’ understanding of survivors disrupted US survivors’ self-perception, causing a cleavage that was to persist in the nuclear medicine for years to come.