In the 1960s, Indian governments were embroiled in a succession of diplomatic disputes involving defections from East to West. In March 1967, Svetlana Iosigovna Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, defected through the US embassy in New Delhi. Further back, in 1962, Vladislaw Stepanovich Tarasov, a Soviet merchant seaman, jumped ship in the eastern Indian port of Calcutta. After a legal wrangle in the Indian courts the Russian sailor left the subcontinent to begin a new life in the West. The Tarasov episode came at a point when India was reeling from a military defeat inflicted by China, and the national government was actively courting American and Soviet assistance to stave off what, at one point, appeared a threat to the India Republic’s survival. More broadly, defections staged in India served as an unwelcome irritant in relations between the Soviet Union, the United States and Great Britain, when these countries were attempting to forge more productive ties in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. This chapter focuses attention on the role played by Western intelligence services in the story of Cold War defection.

A federalised Serbia was formed after the war, as part of a communist-governed Yugoslav federation. Tito and the Party leadership restored Yugoslavia following four years of occupation and civil war, including a brutal conflict between pro-communist and pro-monarchy Serbs. In the post-war period, Serbia, like the rest of Yugoslavia, experienced modernization and industrialization and it was home to a vibrant arts and cultural scene. Serbia was the only Yugoslav republic that itself was federalized, with the establishment of the provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo. In the late 1970s, Serbian political leadership and intellectuals objected, from their different positions, to Serbias status in Yugoslavia. In the second half of the 1980s, the Serbian communist leader Slobodan Milošević adopted a nationalist platform which alienated many non-Serbs, undermined pro-democracy forces in Serbia, and destabilized Yugoslavia. Under the guise of the so-called anti-bureaucratic revolution, Milošević pushed his agenda in 1988-1989 to restore Serbia’s sovereignty over the provinces, and to extend his influence in Montenegro, where pro-Serb sentiments were strong.

The rivalry between the two states of divided Germany played out on a global scale across the Third World. The chain of upheavals in East Africa in 1964-65 led to Dar es Salaam becoming the first African capital south of the Sahara in which the German Democratic Republic maintained a diplomatic mission. This turned the city into a propaganda battlefield. East Berlin strove for full recognition from Tanzania, while Bonn tried to prevent such a development from coming to pass. In the face of this rivalry, Julius Nyerere’s government sought to pursue a non-aligned foreign policy and broker aid agreements to further its socialist project. Adopting a triangular approach, this chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s relationship with the two German states turned on developments in Central Europe, especially West Germany’s Ostpolitik. It reveals the challenges of upholding non-alignment in a Cold War world which did not revolve around simple binaries and was complicated by politics ‘on the ground’ in Dar es Salaam.

The rivalry between the two states of divided Germany played out on a global scale across the Third World. The chain of upheavals in East Africa in 1964-65 led to Dar es Salaam becoming the first African capital south of the Sahara in which the German Democratic Republic maintained a diplomatic mission. This turned the city into a propaganda battlefield. East Berlin strove for full recognition from Tanzania, while Bonn tried to prevent such a development from coming to pass. In the face of this rivalry, Julius Nyerere’s government sought to pursue a non-aligned foreign policy and broker aid agreements to further its socialist project. Adopting a triangular approach, this chapter demonstrates how Tanzania’s relationship with the two German states turned on developments in Central Europe, especially West Germany’s Ostpolitik. It reveals the challenges of upholding non-alignment in a Cold War world which did not revolve around simple binaries and was complicated by politics ‘on the ground’ in Dar es Salaam.

I argue that the (often idiosyncratic) interventions of Pakistan’s diplomats and international lawyers in Kashmir, Jammu and Pashtunistan, as well as in Bandung and Havana, form a distinct legal and political trajectory, which is at odds with the arbitrary, yet ubiquitous, conceptual delineations between ‘cold’ and ‘warm’ wars. Far from being peripheral to global Cold War developments, Pakistan’s internal and international relations and troubles provide a rich source of strategies and ideas about the state, law and society in the Third World. They are, however, also a testament to the centrality of class struggle in a post-colony – a struggle, exemplified in the events of 1951, that no lawfare could bring to an end.

The Cold War brought into the world and the world of inter-state relations a novel kind of space, Division Space – really, a novel mode of spatialisation altogether. The double Germanies, the double Vietnams, the double Koreas, the double Berlins, and the double Chinas were split along the Cold War fault line itself. But that line was not merely a geological feature or a surveyor’s or boundary commission’s line of demarcation, not a 38th parallel or River Elbe. They were only the most spectacular instances of a new space of division of unprecedented scope and penetration, simultaneously jurisdictional (legal), geographic, demographic, political, cultural, economic and ultimately civilisational. The scale of division was adjustable and fractal: city, state, continent, globe.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the years which followed brought into play a new international imaginary launched with a flurry of inaugural gestures. These included the proclamation, by US President George Bush, of a ‘New World Order’ in 1991, the publication, by UN Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, of an Agenda for Peace in 1992,and, in the most triumphalist gesture of the three, the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s invocation of the end of history. Many international legal scholars, too, applauded the beginning of a new post–Cold War world, no longer dominated by two rival superpowers. It was a moment widely thought to be full of new ‘global’, if not cosmopolitan, possibilities.

Whilst the role of the UN and the institutional space it opened for staging the Congo crisis are undoubtedly important for international law, this chapter focuses primarily on the political event of Lumumba’s 1961 assassination. Lumumba became the site of extensive Cold War anxieties and postcolonial aspirations, as an embodiment of the communist threat to some and of a pan-African future to others. His death provoked the ascription of an excess of meaning to a single politician, a victim standing metonymically for the broader violation of Congolese sovereignty. Both larger than life as a postcolonial martyr and overdetermined as a communist, Lumumba was a contested figure in the Cold War political imaginary.