The violence of the Cold War takes up a unique place in the history of violence. The Cold War era is often described as an exceptionally peaceful time in modern history. In this scheme, the violence of the Cold War was primarily of an imaginary kind, which contributed to containing the outbreak of real violence especially among the industrialized nations of the West. The idea of the Cold War as a long peace or an imaginary violence, however, does not fit with how many communities in the broader world experienced the second half of the twentieth century, especially those that underwent the bipolarization of politics as part of the political process of decolonization. In these communities, the Cold War signifies an extraordinarily violent time, characterized by the crisis of civil war and the routinization of other exceptional forms of political violence, which affected intimate human lives as well as the order of political society. An understanding of the Cold War as part of the history of violence requires, therefore, coming to terms with the radical disparity in historical experience between the West and the postcolonial world.