The Other Cold War

A history, not of the end of the cold war, but of the process of its ending, both locally and globally. A rich and compelling account of that complex period. -- Marilyn B. Young, New York University Sophisticated and original. Deploying his ethnographer's insights into modern Korea, Vietnam and Indonesia, Heonik Kwon pays special attention to the local fall out of the East-West confrontations and in particular to the fiercest of the cold war battle-fronts, in post-colonial Southeast Asia, and to the aftershocks, which have not come to an end. The Other Cold War will renew the great debates on the cold war, postcolonialism, and the modern history of Southeast Asia. -- Adam Kuper, Fellow of the British Academy Heonik Kwon is an ethnographer, and ethnography is a way of understanding peoples and events by composing their stories. Kwon's book recomposes the standard, essentially pacific story of the cold war by taking as equal protagonists with Europeans and Americans the peoples like the Koreans and Vietnamese among whom an 'other cold war' raged violent and deadly. This is new historical knowledge that arises from a new formal sophistication. -- Myra Jehlen, Rutgers University, author of Readings at the Edge of Literature A spectacular achievement from one of the most creative and theoretically sophisticated scholars writing about the cold war. While many authors have called for a truly global conception of the cold war, Kwon actually achieves it, ranging broadly across the world, time, and the range of human experience. In the process, he convincingly questions much of the received wisdom about the second half of the twentieth century and offers arguments that any serious student of the cold war will grapple with for years to come. -- Mark Atwood Lawrence, University of Texas at Austin

In this conceptually bold project, Heonik Kwon uses anthropology to interrogate the cold war's cultural and historical narratives. Adopting a truly panoramic view of local politics and international events, he challenges the notion that the cold war was a global struggle fought uniformly around the world and that the end of the war marked a radical, universal rupture in modern history. Incorporating comparative ethnographic study into a thorough analysis of the period, Kwon upends cherished ideas about the global and their hold on contemporary social science. His narrative describes the slow decomposition of a complex social and political order involving a number of local and culturally creative processes. While the nations of Europe and North America experienced the cold war as a time of "long peace," postcolonial nations entered a different reality altogether, characterized by vicious civil wars and other exceptional forms of violence. Arguing that these events should be integrated into any account of the era, Kwon captures the first sociocultural portrait of the cold war in all its subtlety and diversity.