The other Cold War

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