This book examines the role of the Women's International Defense Federation (WIDF) in transnational women’s activism in the context of the Cold War, and in connection to the rights of women from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Combining a global history and postcolonial theory approach, this monograph shines light on an underrepresented organisation and its important role in the Cold War, Twentieth Century women's rights and Soviet history. Questioning whether the organization acted for women’s causes or whether it was merely a Cold War political instrument, the book analyzes and problematizes the place that the WIDF had in the politics of the Soviet Union, examining the ideology and politics of the WIDF and state socialist propaganda regarding women's equality and rights. Using Soviet archival documents of the organizations, the book offers a new perspective on the complexities of the development of global women’s rights movement divided by the Cold War confrontations. This is an important study suitable for students and researchers in Women's and Gender History, Eastern European History and Gender Studies.

The Cold War shaped the world we live in today - its politics, economics, and military affairs. This book shows how the globalization of the Cold War during the last century created the foundations for most of the key conflicts we see today, including the War on Terror. It focuses on how the Third World policies of the two twentieth-century superpowers - the United States and the Soviet Union - gave rise to resentments and resistance that in the end helped topple one superpower and still seriously challenge the other. Ranging from China to Indonesia, Iran, Ethiopia, Angola, Cuba, and Nicaragua, it provides a truly global perspective on the Cold War. And by exploring both the development of interventionist ideologies and the revolutionary movements that confronted interventions, the book links the past with the present in ways that no other major work on the Cold War era has succeeded in doing.

Gendering Postsocialism explores changes in gendered norms and expectations in Eastern Europe and Eurasia after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The dismantlement of state socialism in these regions triggered monumental shifts in their economic landscape, the involvement of their welfare states in social citizenship and, crucially, their established gender norms and relations, all contributing to the formation of the postsocialist citizen. Case studies examine a wide range of issues across 15 countries of the post-Soviet era. These include gender aspects of the developments in education in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Hungary, controversies around abortion legislation in Poland, migrant women and housing as a gendered problem in Russia, challenges facing women’s NGOs in Bosnia, and identity formation of unemployed men in Lithuania. This close analysis reveals how different variations of neoliberal ideology, centred around the notion of the self-reliant and self-determining individual, have strongly influenced postsocialist gender identities, whilst simultaneously showing significant trends for a “retraditionalising” of gender norms and expectations. This volume suggests that despite integration with global political and free market systems, the postsocialist gendered subject combines strategies from the past with those from contemporary ideologies to navigate new multifaceted injustices around gender in Eastern Europe and Eurasia.

This book examines the role of the Women's International Defense Federation (WIDF) in transnational women's activism in the context of the Cold War, and in connection to the rights of women from Asia, Africa and Latin America. Combining a global history and postcolonial theory approach, this monograph shines light on an underrepresented organisation and its important role in the Cold War, Twentieth Century women's rights and Soviet history. Questioning whether the organization acted for women's causes or whether it was merely a Cold War political instrument, the book analyzes and problematizes the place that the WIDF had in the politics of the Soviet Union, examining the ideology and politics of the WIDF and state socialist propaganda regarding women's equality and rights. Using Soviet archival documents of the organizations, the book offers a new perspective on the complexities of the development of global women's rights movement divided by the Cold War confrontations. This is an important study suitable for students and researchers in Women's and Gender History, Eastern European History and Gender Studies.

This book examines global humanitarian efforts involving the two German states and Third World liberation movements during the Cold War.

In Among Women across Worlds, Suzy Kim explores the transnational connections between North Korean women and the global women's movement. Asian women, especially communists, are often depicted as victims of a patriarchal state. Kim challenges this view through extensive archival research, revealing that North Korean women asserted themselves from the late 1940s to 1975, before the Korean War began and up to the UN's International Women's Year. Kim centers on North Korea and the "East" to present a new genealogy of the global women's movement. Women of the Korean Democratic Women's Union (KDWU), part of the global left women's movement led by the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), argued that family and domestic issues should be central to both national and international debates. They highlighted the connections between race, nationality, sex, and class in systems of exploitation. Their intersectional program proclaimed "no peace without justice," "the personal is the political," and "women's rights are human rights," long before Western activists adopted these ideas. Among Women across Worlds uncovers movements and ideas foundational to today's era.

The Soviet Union is often presented as a largely isolated and idiosyncratic state. Soviet Internationalism after Stalin challenges this view by telling the story of Soviet and Latin American intellectuals, students, political figures and artists, and their encounters with the 'other' from the 1950s through the 1980s. In this first multi-archival study of Soviet relations with Latin America, Tobias Rupprecht reveals that, for people in the Second and Third Worlds, the Cold War meant not only confrontation with an ideological enemy but also increased interconnectedness with distant world regions. He shows that the Soviet Union looked quite different from a southern rather than a Western point of view and also charts the impact of the new internationalism on the Soviet Union itself in terms of popular perceptions of the USSR's place in the world and its political, scientific, intellectual and cultural reintegration into the global community.