Description
For many, the Cold War constitutes a distinctive era of the 20th century that has organized international and domestic politics, and the production of knowledge and theories about International Relations. With the fall of the Soviet Union, the phrase the “end of the Cold War” has become ubiquitous to herald a new period of new (non-state) actors and processes of globalization and governance that popularized “new” (meta-) theories about international politics. With the seeming dawn of a “new Cold War” between the United States and China and the return of geopolitics, commentators are quick to call for yet another reconsideration about international politics and its theories.
This article problematizes the role of the “Cold War” as an organizing principle of international and domestic politics and as a way of knowing by problematizing the notion of the Cold War itself as a stable reference point. Instead, the article argues that the Cold War has always been a construct of the respective present where politics, memory and political order, domestic and international, converge. The article does so by collecting and critically engaging with diverse meanings of the Cold War from different temporal and spatial vantage points.
