Cold War Political Theory: From the Center to the Peripheries

5 credits · Undergraduate

Analysts, pundits, and politicians have repeatedly warned us about entering a "New Cold War" between the United States and China. The reference to the Cold War intends to invoke the historical imagination of a binary world where liberal free world defends itself against the expansion of communist dictatorship through economic, political, and military measures. This imagination, however, reflects only a limited vision articulated by thinkers and policymakers at the "center" of the so-called liberal world - France, the United States, the United Kingdom, etc. It eclipses the continuing struggle between the center and peripheries over the meaning of political values, the vision of global order, and the vehicles of social change. This course walks us back to these contestations by closely reading important intellectual texts produced during the Cold War. By closing examining ideas, theories, and visions articulated in these texts from both the center and the peripheries, we seek to reconstruct the variegated faces of the Cold War, disrupt our current image of the Cold War, and reconsider the ways in which we imagine the future of our world.