ABSTRACT
This chapter ponders on what we can gain from looking at the Cold War era through the lens of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). It evaluates early UNESCO’s conception of cultural diplomacy and international cultural relations and positions the politicisation of cinema as holding significant potential for the organisation’s aims of arguing for a new form of universal humanism grounded in the appreciation of similarity rooted in diversity. The chapter concludes with the book’s main argument: that through something as seemingly meaningless as a film catalogue published in the 1950s, even major cultural conflicts such as the Cold War and the decolonisation process can be reframed in service of UNESCO’s cultural diplomatic agenda.
