About Us

Message from the General Editor

Welcome to Routledge Resources Online: The Cold War. This reference work, unique in the world of Cold War studies, offers an opportunity to read up on many topics that are representative of the conflict between a U.S.-led liberal-democratic world and Soviet-led global communism that preoccupied–indeed, threatened–much of the world between 1945 and 1990. The Cold War not only was a zero-sum clash between two competing visions, or ideologies, for organizing the post-World War II world, through the development of nuclear weapons and the subsequent arms race, it also threatened the end of human civilization as people knew it. Increasingly coinciding with processes of decolonization and globalization, the Cold War quickly became a genuinely global contest.

When some two decades ago work began on, as it was called then, the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Cold War, the era of the “new Cold War history” was still fairly young. Around 1990, at the end of the Cold War itself, historians and others suddenly had gained access to archives that during the East-West conflict had been off-limits to just about everyone. It became possible to add first-hand perspectives from non-Western participants in the conflict, especially those in the former Soviet bloc. Soon, the focus (and research opportunities) widened further, and the importance of the Third World for our understanding of the Cold War became a central theme. With the opening of borders and archives, new colleagues joined what increasingly became an international community of Cold War specialists. New archival evidence, often unlocked by a new generation of historians, coupled with the fact that the Cold War had genuinely become history, allowed for new questions being asked, new topics being introduced. Cold War history became truly global.

To provide students, colleagues, and others with a reference work representative of the new, global Cold War history was our objective then, and it has stayed that way. Cold War history has remained an active and evolving field since the publication of the print edition in 2008. The relevance of the Cold War for understanding our own world has only increased. For users, old and new, to continue to be served, and for our reference work to remain representative of the field, we commenced work in 2019 on the fully revised and enhanced digital edition in front of you. The digital format allows us to keep adding material on both traditional and more recently introduced topics from the history of the Cold War. This will happen twice a year (with some crucial topics already in the pipeline for the second half of 2025). We also, where relevant, refer users to online primary documents or document collections, in case one seeks to do some research of one’s own. What has not changed since we made the print edition is the way we have encouraged our authors to write their entries: while conforming to the basic elements one would expect in a reference work, the entries should also be engagingly written, without the perspective of the author being filtered out. The entries here should be informative, but they should also be original pieces of writing, relevant for users ranging from advanced high school students preparing reports, all the way to specialists putting together lectures for their university classes.

Ruud van Dijk (General Editor, Routledge Resources Online: The Cold War)

Editorial Board

Ruud van Dijk, General Editor

Ruud van Dijk studied history at the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands and the University of Kansas, USA. He received his Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1999. He has taught at Carnegie Mellon University, Dickinson College, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and, since 2008, the University of Amsterdam. Besides serving as the senior editor for the Routledge Encyclopedia of the Cold War, he has published on, among other topics, the German “question” in the Cold War, the Euromissile Crisis, NATO, and Dutch foreign relations. Among his current research interests are climate change and environmental degradation as subjects of international relations, and the new “missed opportunities” debate concerning East-West relations in the first post-Cold War decade.

Sean Brennan, Subject Editor

Sean Brennan is a professor of History at the University of Scranton, USA, where he has taught since 2009.  He received his doctorate from the University of Notre Dame, USA.  He is the author of numerous books on the Cold War, such as The Priest Who Put Europe Back Together: The Life of Father Fabian Flynn in 2018, Warren Austin, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr, and the Cold War at the United Nations 1947-1960 and The KGB and the Vatican: Secrets of the Mitrokhin Files, both in 2022, and The Essential Speeches of the Cold War in 2024.

Sean Byrnes, Subject Editor

Sean T. Byrnes is a Senior Instructor of History at Western Governors University, USA, and an Adjunct Associate Professor of History at the University of Maryland Global Campus, USA. He is the author of Disunited Nations: US Foreign Policy, Anti-Americanism, and the Rise of the New Right from LSU Press and his work has appeared in publications including Time, Dissent, Jacobin, and the New Republic. He holds a Ph.D. from Emory University, USA.

Fernando Herrera Calderón, Subject Editor

Fernando Herrera-Calderón is Associate Professor of History at the University of Northern Iowa, specializing in twentieth century Mexican history, the Cold War, student politics, and armed insurgencies. His publications include Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964-1982, co-edited with Adela Cedillo, and Twentieth Century Guerrilla Movements in Latin America: A Primary Source History, both published with Routledge. He has also written several scholarly articles and book chapters in both English and Spanish. His current book project is titled, “Laboratories of Dissent: Student Power and the Urban Guerrilla Experience During Mexico’s Cold War, 1970-1982.”

Lorena De Vita, Subject Editor

Lorena De Vita is a tenured Assistant Professor at Utrecht University. Her work focuses on the course and legacy of Cold War in the Middle East and Europe, paying specific attention to the legacy of the past in international relations. She is the author of Israelpolitik: German-Israeli Relations 1949-1965 (Key Studies in Diplomacy, Manchester University Press 2020). Her work has appeared in top journals, such as International Affairs and Cold War History, as well as popular outlets, such as The Washington Post. She is the 2024 Heineken Young Scientist Award in the Humanities winner and a co-founding member of the Utrecht Global Cold War group (https://www.uu.nl/en/research/global-cold-war).

Frank Gerits, Subject Editor

Frank Gerits is an assistant professor in the history of international relations at Utrecht University, Netherlands, and a researcher fellow at the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State in Bloemfontein, South Africa. After completing his PhD. at the European University Institute in 2014 he worked as a postdoctoral fellow at New York University, the University of Amsterdam and the University of the Free State. His research focuses on the international relations between the Global North and the Global South. His first book, The Ideological Scramble for Africa was published by Cornell University Press in 2023.

Kevin Grimm, Subject Editor

Kevin E. Grimm is an associate professor of history at Regent University, USA, who focuses on the intersection of U.S. foreign policy, West Africa, international labor organizations, and development and modernization during the early Cold War. His work has appeared in Cold War History, the Journal of Contemporary History, Labor History, the Journal of West African History, and Media History. His other work includes a chapter on Western labor philanthropy in Africa in American Philanthropy at Home and Abroad (2022) and a historiography chapter on President Eisenhower’s relationship with the Third World in Wiley-Blackwell’s A Companion to Dwight D. Eisenhower (2017).

Simo Mikkonen, Subject Editor

Simo Mikkonen is Professor of Sociocultural Remembering at the University of Eastern Finland (Joensuu). He is specialized in 20^th Century Eastern European, particularly Soviet cultural history, cultural Cold War, and memory studies. He has published extensively on international and transnational East-West connections, including Beyond the Curtain: Entangled Histories of the Cold War-Era Europe (Berghahn 2015), Music, Art, and Diplomacy: East-West Cultural Interactions and the Cold War (Routledge 2016), as well as Entangled East and West. Cultural Diplomacy and Artistic Interaction during the Cold War (DeGruyter 2019).

Pete Millwood, Subject Editor

Pete Millwood is Lecturer in East Asian history at the University of Melbourne, Australia. His first book Improbable Diplomats: How Ping-Pong Players, Musicians, and Scientists Remade US-China Relations was published by Cambridge University Press in 2022. He received his PhD from Oxford, has taught at Tsinghua and the London School of Economics, and held research fellowships at Peking University, the Library of Congress, and in the University of Hong Kong’s Society of Fellows. His research on US–China diplomatic and transnational relations has also been published in Diplomatic History, Cold War History, and the Journal of Contemporary History.

Paschalis Pechlivanis, Subject Editor

Paschalis Pechlivanis is Assistant Professor in History of International Relations at Utrecht University, Netherlands, and the managing coordinator of the Cold War Research Network (CWRN) in the Netherlands. He is the author of America and Romania in the Cold War: A Differentiated Détente, 1969-80 (Routledge 2019, Cold War History series) and The Vanity of Duty: Diplomacy, Letters and Dictatorship in the life of Ch. Xanthopoulos-Palamas. [in Greek] (Epikentro 2025). His research interests include the (Global) Cold War, US Foreign Policy, post-1945 Balkan History and new diplomatic history approaches. He is currently working on a history of the Balkans viewed as a Cold War microcosm.

Institution page: https://www.uu.nl/staff/PPechlivanis

Angela Romano, Subject Editor

Dr Angela Romano is an international historian of 20^th Century at the Department of Social and Political Sciences of the Alma Mater Studiorum University of Bologna. Her previous positions include Lecturer at the University of Glasgow, Senior Research Fellow at the European University Institute (EUI), where she co-led the ERC-funded project PanEur1970s, Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at LSE International History Department, and Jean Monnet Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies of the EUI. Her research spans the Cold War, the variety of regional integration and cooperation processes, international economic relations, CSCE/OSCE and New Diplomatic History.

Giles Scott-Smith, Subject Editor

Giles Scott-Smith is Professor of Transnational Relations and New Diplomatic History at Leiden University, Netherlands, and Dean of Leiden University College in The Hague. He is one of the coordinators of the New Diplomatic History network, www.newdiplomatichistory.org. His research interests cover the linkages between ideas and power, culture and politics, in particular regarding the role of non-state actors in international affairs.

Liliane Stadler, Subject Editor

Liliane Stadler is an Ax:son Johnson Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), USA. Her research revolves around neutral states within NATO’s Partnership for Peace (PfP) after 1994. Until 2024, Liliane was a lecturer in History of International Relations at the University of Utrecht, Netherlands. She completed her DPhil in History at the University of Oxford (St. Antony’s), UK in 2021 and her MPhil in International Relations at the University of Oxford (Lady Margaret Hall), UK in 2016. She holds a Master of Arts (Hons.) from the University of St. Andrews, UK.