The Global Cold War and its Refugees

Kevin Kim
History
UC Los Angeles

This project emphasizes the Cold War political “refugee” as a central figure in the making and unmaking of the Cold War United States and post-World War II societies. Defining “refuge” as a political and ideological position in opposition to Cold War-era nation-states, militaries, and “Global North”-led international movements, this project explores how political officials, intellectuals, artists, businessmen, grassroots activists, and ordinary citizens, in league with two powerful centrist US dissenters, Herbert Hoover and Henry Wallace, imagined and acted on behalf of “worlds unseen”: alternative global visions, “restraint” and “engagement,” which sought to overcome racism, empire, unregulated capitalism, interstate warfare, and other oppressive state and nonstate practices which produced “refuge” as a mode of reform and resistance, as well as sanctuary.