Book Release: Lorenz Lüthi’s ‘Cold Wars: Asia, the Middle East, Europe’

Date and time: Friday, September 25, 2020, 12 noon to 1:30 pm Eastern Daylight Time (UTC-4)

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We explore Prof. Lorenz Lüthi’s new book, Cold Wars, with Fawaz Gerges, Deborah Larson, Margaret MacMillan, Jennifer Welsh & Carl Bouchard

What was the Cold War that shook world politics for the second half of the twentieth century? Standard narratives focus on Soviet-American rivalry as if the superpowers were the exclusive driving forces of the international system. Lorenz M. Lüthi offers a radically different account, restoring agency to regional powers in Asia, the Middle East and Europe and revealing how regional and national developments shaped the course of the global Cold War. Despite their elevated position in 1945, the United States, Soviet Union and United Kingdom quickly realized that their political, economic, and military power had surprisingly tight limits given the challenges of decolonization, Asian-African internationalism, pan-Arabism, pan-Islamism, Arab–Israeli antagonism, and European economic developments. A series of Cold Wars ebbed and flowed as the three world regions underwent structural changes that weakened or even severed their links to the global ideological clash, leaving the superpower Cold War as the only major conflict that remained by the 1980s.

Lorenz M. Lüthi is Associate Professor at McGill University, Montréal, and is a leading historian of the Cold War. His first book The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (2008) won the 2008 Furniss Award and the 2010 Marshall Shulman Book Prize. His publications on the Vietnam war, Asian-African internationalism, and non-alignment have broken new ground in Cold War history.

Our Panelists:

• Fawaz A. Gerges is Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), and holder of the Emirates Professorship in Contemporary Middle East Studies. He was also the inaugural Director of the LSE Middle East Centre from 2010 until 2013.
• Deborah Welch Larson is professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. at Stanford University. Her publications include Origins of Containment: A Psychological Explanation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985); Anatomy of Mistrust: US-Soviet Relations during the Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); and “Status Seekers: Chinese and Russian Responses to U.S. Primacy,” International Security 34, no. 4 (Spring 2010): 63-95 (with Alexei Shevchenko). She has most recently published Quest for Status: Chinese and Russian Foreign Policy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), with Alexei Shevchenko.
• Margaret MacMillan (Toronto and Oxford) is professor of History at the University of Toronto and an emeritus professor of International History at Oxford University. She was Warden of St Antony’s College, Oxford from 2007-2017. Her research specializes in British imperial history and the international history of the 19th and 20th centuries. Publications include Paris, 1919, Nixon and Mao and The War that Ended Peace. She gave the CBC’s Massey lectures in 2015 and the BBC’s Reith Lectures in 2018. She is an honorary Fellow of the British Academy, a Companion of the Order of Canada and a Companion of Honour (UK).
• Jennifer M. Welsh is the Canada 150 Research Chair in Global Governance and Security at McGill University. She was previously Professor and Chair in International Relations at the European University Institute (Florence, Italy) and Professor in International Relations at the University of Oxford, where she co-founded the Oxford Institute for Ethics, Law and Armed Conflict. From 2013-2016, she served as the Special Adviser to the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon, on the Responsibility to Protect.

Moderator: Carl Bouchard est professeur agrégé au département d’histoire de l’Université de Montréal, membre du Centre d’études sur la paix et la sécurité internationale (CEPSI), du Groupement interuniversitaire pour l’histoire des relations internationales contemporaines et du Centre d’études et de recherches internationales de l’Université de Montréal (CÉRIUM). Il enseigne et encadre des recherches supérieures autour de l’histoire des relations internationales contemporaines de la première moitié du XXe siècle, de la Première Guerre mondiale et de l’histoire de la paix. Il co-dirige pour l’année 2018-2019 le CÉRIUM.