Protesting with, not against a monument: women’s activism and the Women of Steel, Sheffield, UK

In 2016, a monument to the female steel workers of South Yorkshire, who had worked in the local factories and steel mills in the World Wars was unveiled in Sheffield, England. Rooted firmly in Sheffield’s industrial past and the national memory of the wars, the monument began as an act of recognition of this group of working women’s contributions to the war effort. It swiftly became more. Since its unveiling, Women of Steel has been mobilized in multiple acts of activism for such diverse causes as the ordination of women in the Church of England, gender-based violence, and as a battle ground for antagonistic views on what is denoted by the term ‘woman’. This mobilization is remarkable in the histories of gender, place, commemoration, and activism for being conceived by activists as in alignment with, not antagonistic to the meanings of the monument. This paper offers the first academic analysis of Women of Steel, uncovering how and why a monument erected without attendant controversy was swiftly adopted in activism for diverse gendered causes. The paper explores the interplay between gender and time, the denotation of design, and the associative connotations of the monument and the spaces it inhabits.

The geopolitics of memory: an ethnography of the streets

We can experience a memorial site in various ways, from the most embodied to the most abstract, with attention to the dynamic, three-dimensional, tactile, visual and aural dimensions of the site, and the local, national and transnational dimensions of memorialization. This involves engaging with multiple temporalities: our present engagement with the site itself, the history of the site, and the historical events which are referenced. Much of the discussion of sites of memory ( lieux de memoire  cf.) focuses on tangible sites such as war memorials. Some acts of memorialization, however, leave no permanent traces on the streets. Because they are ephemeral, we are reliant on other sources in order to know their history. Our visit to the site must be triangulated with information from the historical record. This essay focuses on a site of memory which has been transformed from an intangible site of memorialization to the very tangible site of a statue for peace.  I place the site in context with an ‘ethnography of the streets’ which is attentive to the visible traces of geopolitics in the city centre of Seoul.

Spying in South Asia: Britain, United States, and India’s Secret Cold War by Paul M. McGarr, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, pp.348, £30 (hardback), ISBN 9781108843676.

Envoys and Missed Opportunities for Conflict Resolution: Richard Goodwin, Che Guevara, and U.S.-Cuban Relations, 1961

Can individual diplomats clear the path to détente between adversaries? The litany of failed overtures between the United States and Cuba, and the sheer duration of official hostility from the Dwight Eisenhower administration to Barack Obama’s second term, present compelling puzzles about peacemaking. Were structural obstacles insurmountable, or did failures stem from personnel and process? I analyse a negative case through archival research, presenting a revisionist account of Che Guevara’s August 1961 meeting with Kennedy staffer Richard Goodwin. During a crucial opportunity for conflict resolution between the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, the personal characteristics of diplomatic envoys (not domestic opposition, mistrust, or incompatible preferences) chiefly explain the failure to negotiate a modus vivendi. Further, although the Kennedy administration, the press, and scholars have downplayed this encounter while emphasising continued U.S. covert operations against Fidel Castro, I argue that the Goodwin-Guevara meeting held significant promise, that its failure affected regional security and the Cold War in Latin America, and that it offers lessons for analysts and practitioners of international conflict resolution.

Peace Talks and Imperial Stocks: What Bound Fascist Italy’s Early Diplomacy to Postwar Europe

Italian foreign policy during the interwar years is often reduced to the ‘road to war’ that characterised relations between Italy and its former wartime allies after the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. It is surprising how little scholarly attention has been dedicated to examining Italian foreign policy prior to this point of rupture. This article aims to explain how and why Fascist Italy cooperated in the post-war order for as long as it did by situating early Fascist diplomacy within the context of the Greater War. Benito Mussolini rose to power preoccupied with rectifying the so-called ‘mutilated victory’ while the post-war order was still deeply in flux. The ‘unfinished peace’ resulting from the Treaty of Versailles (1919) offered significant opportunity for the young Fascist regime to pursue further negotiations with the British to bring to fruition the unfulfilled programme of its Liberal predecessors. This article narrows in on negotiations over one outstanding item on the agenda – the Jubaland transfer – to demonstrate that it was precisely these discussions with the British about Italy’s unresolved imperial claims that drew the intrinsically revisionist regime into a range of diplomatic exchanges and gave the young Fascist regime a stake in the future post-war order. In practice, Fascist Italy’s determination to secure the transfer of Jubaland from British Kenya to Italian Somaliland deeply entangled the new revisionist regime in broader multilateral initiatives concerned with European security, economic reconstruction, and the nature the post-war order as a whole.

Internationalism Under Relentless Attacks: Anti-United Nations Sentiment in the United States During the Truman Era

American resentment regarding the United Nations Organization has not been confined to recent decades. Anti-UN sentiment, in fact, was already perceptible during the early Cold War period: several personalities and organisations of the Truman era, as well as a number of newspapers, denounced the world forum. Who were the main detractors of the UN during the years 1945–1952? How did they justify their acrimonious position? Did they deserve the label of ‘isolationists’? What was their impact? The primary objective of this article is to shed some light on the issues at hand and provide answers to these essential questions.

Origins of the American Foreign Policy Towards Kurdish Separatism in the Cold War Era and Mahabad Republic Case in Terms of Sea and Land Power Rivalry

The first active American involvement in the Kurdish unrest took place in 1942 in Iran. American strategy in the aftermath of the Second World War, which was designed to prevent Soviet expansionism towards the Persian Gulf, triggered the collapse of the first Kurdish political entity Mahabad Republic in 1946. These American involvements were not analysed in scholarly in the literature although they established the pillars of America’s Kurdish policy. The creation of the Mahabad Republic in January 1946 drew American interest more towards the Kurdish separatist movements, while the geopolitical considerations appeared during the crisis continued during the Cold War era. Therefore, there is congruence between trace of American foreign policy and classical geopolitical thinking in this case. This article aims to illustrate foundation of America’s Kurdish policy based on British and American archives. America’s Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Averell Harriman, played a significant role, which should be noted in this context.

Throwing Good Money After Bad: The Kuomintang Involvement in the Chew Swee Kee Case, 1956–59

The absence of ROC consulates and KMT party branches in Singapore after 1949 precluded any possibility of open KMT intervention in post-war Singapore and necessitated clandestine operations through Taipei’s liaison agents. Backing the Labour Front government’s Minister of Education Chew Swee Kee, who sought to regulate and restrict Chinese education, the KMT leadership effectively subordinated the promotion of Chinese education to the larger overarching goal of fighting communism. Following the 1959 Legislative Assembly elections, the KMT leadership realised belatedly that they had backed the wrong horse, a fiasco which must ultimately be attributed to unreliable intelligence gathered by liaison agents.

Review article: South African military involvement in Rhodesia, c.1965-80

Over time a modest, but developing amount of scholarship has emerged investigating the nature of South African military support for Rhodesia. This review article aims to outline what work has been done so far on this topic, and to suggest further avenues for research. It suggests that there is still much work to be done on a whole host of issues surrounding South African involvement in Rhodesia. This extends far beyond the actual deployment of South African personnel to encompass a wide-range of topics which surround South Africa’s decision to aid Rhodesia in its war against the Zimbabwean nationalist guerrillas.

Development of Portuguese counterinsurgency, 1961–1974

Despite the retarded state of Portugal’s economy, the enormous geographical challenges, and an unprepared armed force, Portugal felt confident that it understood the threat to its African possessions and could overcome these difficulties. Out of this national self-confidence, Portugal developed its own style of counterinsurgency (COIN) warfare through a synthesis of the experience of others and of its own experience in Africa since the fifteenth century. It sought to disrupt the nationalist organisations, to protect its people from insurgent contact, and to win their loyalty by elevating their standard of living and redressing their grievances. This article seeks to analyse the development of these factors into what might be termed a Portuguese way of war.