The Great War of Enclosure: Securing the Skies

Swarms of police drones, fleets of overhead delivery bots, and flocks of private security drones are set to multiply the complex interfaces between state, capital, and sense. This paper explores the military and economic enclosure of the atmosphere by drones. For centuries, capitalist enclosure has privatized and secured common spaces: territorializing new power relations into the soil. Enclosure now operates through an increasingly atmospheric spatiality. The birth of airpower enabled new vertical regimes of state power, capital accumulation, and violence. Now, drones are materializing both intimate and pervasive colonizations of local, national, and international airspace. Crucially, this discloses new morphologies and ontologies of urban (in)security, in which an atmospheric state polices deterritorialized aerial circulations. Such a reenchanted atmosphere collapses the geopolitical and geoeconomic in uncertain robotic orbits. This paper, which connects past and present, is driven by a deeper concern for the existential dimensions of dronified skyscapes, subjects, and violence.     

Review Article: Nordic Exceptions in War and Cold War

PHILIP GILTNER. ‘In the Friendliest Manner’: German-Danish Economic Cooperation during the Nazi Occupation of 1940–1949. New York: Peter Lang, 1998. Pp. xii, 258. $49.95 (US); T. MICHAEL RUDDY, ed. Charting an Independent Course: Finland's Place in the Cold War and in US Foreign Policy. Claremont: Regina Books, 1998. Pp. 223. $32.95 (US), cloth; $14.95 (US), paper; MAX JAKOBSON. Finland in the New Europe. Westport: Praeger, 1998. Pp. xiv, 176. $19.95 (US), paper; TEIJA TIILIKAINEN. Europe and Finland: Defining the Political Identity of Finland in Western Europe. Aldershot and Brookfield: Ashgate, 1998. Pp. 185. $68.95 (US). Reviewed by Thomas Munch-Petersen     

The Chinese developmental state during the Cold War: the making of the 1956 twelve-year science and technology plan

Abstract

In 1956, the government of the People’s Republic of China made a 12-year plan for scientific and technological developments (‘The Long-term Plan for the Development of Science and Technology for 1956–1967’), often credited as a visionary blueprint for its nuclear weapons programs and industrialization. Yet, this study suggests that the plan was not the logical manifestation of a unified national leadership, but rather the result of political contestations and compromises among the Communist party-state leaders, especially between Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai, and between the state and the scientific–technological elite. It further indicates that the making of Chinese science and technology policy was shaped by the cold war geopolitics, national developmental aspirations and transnational influences, especially from the Soviet Union and the USA.     

Political Science in Mexico: Cold War and Post-Cold War Context

Abstract

Through a critical consideration of recent proposals urging the use of “citizen forums” or “mini-publics” on issues involving science, this article reflects on the challenge posed to democracy and democratic decision making by the intellectual authority of modern science. Though the danger of a descent into technocracy is real and pressing, arguably the most serious challenge to democracy today, these novel “deliberative democratic” institutions are unpromising as a corrective beyond the local level, and may actually exacerbate the problem. The article concludes with a consideration of alternatives.     

Intelligence in the Cold War

This paper asserts that Cold War intelligence was essentially military intelligence. It provides a personal perspective on the UK Defence Intelligence Staff (DIS) and how Cold War intelligence was influenced by the experiences of individuals in the Second World War. It reviews little-studied aspects of the US–UK intelligence relationship, the NATO intelligence dimension, and the British Commanders'-in-Chief Mission to the Soviet Forces in (East) Germany (BRIXMIS), effectively legitimate spies in uniform. It concludes with some reflections on the changes the end of the Cold War brought to the work of the DIS.     

Review Article: Cold War or Cold Peace

JOHN LEWIS GADDIS. The United States and the End of the Cold War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. ix, 301. $34.95 (CDN);

MICHAEL J. HOGAN, ed. The End of the Cold War: Its Meanings and Implications. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xv, 294. $13.95 (us), paper;

JAMES CHACE. The Consequences of the Peace: The New Internationalism and American Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. xii, 221. $32.50 (CDN).     

Towards the Cold War

ROBERT DALLEK. Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1979. Pp. ix, 657; DANIEL YERGIN. Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1977. Pp. x, 526; JOHN H. BACKER. The Decision to Divide Germany: American Foreign Policy in Transition. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1978. Pp. x, 212; ROBERT J. DONOVAN. Conflict and Crisis: The Presidency of Harry S. Truman, 1945–1948. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1977. Pp. xvii, 473; YONOSUKE NAGAI and AKIRA IRIYE, editors. The Origins of the Cold War in Asia. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1977. Pp. ix, 448; THOMAS G. PATERSON. On Every Front: The Making of the Cold War. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979. Pp. xii, 210.     

Detente and Deterrence in the Cold War

Keith L. Nelson, The Making of Détente: Soviet-American Relations in the Shadow of Vietnam
Terry Terriff, The Nixon Administration and the Making of U.S. Nuclear Strategy     

Review Article: Hot War,Cold War,New War

STANLEY KARNOW. Vietnam, A History. New York: Penguin, 1984. Pp. xi, 752. $10.95 (US); GABRIEL KOLKO. Anatomy of a War: Vietnam, The United States, and the Modern Historical Experience. New York: Pantheon Books, 1985. Pp. xvi, 628. $25.00 (US); TIMOTHY J. LOMPERIS. The War Everyone Lost-and Won: America's Intervention in Vietnam's Twin Struggles. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. Pp. x, 192. $22.50 (US); R.B. SMITH. An International History of the Vietnam War: The Kennedy Strategy. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985. Pp. xii, 429. $25.00 (US); HARRY O. SUMMERS, Jr. On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of the Vietnam War. New York: Dell, 1984. Pp. 288. $3.95 (US).     

Gold Wars in the Cold War

Book reviewed:
Francis J. Gavin. Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958–1971 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 280 pp. Illus., tables, notes, bibliography, index. $45.00 (cloth).