Cold War Asia
Unlearning Narratives, Making New Histories
Edited by Hajimu Masuda

Approx. 376 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 17 halftones, 1 map
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-8631-8
Published: May 2025 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-8630-1
Published: May 2025
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The essays in this collection demonstrate how the world took shape far away from the voluminously analyzed epicenters of the Soviet Union, the United States, and China. Masuda organizes each chapter around the theme of "many Cold Wars," or, more precisely, many local and social wars that were imagined as part of the global Cold War. These histories raise fundamental questions about standard Cold War narratives, encouraging readers to rethink why the Cold War still matters.
Contributors are Mary Grace Concepcion, Simon Creak, Cui Feng, David Engerman, Prasit Leepreecha, Luong Thi Hong, Muhammad Kunhi Mahin Udma, Masuda Hajimu, Alan McPherson, Imam Muhtarom, Sim Chi Yin, Kisho Tsuchiva, Odd Arne Westad, Matthew Woolgar, Kinuko Maehara Yamazato, Bin Yang, and Taomo Zhou.
About the Author
Hajimu Masuda is assistant professor of history at the National University of Singapore.
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Reviews
"With his diverse and excellent team of scholars from around the world, Masuda makes an important and very interesting contribution to the Cold War historiography. He persuasively demonstrates that peoples in Asia most often appropriated Cold War politics for their own struggles and conflicts. This is very much the kind of intervention that the study of the Cold War in Asia needs right now."—Gregg A. Brazinsky, author of Winning the Third World: Sino-American Rivalry during the Cold War
"The volume they have produced deserves a hearty ¡felicidades! Each of the chapters herein features never-before-used sources—especially oral histories— historiographical innovation, and analytical sophistication. The forest is even greener than its verdant trees: the volume as a whole demonstrates that Asians created their own Cold War, adapting ideologies from the West to suit local needs, thus transforming long-running social tensions into polarized political wars. This book proves pathbreaking in its methods and insights."
—Alan McPherson, the author of The Breach: Iran-Contra and the Assault on American Democracy
"A wonderfully rich collection (...) The contributors to this volume argue that it does not make sense to simply look at the Cold War as imported into Asia or understand it from the top down. Instead, this book makes an excellent starting point for alternative explorations. The program Masuda outlines at the end of his introduction will be debated for a long time among Cold War historians and historians of contemporary Asia."
—Odd Arne Westad, the author of The Cold War: A World History
"In sum, Cold War Asia offers a template and some exemplars of a new generation of history, one that centers the Cold War in Asia and locates the Cold War in everyday life in villages, towns, and cities. Most importantly the book invites us to take advantage of historical distance to find not just new sources but new perspectives on a dominant element of the twentieth-century world – one whose legacies we are still reckoning with some three decades later.”
—David Engerman, the author of The Price of Aid: The Economic Cold War in India