Call for Papers: Special Issue “Latin America and Eastern Europe in the Context of the Global Cold War”

Call for Papers: Special Issue “Latin America and Eastern Europe in the Context of the Global Cold War”

The journal Esboços: histórias em contextos globais, published by the Graduate Program in History at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil), invites researchers to submit articles for the special issue “Latin America and Eastern Europe in the Context of the Global Cold War”, with a submission deadline of March 31, 2027.

This special issue aims to bring together studies that examine, from different perspectives, experiences of connection and exchange between individual and collective actors from Latin America and Eastern Europe within the global context of the Cold War. Seeking to engage with recent historiography on the multiple dimensions of the hegemonic struggles that shaped this period, the special issue welcomes contributions covering a broad thematic and geographical range, highlighting the various forms of cultural, political, and economic interaction that connected the two regions. It aims to bring together analyses encompassing different chronological, spatial, and analytical frameworks in order to deepen and diversify scholarship on East-South relations during the Cold War, considering their local, national, regional, and global dimensions.

 

For a long time, studies of Cold War history tended to attribute an almost exclusive leading role to the major powers involved in the conflict. In recent decades, however, the emergence of new historiographical approaches, facilitated by expanded access to archives, the end of the bipolar order, and the development of global and transnational perspectives, has considerably broadened the scope of research in this field. Against this background, the perception of isolation behind the “Iron Curtain” has been challenged by growing recognition of the multiple cross-border exchanges that characterized contacts among the socialist and capitalist spheres and the so-called Third World following the Second World War. Similarly, historiographical assumptions portraying the “Soviet bloc” as monolithic have been reconsidered, while the influence of actors from Africa, Asia, and Latin America on the course of the conflict has received increasing attention, without overlooking the interventionism of the superpowers.

Regarding Latin America within the field of Cold War East-South relations, despite significant recent advances, existing scholarship has tended to focus predominantly on official diplomacy and the reconstruction of particular political and intellectual trajectories. Likewise, a large proportion of studies has concentrated on relations between Cuba and the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, on the place occupied by Chile under the Popular Unity government within the international socialist world. For this reason, this special issue seeks to make a significant historiographical contribution by expanding knowledge in four main directions:

• The participation of diverse political, economic, and cultural actors in building connections between Latin America and Eastern Europe during the Cold War. This includes examining the particularities of diplomatic initiatives undertaken by actors who, although part of the socialist bloc, did not always follow Soviet directives and developed their own channels of engagement, including unofficial ones, with the Americas.
• The multiplicity of interests and aspirations that motivated these connections across different contexts and geographical settings, highlighting the complex interplay between strategic and economic considerations, on the one hand, and “values”, on the other, that contributed to closer relations at different scales.
• The “bottom-up” experiences of individuals directly involved in material and symbolic exchanges between the two regions, with particular attention to the economic, technical, artistic, and scientific actors who participated in these processes.
• Theoretical reflection on the concept of the Cold War itself and its implications for analyzing the dynamics between Latin American contexts and the various actors associated with the “socialist bloc”.

Guest Editors: Alexey A. Manukhin (Russian Academy of Sciences, Russia), Bojana Kovacevic Petrovic (University of Novi Sad, Servia) e Lucas Duarte (Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil).

Submission deadline: March 31, 2027.