This book examines war veterans history after 1945 from a global perspective. In the Cold War era, in most countries of the world there was a sizeable portion of population with direct war experience. This edited volume gathers contributions which show the veterans involvement in all the major historical processes shaping the world after World War II. Cold War politics, racial conflict, decolonization, state-building, and the reshaping of war memory were phenomena in which former soldiers and ex-combatants were directly involved. By examining how different veterans groups, movements and organizations challenged or sustained the Cold War, strived to prevent or to foster decolonization, and transcended or supported official memories of war, the volume characterizes veterans as largely independent and autonomous actors which interacted with societies and states in the making of our times. Spanning historical cases from the United States to Hong-Kong, from Europe to Southern Africa, from Algeria to Iran, the volume situates veterans within the turbulent international context since World War II.
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ix | |
Acknowledgements |
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xiii | |
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1 Introduction: A world of veterans |
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1 | (14) |
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15 | (36) |
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2 The International Federation of Resistance Fighters: Communist anti-fascism, Germany and Europe |
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17 | (16) |
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3 The World Veterans Federation: Cold War politics and globalization |
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33 | (18) |
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PART II Race and Decolonization |
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51 | (64) |
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4 South African veterans and the institutionalization of apartheid in South Africa |
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53 | (16) |
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5 Enforcing conformity: Race in the American Legion, 1940--1960 |
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69 | (14) |
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6 "Fighting for Their Freedom At Home": Native American Vietnam veterans in the Red Power Movement, 1969--1973 |
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83 | (17) |
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7 Poppies, pensions, passports: The British Legion and transnational civil society action in decolonizing Hong Kong |
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100 | (15) |
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PART III Decolonization and State-Building |
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115 | (70) |
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8 Algerian veterans' associations in the late colonial period in Algeria, 1945--1962 |
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117 | (17) |
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9 Colonial soldiers and postcolonial politics in Guinea, Ivory Coast and Upper Volta, 1958--1973 |
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134 | (16) |
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10 War, mobilization and development in the Islamic Republic of Iran: From the Construction Jihad to the Trench Builders Association, 1979--2013 |
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150 | (17) |
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11 Veterans, decolonization and land expropriation in post-independence Zimbabwe, 2000--2008 |
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167 | (18) |
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185 | (66) |
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12 Inconvenient heroes? War veterans from the Eastern Front in Franco's Spain, 1942--1975 |
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187 | (16) |
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13 Memory, authority and anti-war politics of French veterans of the Algerian war of decolonization (1954--1962) |
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203 | (16) |
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14 State power, cultural exchange and the "Forgotten War": British veterans of the Korean War, 1953--2013 |
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219 | (16) |
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15 Retracing memories of war: South African military veterans as tourists in Angola |
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235 | (16) |
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Index |
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251 | |
Įngel Alcalde obtained his PhD from the European University Institute in 2015. He was a Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow at LMU Munich in 2016-2017. He has also been a visiting scholar at the European Institute at Columbia University (New York), the Leibniz-Institute for European History (Mainz), and the Center for the History of Global Development at Shanghai University. His latest book is War Veterans and Fascism in Interwar Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Xosé M. Nśńez Seixas is Full Professor of Modern History at the University of Santiago de Compostela and at the LMU of Munich (2012-1017). He obtained his PhD from the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). He has authored or co-authored more than a dozen books on nationalist movements, national and regional identities, history of migration, and the cultural and social history of war in the twentieth century. His latest books are Die spanische Blaue Division an der Ostfront (1941-45) (Aschendorff, 2016) and (ed.) Metaphors of Spain (Berghahn, 2017).