Volunteers Across Cold War Borders
Solidarity and Socialist Internationalism
Ana Kladnik editor George Bodie editor
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Publishing:21st Jan '27
£85.00
This title is due to be published on 21st January, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
This open access edited collection explores how the connections forged between socialist and postcolonial nations during the Cold War were underpinned by voluntarism and practices of international solidarity.
Building on recent advances in our understanding of the history of internationalism in the socialist world, this open access book explores how far the practices of international solidarity were underpinned by voluntarism in multiple contexts. As a fundamental component of everyday life in socialist societies, from the Bolshevik revolution onward, the concept drove a myriad range of activities from shock work and Stakhanovism to local fundraising for civic projects. Through a mixture of compulsion, enticement, social pressure and full-on enforcement alongside popular enthusiasm, it was socialist citizens that drove internationalism; paying for it by donating money, joining solidarity committees or attending meetings.
Drawing upon a range of examples and with an expansive geographical focus, this edited volume will return voluntarism to the fore of studies of socialist internationalism, opening up new pathways in the study of the topic and shedding light on the everyday realities of such practices. While existing studies have drawn attention to the official, state-led iterations of internationalism, this volume will instead zoom in on the ordinary citizens who made it happen.
The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on Bloomsbury Collections. Open access was funded by University of Graz.
Through a series of fascinating case studies, Volunteers Across Borders explores the history of voluntary action in socialist, post-colonial and post-socialist societies in Europe and the global South, demonstrating that volunteers and volunteering existed in many forms outside the liberal democratic West during the Cold War. * Celia Donert, University of Cambridge, UK *
Volunteers Across Cold War Borders upends the geographies and chronologies we usually employ to write about socialism, and our understanding of who its agents were. Through a deep and simultaneously broad examination of voluntarism and its relationship to socialism, this book provides fresh perspectives on longer-running questions like: what room did people have to manoeuvre in socialism, and what did they do with it? How did socialist states relate to decolonizing countries in the ‘Global South’? And how important was ideology to citizens in socialist states and their leaders? * Rosamund Johnston, University of Vienna, Austria *
ISBN: 9781350541733
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
312 pages