This article examines the post-war activities of the National Labor Alliance (NTS), a far-right Russian exile organisation whose members had served in German intelligence and propaganda structures during the Second World War. Using declassified CIA documents and previously untapped sources pertaining to NTS, it analyses the transformation of a semi-fascistic, collaborationist and anti-Semitic organisation into a Cold War asset of the CIA. The NTS played a role in shaping its association with US power by applying deceptive political strategies it had adopted during the interwar period and the Second World War to the new geopolitical context of divided Europe.

This article examines contributions of the chief economic statistician and socialist activist Ludwik Landau (1902–1944) that empirically investigated Poland’s underdevelopment in the framework of world capitalist economy. Landau pioneered a structural approach to measure the global gap between rich and poor countries in 1938–9, when such a synthetic view was largely unimaginable. Landau’s main work in international comparative statistics, World Economy, scholarly elaborated his socialist views on the necessity of non-capitalist development for Poland and other poor regions in agrarian Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. I argue that the Polish experience bestowed epistemic advantage in understanding the non-industrialised world and became a starting point from which to explore underdevelopment globally. This article concludes with a discussion of the political and epistemic significance of Landau’s work and how it figures in the larger history of development and statistical measurement of the world.

The events of 1914 initiated the redrawing of many boundaries, both geopolitical and intellectual. At the outbreak of the war the London-based anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski was at a professional meeting in Australia. Technically an ‘enemy alien’ (a Pole of Austro-Hungarian citizenship), he was barred from returning to Britain; stranded in Australia, under surveillance by authorities and with insecure finances, Malinowski began fieldwork in the Trobriand Islands that would result in his groundbreaking Argonauts of the Western Pacific (1922).1Argonauts’ influence rested on its compelling portrait of the anthropologist as ‘participant-observer’, the insider/outsider uniquely poised to decode and recode cultures and meanings.2 Malinowski thus adeptly retooled his own ambiguous status into a paradigm of the ethnographer’s optimal subject-position – quipping that he himself was particularly suited to this role, as ‘the Slavonic nature is more plastic and more naturally savage than that of Western Europeans’.3

This article addresses the divided memory and contested meaning of the Great War in interwar Czechoslovakia. Focusing on the legacy of a loose and short-lived movement of army deserters called ‘Green Cadres’ that appeared in 1918, it suggests that the Czechoslovak nation building project faced challenges not only from sizable ethnic minorities within the fledgling state, but also from the restive Czech peasantry. As elsewhere in East Central Europe, many peasants regarded the Green Cadres as liberators and representatives of a more radical, rural oriented national revolution. These unfulfilled hopes resonated through the interwar period. This article thus sheds light on an important social and cultural fault line that has been neglected in histories of the world wars in Europe.

This article explores how two of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski’s Polish protegés, Feliks Gross (1906–2006) and Józef Obrębski (1905–67), sought to rebuild careers in the United States after the Second World War. Reading the scholars’ correspondence of 1946 to 1948, exchanged while Gross was commuting between jobs in New York and Wyoming and Obrębski was conducting fieldwork in Jamaica, it examines the confidence, excitement and sense of discovery with which the two refugees sought to transplant theories and methods first cultivated in interwar Poland to new soil. Arguing that Gross and Obrębski approached exile as a chance to ‘go global’ with Polish social science, it emphasises the role of both place and displacement in intellectual history. In particular, it looks at how the scholars drew on pre-war experiences in East Central Europe to produce new ways of thinking about nationality, globalisation and decolonisation in the post-war world.

This article examines the contested presence of Vichy administrators in high positions of the French administration of occupied Germany after the Second World War. In occupied Germany, where many of Pétain’s officials pursued their careers, resisters and collaborators negotiated their new positions in the wake of the German occupation of France. Key to understanding this settlement are the notions of expertise and merit as well as the role of the inherited French social order untouched by the collaboration.

The Durkheimian School of sociology was one of the most comprehensive programmes ever developed in the social sciences. This article contributes to those accounts of the School that discuss its intergenerational, interdisciplinary and international transformations after the Great War. From this perspective, the article presents the case of a Polish scholar, Stefan Czarnowski (1879–1937), whose early work on the cult of St. Patrick in Ireland became one of the Durkheimian classics on social integration. In the interwar period Czarnowski argued against race studies and anti-social concepts of culture and called for sociologically grounded comparative world history ordered around the notions of class and work. More generally, Czarnowski’s reconfiguration of Durkheimian universal principles in the specific location of East Central Europe calls for a deeper historicisation of the Durkheimian School as a movement in international social sciences.

This article seeks to write Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe into the history of post-Second World War global psychiatry and to explore the significance of Marxist psychiatry in an international context. It traces Yugoslav psychiatrists’ transnational and interdisciplinary engagements as they peaked in the 1960s. Focusing on the distinguished Belgrade psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Vladimir Jakovljevic (1925–68), it looks at Yugoslav psychiatry’s clinical and anthropological research in the global South to shed light on its contributions to Western-dominated transcultural psychiatry. Through this lens the article also explores how Eastern Europe’s intellectuals engaged with decolonisation and the notions of race, ‘primitivism’ and modernity. Jakovljevic’s involvement in transcultural psychiatry demonstrated the inherent contradiction of Eastern European Marxist psychiatry: its dubiously colonial ‘civilising mission’ towards the subalterns in its own populations and its progressive, emancipatory agenda. Jakovljevic’s writings about Africa ultimately turned into an unprecedented opportunity to shed light on some glaring internal inconsistencies from Yugoslavia’s own socio-political context.