This chapter focuses on the period beginning with the Democrat Party’s electoral triumph in 1954 and ending with its 1955 parliamentary group crisis, when the government nearly fell. In this period, economic conditions ceased to favor the party. A slump in global demand reduced Turkey’s access to foreign exchange, while the government’s expansionary monetary policies encouraged inflation. As economic challenges intensified, economic policy became as much of an electoral liability as a strength. Facing domestic criticism, Democrat-led governments limited the bounds of public dissent in schools, media, and political organizations. Prime Minister Menderes and his allies resisted calls from economic liberals in their own party (as well as the United States) to devalue the lira, increase taxes, and develop a long-term economic plan. The resulting tensions fractured the party, leading to the departure of many of its liberal members. These efforts to constrain institutions that provided checks and balances on the government constituted a policy of de-democratization. At the same time, the party’s leaders played international creditors off against one another and sought access to additional credit.

This introduction argues against analyzing the Democrat Party in terms of strict binaries such as liberal–illiberal, center–periphery, secular–reactionary, or victim–perpetrator. While the divisions that scholars emphasize are real enough to affect the lives of people in Turkey, these divides are multiple and cross-cutting. Instead, I present an account of the Democrat Party, its role in Turkey’s democratization, and its engagement with the emerging Cold War order that is mindful of the divides in Turkey but that also acknowledges the party’s ability to transcend those divides – or, at least, embody their multiple contradictions. This book presents a portrait of the Democrat Party that encompasses these contradictions while also emphasizing Democrat Party leaders’ connections to the domestic political order that preceded them and to the international order of the 1950s.

Adopting a microhistorical approach and narrowing the scale of observation offers Cold War historians invaluable heuristic and narrative opportunities, uncovering little-known, seemingly “small” stories that nonetheless hold significant illustrative and historiographical power. This approach repositions human agency at the center of historical narratives and examines its interplay with broader political, geopolitical, and ideological structures. Drawing on Edoardo Grendi’s famous “exceptional/normal” antinomy, the book reconstructs the story of the evangelical Church of Christ’s mission in Italy – a story that is, at first glance, highly exceptional, but on closer examination proves to be remarkably normal within its broader historical context. The analysis seeks to connect global history with microhistory, bridging the dynamics of world integration, such as the Cold War, with the bottom-up perspectives of long neglected actors. This methodological challenge is compounded by the abundance of primary sources available to historians of post-1945 international relations. By exploring the Church of Christ’s Italian mission, the book highlights the potential of microhistory to enrich global historical frameworks, weaving together large-scale structural forces with the intricate, human-scale dynamics that often drive historical change.

Chapter 7 analyzes changes in India’s important foreign relations, focusing on the post-Cold War period. The chapter argues that India’s approach to the world changed significantly in the post-1990 period, but has since then been marked mainly by incremental changes.

The chapter analyzes the intersection of population control policies, Cold War dynamics, and racial considerations in the post–World War II era. It highlights the challenges faced by Western states in influencing birth control policies in postcolonial countries, with a focus on the perceived link between population growth and the spread of Communism. Key figures like Dudley Kirk and Frank Lorimer advocated for redefining relationships with developing nations to counter Communist expansion, emphasizing economic support and the reduction of fertility rates over military intervention. The chapter also explores the evolution of demographic viewpoints, moving away from racist eugenic traditions toward more democratic and liberal approaches to population control. The chapter provides insights into how intellectuals grappled with the unprecedented scale of population growth and its potential impact on global stability and resources, highlighting the strategic evolution of overpopulation discourse from Western industrialized countries to influence birth rates in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The chapter explores the declaration of contraception as a human right within the United Nations, focusing on key events such as the International Conference on Human Rights in Tehran in 1968. The involvement of transnationally operating NGOs such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation and the Population Council is highlighted. The narrative showcases the shift toward population control as a human right, despite opposition from such entities as the Catholic Church. The chapter delves into the resolutions and debates at the Tehran conference, emphasizing differing perspectives on population control as a human rights issue. It particularly highlights contributions from the opposing blocs in the Cold War and the Communist critique against what Soviet states understood as the fusion of human rights and Neo-Malthusianism. The chapter concludes by discussing a significant transition toward justifying population control programs in terms of human rights rather than just economic necessity, arguing that the fusion of human rights with population control in the 1960s marks a significant turning point in the global discourse on demographic policies and individual rights.

Haydn’s last opera, L’anima del filosofo (The soul of the philosopher), is a highly unusual retelling of the Orpheus myth. Written for the London stage in 1791 to a libretto by Carlo Francesco Badini (c. 1730–1810), the opera was never staged then nor during the composer’s lifetime. Shut down in rehearsal and banished from performance, the opera never reached the stage of the Haymarket Theatre. As Haydn himself concluded, ‘Orfeo was, so to speak, declared contraband’ (‘Orfeo wurde, so zu sagen, als Contrebande erklärt’).

Chapter 1 offers a historical introduction as well as an overview of existing research in the field. It argues that by mapping out the trajectories of former volunteer soldiers, it is possible to see the many ways in which the Spanish Civil War and the broader anti-fascist engagement of the inter-war period could constitute a transformative experience and event; an event that expanded volunteers’ political horizons and gradually opened up possibilities for border-crossing political engagement in the post-war era. Thus, it sets the stage for the case studies constituting the main part of the book, showing that the political and military influence of the volunteers in Spain did not necessarily come to an end in 1938/1939 or even in 1945. In a few yet significant cases, it stretched across the globe far into the Cold War period.

The introduction begins with the story of Domitila, a young campesina who escaped to the mountains at night to train for the coming insurrection. Guarding her secret, she endured beatings from her father, who accused her of promiscuity. After her father discovered the revolver hidden underneath her pillow, he affords her a form of respect that he had previously reserved for men. Through Domitila’s personal story, I explain the conditions that drove rural workers to organize, the dramatic rise of state repression against unarmed movements, the left’s radicalization, the subsequent formation of the insurgency, the outbreak of the civil war (1980–1992), women’s organizing in the guerrilla territories and in multiple countries abroad, and the postwar battles to remember an insurgent past. I also contextualize El Salvador within a regional and global Cold War history. After the major actors and temporal scope are identified, I explain how dominant narratives, many rooted in Cold War paradigms, have contributed to the erasure of revolutionary women within feminist histories. I offer an alternative framework and methodology – rooted in dialectical approaches, oral history, and movement archives – that takes seriously the political contributions of revolutionary women.