Southern African Liberation Movements and the Global Cold War “East”. Transnational Activism 1960-1990,

Abstract

the book explores connections between liberation movements in Southern Africa and between those movements and countries in the Eastern Bloc in the Cold War decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. The many different forms such connections took have been little investigated. Articles in this edition enter that research gap and showcase studies of such interactions, at both leadership and grass-roots levels, seeking to explain why they took the form they did. Members of liberation movements worked together in exile headquarters, they travelled to Eastern Europe for military training or to receive university education. But little is known about the actual networks and connections they shaped with their individual movements and ideas. In the special issue such connections will be teased out and an attempt made to bring threads together for the region as a whole.