O.A. Westad is a professor of international history at the LSE and the author of The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times.
‘Third World’ has always been a troublesome term. Coined in 1952 by the French economist Alfred Sauvy to describe the global tiers état, the unrepresented and downtrodden majority of the world’s peoples, it was taken up by revolutionaries in the 1960s as a watchword for change. Over the past two decades, as the last revolutionary era in world politics faded from view,...
America’s struggle with the Soviet Union and Communism during the Cold War is the key founding myth of the modern American state – a state in many ways utterly different from the one...
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