Topics: Why the Cold War Matters Now

Catalog description

Is the War on Terror a “war”? How do we define “peace” in the 21st Century? This course uses the Cold War to contextualize the current difficulty in making firm distinctions between states of war and peace as well as the changing face of violence, from intra-state conflict in places like the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda to contemporary manifestations of terrorism and the use of drone warfare. Specifically, the Cold War prefigured how peace and war have come to be defined. Leveraging cultural icons such as the television series The Twilight Zone (1959-1964) and the film Dr. Strangelove: How I learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964), the course centers around the idea of the Cold War created a liminal space between conventional understandings of war and peace. The constant threat of nuclear annihilation, for instance, brought “war” to the household of every American. Under a constant state of danger, “cold war” became the new normal and justified the creation of a security state apparatus and the deployment of covert and overt force without Congressional declarations of war in order to, paradoxically, secure feelings of being at peace. The first two-thirds of the course will explore the effect of the ambiguity surrounding the status of “war” and “peace” during the Cold War on topics such as: the formation of the national security state, the military industrial complex, and the universal military service debate; the formation of the imperial presidency; and issues of gender, race, and class, selective immigration policies, and programs like the “War on Poverty.” In addition, Cold War interventions have had important, often tragic, consequences in places far from Washington D.C., in places like Vietnam, Lebanon, the Congo, and Central and South America and we place such actions within their global and local contexts with an eye toward how they shaped the…