Alternative Globalizations Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World

Alternative Globalizations is fully rewarding. That the contributions challenge frequently used categories, complicate binary narratives inherited from the Cold War, and show interconnections, where most of us would not assume them to have played a crucial role, is another highly appreciated trait.

Gathering contributions which analyse the many shapes of socialist internationalism during the post-war period, the book proposes a renovated and multifaceted frame of globalization. . . . The ambitious objectives of the collection are fulfilled in so far as the global scenario of the entangled processes of Cold War and decolonization is described as a multilocal and multivocal context whose effects reverberate in the contemporary globalization.

This edited volume is a significant contribution to knowledge that broadens our understanding of the global Cold War setting. It challenges both the dominant research paradigms and current hegemonic narratives about this period. The book can be taken as a starting point and its chapters as an inspiration and introduction to discovering and exploring the work of its authors more widely. Due to its broad implications, it does not only appeal to historians of the post-1945 world. Rather, it is equally interesting to scholars studying contemporary societies that once took part in socialist globalizing projects and postcolonial and postsocialist contexts across Central and Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia.

New anthology publication Alternative Globalizations. Eastern Europe and the Postcolonial World represents, in the best light, the strength of the current trend in world historiography, which is increasingly focused on global history. Such a view of history reveals completely new contexts and motivations of various participants in events. Not only the main players of the Cold War are taken into account, but also the interests and motivations of participants not only from Europe but also from other continents of the world.

This volume edited by James Mark, Artemy M. Kalinovsky, and Steffi Marung makes an important contribution to the scholarship, not only by illuminating various aspects of the East-South interconnections, but by also synthesizing these case studies into a wider history of "alternative globalizations."