Thursday, 7 November 2019

Alison Kraft and Carola Sachse (eds.): Science, (Anti-)Communism and Diplomacy: The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in the Early Cold War. Leiden 2019, ISBN: 978-90-04-34015-2



From 1957 onwards, the Pugwash Conferences brought together elite scientists from across ideological and political divides to work towards disarmament. Through a series of national case studies - Austria, China, Czechoslovakia, East and West Germany, the US and USSR – this volume offers a critical reassessment of the development and work of “Pugwash” nationally, internationally, and as a transnational forum for Track II diplomacy. This major new collection of work reveals the difficulties that Pugwash scientists encountered as they sought to reach across the blocs, create a channel for East-West dialogue and realize on the project’s founding aim of influencing state actors. Uniquely, the book affords a sense of the contingent and contested process by which the network-like organization took shape around the conferences. 

Contributors are Gordon Barrett, Matthew Evangelista, Silke Fengler, Alison Kraft, Fabian Lüscher, Doubravka Olšáková, Geoffrey Roberts, Paul Rubinson, and Carola Sachse.


Table of Contents

The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs: Vision, Rhetoric, Realities
By: Alison Kraft and Carola Sachse, Pages: 1–39

Science, Peace and Internationalism: Frédéric Joliot-Curie, the World Federation of Scientific Workers and the Origins of the Pugwash Movement
By: Geoffrey Roberts, Pages: 43–79

Patronage Impossible: Cyrus Eaton and His Pugwash Scientists
By: Carola Sachse, Pages: 80–117

Party, Peers, Publicity: Overlapping Loyalties in Early Soviet Pugwash, 1955–1960
By: Fabian Lüscher, Pages: 121–155

American Scientists in “Communist Conclaves:” Pugwash and Anti-communism in the United States, 1957–1968
By: Paul Rubinson, Pages: 156–189

Minding the Gap: Zhou Peiyuan, Dorothy Hodgkin, and the Durability of Sino-Pugwash Networks
By: Gordon Barrett, Pages: 190–217

“Salonbolschewiken:” Pugwash in Austria, 1955–1965
By: Silke Fengler, Pages: 221–258

Czechoslovak Ambitions and Soviet Politics in Eastern Europe: Pugwash and the Soviet Peace Agenda in the 1950s and 1960s
By: Doubravka Olšáková Pages: 259–285

Confronting the German Problem: Pugwash in West and East Germany, 1957–1964
By: Alison Kraft, Pages: 286–323

Blurring the Borders of a New Discipline: The Achievements and Prospects of Pugwash History
By: Matthew Evangelista
Pages: 324–343

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