Bibliographical Essay

The Cold War holds a unique place in the history of violence. Notably, a large body of Cold War literature concentrates on imaginary violence (the threat and fear of violence), especially regarding thermonuclear destruction.

Different renderings of the place of violence in Cold War history also exist. These typically result from broad comparative or global historical views of the Cold War that consider the different ways in which violence was manifested across territories, especially between post-1945 Europe and the postcolonial world. Walter LaFeber's ‘An End to Which Cold War?', in Michael J. Hogan (ed.), The End of the Cold War: Its Meaning and Implications (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 13-20, clarifies that Cold War conflicts resulted in over 40 million human casualties across places. The era's large­scale violence erupted especially in places that experienced Cold War confrontation as part of decolonisation. Accordingly, the theme of Cold War violence is discussed widely in studies on the global conflict that was waged in the decolonising world. Notable in this regard is Odd Arne Westad's The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), which brings to the centre of Cold War historical narratives the history of Third World revolutions, which typically involved civil war crises.

The view of the Cold War in terms of a history of violence is present in several area studies.

Notably, a large body of work on the Korean and Vietnam wars can be considered part of Cold War violence studies. Bruce Cuming's investigation of the 1947-9 counterinsurgency violence in Korea in The Origins of the Korean War: The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990) is a classic example. An important investigation of a systemic failure regarding the protection of civilians by US forces in the Korean conflict would be Charles J. Henry, Martha Mendoza and Sang-hun Choe's The Bridge at No Gun Ri: A Hidden Nightmare from the Korean War (New York: Henry Holt, 2001). Taewoo Kim's ‘Limited War, Unlimited Targets: U.S. Air Force Bombing of North Korea during the Korean War, 1950-1953', Critical Asian Studies 44 (2012), 467-92, provides a useful introduction to the violence of aerial bombing in North Korea, the legacies of which continue to reverberate today in the ongoing US-North Korean stand­off. Bombing Civilians: A Twentieth-Century History, edited by Yuki Tanaka and Marilyn B.

New and innovative studies are now exploring other forms of Cold War violence, which have been hitherto understudied. Monica Kim analyses highly intimate violence, both physical and psychological, in relation to the idea of ‘brainwashing', which was manifested in the interrogative acts against the communist prisoners of war during the Korea conflict, in The Interrogation Rooms of the Korean War: The Untold History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019). Polymeris Voglis explores similar issues in the context of the Greek Civil War in his Becoming a Subject: Political Prisoners during the Greek Civil War (Oxford: Berghahn, 2002). Edwin A. Martini's Agent Orange: History, Science, and the Politics of Uncertainty (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012) explores the Vietnam War's violence against the environment, focusing on the widespread use of highly toxic herbicides as part of counterinsurgency warfare. This form of violence left enduring human disabilities on combatants, civilians and even those born after the war. These aspects of the Cold War's ‘war against nature' are investigated in The Environmental Histories of the Cold War, edited by J. R. McNeill and Corinna R. Unger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Another notable example in this research genre is anthropologist Krisna Uk's informative study of how the Jorai people in the border region between Vietnam and Cambodia relate to the deadly remains of the Vietnam War, including unexploded bombs and mines that abound in their highland forest environment, in Salvage: Cultural Resilience among the Jorai of Northeast Cambodia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016).