The Cold War occupies a rather unusual place in the history of organised mass violence.

The second half of the twentieth century is sometimes depicted as an exceptionally peaceful era in modern history, in contrast to the century's first half, which witnessed two wars of great magnitude.

Turning our attention to the historical horizons outside Europe and the transatlantic, however, the pacific view of Cold War history runs into obstacles. The term ‘cold war' refers to the prevailing condition of the world in the second half of the twentieth century, divided into two separate paths of political modernity and economic development. In a narrower sense, it means the contest of power and will between the two dominant states, the United States and the Soviet Union, which, according to Orwell, set out to rule the world between them under an undeclared state of war, being unable to conquer one another.^{[791] [792]} In a broader definition, however, the Cold War also entails the unequal relations of power among the political communities that pursued or were driven to pursue a specific path of progress within the binary structure of the global order.

It is important to note that the Cold War took violent forms especially in the regions that underwent the advent of political bipolarity as part of the political process of decolonisation. In this light, this chapter deals with three interrelated issues concerning the place of the Cold War in the history of violence. First, it discusses the fact that the Cold War becomes a legitimate subject of the history of violence once we broaden our interest to include postcolonial historical milieux. Second, it considers the related issue that the violence of the Cold War can be conceptualised broadly in terms of two forms: on the one hand, an imaginary violence - most notably, the threat and the fear of thermonuclear destruction - and, on the other, a non-imaginary, real violence that tore apart the physical and moral integrity of numerous human communities. It explores the duplex character of the Cold War's violence, adopting what may be called a historical anthropological approach that is attentive to questions of plurality and unity in human historical experience. The destruction of the Cold War first became apparent in North­East and South-East Asia. Drawing upon the violent postcolonial Cold War experience in Korea and Vietnam, finally, the chapter will explore how the duplex character of Cold War violence, imaginary and non-imaginary, can be discussed as an issue of the Cold War in Asia, not merely along the comparative historical horizon between postcolonial Asia and post-World War II Europe.