Reconceptualizing the Cold War (RCW) Second Workshop

 

We organized the Second Cold War Oral History Workshop, “Reconceptualizing the Cold War: On-the-ground Experiences in Asia,” which was held at NUS Utown on 22-23 June 2019. Ten scholars from abroad (Thailand, Pakistan, China, Japan, Australia, Czech, France, UK, and the US), nine scholars from local institutions (NUS, NTU, NIE, SUTD, SMU), and five graduate students from our Department participated in this workshop and had quite lively and intense discussions.

 

Reconceptualizing the Cold War: On-the-Ground-Experience in Asia Project Workshop, June 22-23, 2019

 

Day One: 22 June 2019

 

Opening Remark: Masuda Hajimu (Associate Professor, NUS)

 

Panel 1: Local Politics Underneath the Global Cold War

Prasit Leepreecha (Senior Lecturer, Chiang Mai Univ., Thailand), “Cold War and Ethnicity in Northern Thailand

 

Vatthana Pholsena (Research Fellow, French National Centre for Scientific Research, France), “Reconstituting a history of the Cold War in two Southeast Asian borderlands”

 

Simon Richard Creak (Assistant Professor, NIE/NTU, Singapore), “Anti-Vietnamese Racism as Anticommunism: Vernacular Expression of Ideology and Defining the Cold War in Laos”

 

Discussant: Samson Lim (Associate Professor, SUTD, Singapore)

 

Panel 2: Personal Life Stories Underneath Cold War Conflicts

Hajirah Junaid, (Independent Researcher, Islamabad, Pakistan), “From East Pakistan to Bangladesh: Challenges of the political, economic and social environment of 1970 and 1971 from a people’s perspective”

 

May Ngo (Research Fellow, Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech), “Chinese-Cambodians in the Vietnam War: an oral history of the ‘other’ soldiers in the Vietcong”

 

Discussant: Chien-Wen Kung (Postdoc Fellow, NUS)

 

Panel 3: Left-wing activism and Anti-communist Repression in Indonesia

Paula Hendrikx (PhD candidate, Univ. of Melbourne, Australia), “Women, Land and Peasant Activism on the Left in Early 1960s Cold War Indonesia: A Case Study from the Minangkabau Highlands”

 

Vannessa Hearman (Senior Lecturer, Charles Darwin Univ., Australia), “To kill or be killed’: Fear and responses to the Indonesian anti-communist Repression”

 

Kisho Tsuchiya (Postdoc Fellow, NUS), “Making of a Cold War Simulacrum: FRETILIN and the Cold War in Timor, 1974-1975”

 

Discussant: Seng Guo Quan (Assistant Professor, NUS)

 

Panel 4: What emotions conveyed in the form of ideology?

Bin Yang (Associate Professor, Univ. of Macau, Macau), “Red Guards in Burma, 1960s–1980s: An Oral History”

 

Covell Meyskens (Assistant Professor, US Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey), “Maoist Man and its Discontents in a Third Front Town”

 

Discussant: Zhou Taomo (Assistant Professor, NTU)

 

Panel 5: What emotions conveyed in the form of ideology?

Kinuko Maehara Yamazato (Associate Professor, Univ. of the Ryukyu, Okinawa), “Through the Eyes of Okinawan Students: Experiences in the US Military Scholarship Program during the Cold War”

 

Sherzod Muminov (Lecturer, Univ. of East Anglia, UK), “Inadvertent Cold Warriors: Japanese Returnees from Soviet Captivity and the Early Cold War in East Asia, 1949-1956”

 

Discussant: Sayaka Chatani (Assistant Professor, NUS)

 

Panel 6: Roundtable

All panelists and discussants

 

For more details, see Dr. Kisho Tsuchiya’s Conference report, which was published on H-Diplo (July 2019): https://hdiplo.org/to/CR-2019-1