The end of the Second World War in Slovenia was marked by massacres of the collaborating armed units, the Home Guard, by the Communist Partisans. Kočevski Rog, one of the largest atrocity sites, has been the focus of controversies related to reconciliation, silencing and polarization. Decades of silence ensued. The site's symbolism evolved over time, first associated with massacres and silencing and then with reconciliation following the 1990 Reconciliation Ceremony. Finally, it became a symbol of a controversial debate in which the Home Guard were depicted as victims while the Partisans were perpetrators. Kočevski Rog is representative of the revisionist narrative that rehabilitated the Home Guard and omitted their role as Nazi collaborators. Yet when the postwar killings or violence are discussed, Kočevski Rog is often forgotten or clustered with other locations under the umbrella term ‘communist violence’. This clustering significantly undermines the understanding of mass atrocities committed because they occurred under different conditions and supports the revisionist narrative of the Second World War and the postwar massacres. This paper examines the site of Kočevski Rog, its tailored image within selective narratives and its significance in Slovenia's memory, political polarization and manipulation of the past for contentious contemporary political agendas.
This article uses the records of Catholic annulment trials as a unique window into sex in twentieth-century Europe, turning to five case studies within the context of Spain's transition to democracy to uncover everyday experiences of sexual failure against the backdrop of a period better remembered for political liberalisation and cultural permissiveness. It does so by combining insights from failure studies with those from sociological script theory, focussing on surprisingly durable expectations around heterosexual sex to interrogate hidden experiences and understandings of intimacy. It argues that the ecclesiastical courts constituted ‘regimes of failure’ which gave voice to a far longer-term process of putting sex on trial. For the couples concerned, failure was not an isolated incident or inherent fact, but a deeply social phenomenon which was encountered, rationalised, and managed over the long term within a community context. Whilst these specialised cases cannot, by themselves, overturn simplistic understandings of one-way liberalisation in Spain and across Europe, they serve as a rare reminder of the ways in which the hitherto neglected phenomenon of sexual failure can operate in outwardly permissive societies, with implications for our understandings of secularisation, liberalisation, and modernity.
This article examines the World Bank's (WB) use of structural adjustment lending (SAL) in Argentina during 1989–91, when President Carlos Menem launched a far-reaching neoliberal transformation. Drawing on recently declassified WB files and Argentine and US primary sources, it analyzes the intensive negotiations that led to the WB's first adjustment loans to Menem's administration and to the granting of an unprecedented number of loans to the country. The article advances four main arguments. First, it challenges portrayals of adjustment as externally imposed by demonstrating Argentina's agency, showing that national policymakers actively pursued WB's SAL to finance, legitimize, and promote a domestically designed neoliberal agenda. Second, it demonstrates that SAL not only reshaped Argentina's economic structure and thinking but also facilitated the WB's institutional expansion and deeper involvement in transformative structural reforms. Third, it situates SAL within a WB–Argentina–US triangle that reconfigured responsibility for managing the debt crisis and blurred earlier divisions of labor between the WB and the International Monetary Fund. Fourth, it exposed tensions between executive-driven reform and democratic accountability in Argentina's post-authoritarian transition.
In this paper, I argue that the problem of majority behaviour under German occupation between 1940 and 1944 has not been discussed with sufficient nuance. Whereas claims of a far-spread accommodation certainly hold true, other common behavioural patterns such as the dissemination of foreign radio news, rumours, prophecies, and historical analogies hint at more critical or subversive facets of daily life under occupation. The article attempts to analyse such narratives and the ensuing social practices by cross-reading German, British, and French archives as well as a broad range of French diaries. Analysing these informal modes of communication and sense-making not only deepens our understanding of French society under German occupation, but can also help explain disagreements and tensions in postwar memorial and historical debates.
This article examines how the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) asymmetrical approach to structural adjustment in Africa became entrenched during the financial turbulence of the 1980s. Drawing upon unpublished IMF Central Files – including Executive Board minutes, internal correspondence, and preparatory documents – as well as the published proceedings of a 1985 symposium in Nairobi and memoirs of key participants, it argues that African central bank governors mounted sophisticated critiques of the Fund's adjustment programs. By sophisticated, the article means a critique that engaged the Fund's own technical programming framework and challenged its asymmetrical burden-sharing, which required only deficit countries to adjust while surplus nations bore no corresponding obligations. Rather than incorporating these critiques, IMF leadership responded by expanding the Fund's loan programs through the Structural Adjustment Facility (SAF, 1986) and the Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF, 1987), facilities that tripled concessional resources while increasing conditionality. These moves represented a selective answer to the governors’ demand for more resources while discarding the Nairobi conference's qualitative challenges to the premises of adjustment. The study shows how alternative viewpoints were systematically sidelined through institutional power dynamics, editorial control, and the foreclosure of dissenting voices, setting the stage for a world with ‘no alternative’ to the IMF's approach to adjustment.
This article examines the politics of the Mexican power industry between 1949, when the World Bank made its first major loan to a developing country, and 1954, when the loan project came to an end. By analyzing Mexico's largest power company, Mexican Light and Power, it argues that business history is central to understanding development politics and diplomatic relations. On the brink of bankruptcy and incapable of meeting growing power demand, in 1949 Mexlight received a large loan from the World Bank to expand its generation capacity. The article argues that the Bank's involvement with the Mexican power industry should be understood as part of a broader Bretton Woods project to strengthen private enterprise in the developing world. The article advances an understanding of Latin American postwar development premised on willful integration into US economic structures. The article shows how the Bank's project was successful in building infrastructure to expand generation capacity, but it failed at securing private enterprise a space of economic autonomy free from government intervention. Contributing to discussions on developmental states, it argues that Mexico's private power industry expanded by deepening its reliance on government support.
Censuses that question individual population groups on ethnic or religious characteristics often precede ethnic cleansing. Is the 1939 census in Germany an exception? The focus of this article is how Friedrich Burgdorfer, as demographer and head of the Reich Statistical Office, made German Jews countable. The main purpose of the German census of Jews was to count them individually, divided according to their degree of Jewish kinship. In addition, from 1939 onwards, the demographers of the Reich Statistical Office provided decision-makers with the statistical data to statistically verify the self-censuses of the Jewish communities, to record the number of the group to be deported in advance in the case of deportations and to provide verifiable information in the event of changes such as people moving away. In this way, science and politics made resources available to each other in order to make the persecution and killing of German Jews plannable and thus feasible.
In February 1945, shortly before the complete liberation of Budapest, the Budapest National Committee set up a Commission to Investigate Nazi and Arrow Cross Atrocities. Its mandate was to document crimes committed during World War II. Based on the Commission's extensive documentation work and its eventual collapse this article discusses Hungary's contradictory policy regarding the immediate past, World War II and especially the crimes committed. The article argues that the dual aim of fostering social reintegration while delegitimizing former regimes produced conflicting interpretations of the wartime period. At the same time, domestic political objectives competed soon with the foreign policy aims - a tension that became particularly apparent in the context of the Paris Peace Conference. This had a profound impact on the work of the Crimes Commission, ultimately contributing to its failure in the summer of 1945.
This article examines the strategic deployment of Christian themes in Nazi propaganda aimed at Latin American Catholics during the Second World War. In contrast to the regime's fraught relationship with Christianity in Europe, Nazi propagandists adopted a more pragmatic stance abroad, seeking to mobilize Catholicism as a cultural and spiritual resource. These propagandists cultivated a narrative recasting the Reich as a bulwark of Christendom and Western civilization against ‘atheistic Bolshevism’ and Anglo-American powers accused of betraying Christianity. After 1941, when American entry into the war resulted in restricted Axis influence, Francoist Spain became a vital intermediary, and by aligning itself with Spain and Italy, the Reich positioned itself within a Catholic and Latin civilizational bloc. This strategy reveals the opportunism of Nazi messaging and its role in global ideological competition that unfolded in symbolic and spiritual terms.
Poland was not the first country in communist Eastern Europe to reach for support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to overcome its sovereign debt crisis. Poland was first, however, to experience the deep tensions between Western calls for democratization and the pressure for austerity that took centre stage in Washington's recipes for 'structural adjustment'. Focusing on the Polish communists' efforts to strike a deal with the IMF during the 1980s, this article sheds new light on the run-up to the sweeping shock therapy implemented by the Solidarno & sacute;& cacute;-backed government from 1990. Based on Polish government and party archives, IMF files and the Polish underground press, it offers a thorough reappraisal of the startling failure to reach support for austerity in the nationwide referendum organized by the Jaruzelski regime in November 1987. By analysing this vote as a key element of the domestic and international struggle over the political and financial conditionality of mitigating Poland's economic malaise, it refines our understanding of Polish agency in the process. Scrutinising Poland's reorientation towards the capitalist West, the article contributes to a more nuanced understanding of debt, sovereignty, and democracy in the global neoliberal order that emerged in the course of the 1980s.
This special issue places the socialist world at the centre of the modern history of humanitarianism. The contributions bring together a wide range of perspectives to explore the meaning, purpose, and practices of socialist humanitarianism at different scales and across continents. Closely examining practices and discourses from socialist contexts and actors across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America expands definitions of humanitarian action, highlights aid flows that upend traditional assumptions about unidirectional Global North-Global South transfer, and proposes alternative chronologies for tracing the development of the international humanitarian sector. This short introduction explores why the socialist world has been sidelined within international historiographies on humanitarianism and argues that placing it at the centre can offer new ways of understanding the evolution of humanitarian ideas and practices across the second half of the twentieth century.
The prevailing narrative holds that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) imposed 'shock therapy' on Russia during the 1990s. Drawing on evidence from the IMF archives and interviews with key participants, I argue in this article that Russian economists and policymakers, and even more so the conditions of state collapse, shaped the country's post-socialist transition. Foreign assistance was occasionally used as an instrument by Russian market reformers to gain leverage in domestic policy struggles, and the IMF economists in Moscow provided technical knowledge on the workings of a market economy. Regarding the general nature of Russia's rugged transition to capitalism, however, the IMF's influence was minimal. Its demands for fiscal and monetary reform were frequently ignored or only partially implemented. By the mid-decade, the Fund tolerated non-compliance, fearing that greater pressure might politically weaken a Western-friendly government. The article thus reframes Russia's transformation as a process driven primarily by domestic developments and actors, with the IMF serving as a resource for domestic actors rather than an enforcer of an externally imposed agenda.
On May Day 1987, Zambian president Kenneth Kaunda publicly announced to stop adhering to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after years of following its prescriptions for economic policy reform. Zambian politicians and newspapers assisted by accusing the Bretton Woods institutions of being 'neocolonialist organizations' and forcing the country to implement a painful 'structural adjustment program' (SAP). Agency seemed to rest exclusively with international financial institutions. However, Kaunda was obviously taking a decision by breaking with the IMF in 1987. Against this background the article asks who was taking actions in formulating, shaping, and finally canceling the SAP in place in Zambia between 1985 and 1987. I argue that the SAPs in mid-1980s Zambia were shaped by a broad spectrum of actors, from the Bretton Woods Twins to Western donor governments, to the Zambian administration and other social forces within the country. Secondly, I refute narratives of SAPs as 'neocolonial' impositions, highlighting instead that IMF and Bank had considerable leverage though not complete control over the process. Thirdly, I show that the period in question was a time of 'global disconnect' for large parts of the Zambian economy and society, although SAPs were pushing for liberalization and world market integration.
Maintaining order in occupied territories was considered vital to the wider success of the Japanese wartime effort during the Asia-Pacific War (1937-45). Efforts to establish peace in the Philippines after occupation of the islands in January 1942 were impeded by the emergence of widespread guerrilla resistance. The Japanese military employed a variety of pacification and subjugation measures to combat opposition and restore order. Perhaps the most integral of these measures was the imposition of a military justice system to reinforce military rule and facilitate military control over occupied territories. This article examines the system and its evolution in the Philippines between 1942 and 1945, offering the first in-depth overview of Japanese military justice in the islands during the Asia-Pacific War. It demonstrates the dynamic character of military justice, emphasizing a shift from intimidation to conciliation over the course of the occupation, before an eventual radicalization of judicial practices towards the end of the war. The article also reflects on the role of military justice in the widespread violence perpetrated by Japanese forces during the final months of occupation, identifying structural weaknesses and institutional norms as factors shaping a notable increase in the use of force.
This article explores the emotional regimes and refuges developed by male inmates in Nazi concentration camps (KL), focusing on Dachau, Mauthausen and Sachsenhausen. Drawing on survivor testimonies and memoirs, it argues that the SS imposed a top-down emotional regime designed to dehumanize and control prisoners through emotional repression and behavioural conformity. Inmates internalized and enforced these norms, not only to avoid punishment but also to reclaim agency and masculine identity in an emasculating environment. Emotional control became a survival strategy and a moral imperative, with stoicism and selective apathy valued over vulnerability. However, friendships offered emotional refuge, enabling inmates to express care, trust and pride - emotions otherwise suppressed in camp society. These relationships allowed prisoners to reassert individuality and moral decency, subtly resisting SS efforts to destroy their humanity. The article situates emotional regimes and refuges within broader debates on resistance, arguing that conformity to emotional norms and the cultivation of friendship constituted symbolic and defensive resistance. By examining the gendered dimensions of emotional expression and repression, this study contributes to our understanding of inmate society, survival strategies and the emotional lives of men under extreme conditions.
This article examines Jewish refugee experience and knowledge in contemporary European and transatlantic history through the life and work of Gerda Lerner (1920-2013). Having escaped Nazi-occupied Europe in 1939, Lerner later emerged as a prominent feminist historian and activist in the United States. Drawing on archival and published sources, the article reconstructs how her encounter with post-unification Germany in 1993 deepened her self-understanding as a Jewish survivor of Nazi persecution and sharpened her engagement with European memory politics, antisemitism, and German feelings of guilt. Using a micro-historical approach, the article explores the intersections of antisemitism and racism, the limitations of European and German cultures of remembrance, and transatlantic knowledge exchanges in the early 1990s. The article connects the Austrian-Jewish refugee experience, the evolution of transatlantic feminist scholarly networks, and the societal upheavals and transformations following German unification, histories previously explored separately: Tracing how Lerner's refugee experiential knowledge, her feminism, and anti-racism informed each other, the article recontextualizes the enduring legacies of Nazism and the Holocaust alongside contemporary racism and right-wing violence in post-unification Germany. Putting Lerner's Jewish refugee knowledge under a microscope shows the interconnected histories of antisemitism, racism, Holocaust remembrance, and the transnational circulation of feminist thought.
At the end of the Second World War, Allied-occupied Austria and Germany became places of transit for hundreds of thousands of displaced persons (DPs) and refugees, as well as sites of employment for various internationally composed teams of relief workers. Through its analysis of personal documents produced by both United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and Quaker relief workers, administrative correspondence by UNRRA and later the International Refugee Organization (IRO), organizational bulletins, as well as the diary of a DP, this paper shows how DPs themselves played an active part in the postwar rehabilitation of displaced people. Their duties within the camps and their close collaboration with non-DP relief workers highlight various forms of refugee agency. This paper further examines what UNRRA and the IRO gained through their collaboration with DPs, as well as to what extent DPs could themselves benefit from this. Despite the hierarchies embedded in the labour policies of UNRRA, the IRO and the Allied occupation forces, this paper demonstrates that focusing on refugee workers and the diverse ways in which they utilized their skills to administer relief measures and sustain camp life reveals the interrelation between refugee agency and the agency of non-DP relief workers.
This study analyzes Chinese press perceptions of the Turkish National Struggle (1919-23) and Atat & uuml;rk's subsequent reforms until his death. Based on extensive analysis of Chinese newspapers and journals from 1923-39, it focuses on the 1930s, a period of intense national crisis in China that saw a surge in interest in T & uuml;rkiye's successful anti-imperialist and modernization efforts. The research highlights the influence of Atat & uuml;rk's leadership and reforms on Chinese political and intellectual elites. It reveals two main spheres of engagement: Guomindang (GMD) leaders and military elites viewed T & uuml;rkiye as a strategic model for state-centered national revival. Simultaneously, intellectuals offered a wider range of interpretations, falling into three categories: epic, leader-centric accounts; legal-nationalist perspectives; and empathetic yet critical analyses. By examining previously unexplored Chinese-language sources, this study offers a pioneering systematic analysis of how Republican-era Chinese intellectuals and media understood the Turkish experience. It makes a significant original contribution to the historiography of Sino-Turkish relations, detailing the instrumental and ideological ways in which Atat & uuml;rk's T & uuml;rkiye was interpreted by a nation searching for its own path to modernity and sovereignty.
This article revisits the US transition to peacetime after the Second World War from a bottom-up perspective. While postwar America is often portrayed as a unified society led by returning veterans who seamlessly reintegrated into civilian life, this account obscures the uneven, prolonged, and often exclusionary nature of that transition. Drawing on recent historiography and highlighting understudied groups such as female veterans, veterans of color, conscientious objectors, war brides, prisoners of war, and civilians caught in the machinery of war, the article emphasizes the multiple and often overlapping timelines through which Americans 'exited' the war. It also explores the blurred boundaries between wartime and peacetime, especially for those veterans who reenlisted, served in occupation forces, or carried their struggles into the civil rights movement. The article argues that 1945 should not be seen as a clean break but rather as one among many possible endpoints in a much longer process of demobilization and reintegration. In doing so, it not only calls for a more inclusive history of the postwar years but also invites a broader reflection on how national memory elevates some veterans while rendering others invisible.
This article considers the relationship between Britain and Turkey during the Second World War and its immediate aftermath via the work of the British Council, specifically in its work with the Halkevleri (People's Houses) in Turkey and the Halkevi established in London in 1942. Concentrating on cultural diplomacy, it explores the ways in which the British Council adapted its cultural arsenal to build relations with Turkey - crucial for its strategic status, adamant in its neutrality - with the limited resources available. The article also examines how Turkey received these efforts at cultural diplomacy, whether they were reciprocated, and whether they managed to fill the gap between the aid that was requested and what Britain was willing or able to provide. It considers to what extent psychological rearmament could do military work, to what extent it sought to, and to what extent it could be expected to succeed. Finally, it considers the retraction of generosity and a series of rejected requests in the immediate postwar period as a clarification of the goals and limits of the Council's campaign.
