Professor Arne Westad (Yale University) talks with the Thinking Global team about what it is to ‘think globally’ when it comes to international politics, the potential for a new Cold War, Sino-US relations, developing states in the international order, and what it is to think about global politics ‘in language’. Thinking Global is a podcast from E-International Relations – the world’s leading open access website for students and scholars of international politics.
Since the mid-2000s, Westad has been concerned with more general aspects of post-colonial and global history, as well as the modern history of China. The three key works from this period are The Global Cold War, which argues for ways of understanding the Soviet-American conflict in light of late- and post-colonial change in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean; Restless Empire, which discusses broad trends in China’s international history since 1750; and The Cold War: A World History, which summarizes the origins, conduct, and results of the conflict on a global scale. Today he is mainly interested in researching histories of empire and imperialism, first and foremost in Asia, but also world-wide. He is also trying to figure out how China’s late twentieth century economic reforms came into being and how their results changed the global economy. Professor Westad can be found on Twitter: @OAWestad.
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