Contact Us

We're Asia-based scholars and researchers, creating an online archive of oral history collections concerning the Cold War and decolonization in Asia. Our oral history project—in a sense, an attempt at history from below—will be an important and useful corrective to conventional Cold War and decolonization histories, which have largely emphasized superpowers’ and political leaders’ conduct.

Through this project, we draw attention to “many Cold Wars,” or, more precisely, many local and social wars that were imagined as parts of the global Cold War. In doing so, our project raises fundamental questions about standard Cold War narratives, encouraging historians and scholars in other disciplines to rethink what the Cold War really was. To explore such an approach, we ask the following core questions.:

• What was actually being fought over in the name of the Cold War?

• What kinds of social, cultural, gender, local, or generational conflicts existed underneath the Cold War confrontation?

• What kinds of individual emotions were carried through in the form of ideology, whether communism or anticommunism?

• What is the commonality among a host of events that might appear irrelevant to one another at a glance?

• What kinds of dynamics can we see in Cold War Asia, and in what ways can we use Cold War Asia as a method to reconsider the Cold War, itself?

If you are interested in conducting oral history interviews on any topics relevant to our project, please feel free to contact Principal Investigator Masuda Hajimu at <hishm@nus.edu.sg>. Typically, we will ask contributors to submit: 1) Interview transcripts (in local languages or English translation), 2) English summaries of these interviews, and 3) Basic information on interviewees.

Kindly contact us if you wish to contribute or enquire more about our project.

Thank you for using this oral history archive. We're looking forward to having new contributors and new projects.