070249 UE Working Skills in Global History (2025S)

This course introduces students to researching a historical topic in a global context, with the goal of training them to work with different types of texts and primary sources, and to present their findings orally and visually. We will introduce students to the effective use of academic search engines, explore databases, and introduce citation management software such as Zotero.

In this course, we will work with selected key texts in the field of ‘New Cold War History’. This approach, decisively shaped by scholars such as Odd Arne Westad, Piero Gleijeses, Christine Hatzky, Vijay Prashad, Leslie James, Lorenz Lüthi, and others, is characterized by
• a decentering of the binary ‘superpower narrative’ that reduced all other actors to mere proxies,
• a reassessment of the agency of actors in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,
• and a multi-perspectivity through multi-local archival research in different languages in order to de-center Anglophone sources and scholarship.

Working on these texts will allow students to explore the historical entanglements between Cold War dynamics, decolonization processes, and development discourses that (re)configured the foundations of today's world order.
The particular focus of this course will be on African and Asian actors and their unique answers to navigate the dynamics of the Global Cold War (as expressed in Third Worldism, the Non-Aligned Movement, and Afro-Asianism). By combining texts from diplomatic, social and economic history as well as postcolonial critique, we will encourage students to employ a perspective that transcends the disciplinary boundaries of international relations. Additionally, students will be introduced to selected archival documents from African, Asian and European archives in order to acquire the skills to independently contextualize and critically analyse primary sources in accordance with the research literature on the subject.

Through engagement with the main literature - from writing abstracts, reviews, and short es-says to providing feedback and presenting a paper in a mock conference setting - we will not only identify the core narratives, but also engage with critical voices arguing for a re-centering of Cold War superpower influence, intimidation, and interference. By the end of the course, students will be equipped with the relevant work skills to engage with the state of the art and scholarly debates in a particular topic/field and conduct independent research in order to formulate their own global historical research questions present their findings.