SAW Project
Subproject Lead: Frank Bösch
Research Fellow/PhD candidate at ZZF Potsdam: Nico Putz
As a Leibniz Collaborative Excellence Project, funded by the Leibniz Association, CRAFTE brings together three Leibniz institutes: Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Berlin (ZMO), Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History (ZZF, Potsdam), Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space (IRS, Erkner), & two non-European partners: Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU, New Delhi, India), Afro-Asian Futures Past Project (Andrew W. Mellon Project, Howard University, Washington DC, USA)
CRAFTE explores Afro-Asian entanglements during the Cold War, focusing on actors, practices and their everyday sites of interaction. The Cold War’s ambit of influence extended far beyond the geographical bounds of Euro-America and the Soviet Union. Recent research has taken note of voices from Africa and Asia, yet little is known about their interconnections. Overlooking these has given us a one-sided picture of the Cold War in which the global South only appears as a theatre of bloc politics. CRAFTE proposes to fill this gap by critically engaging with the lived world(s) of Afro-Asian connections, to show how these were embedded in, but also, how they shaped the global Cold War.
Critically following actors’ trajectories and practices, the project goes beyond the analyses of state programmatics, institutions and discourses, which have dominated Cold War research. At its centre-stage is the question: How were Afro-Asian actors embedded in, and in turn how did they shape, the global Cold War?
In order to understand the nature of ‘interconnections’, CRAFTE deploys the framework of entanglements “horizontally”, i.e. without postulating any centre-periphery divides or spatial hierarchies. The project’s central aim is to explore the scope and extent of South-South connections and how they were ‘crafted’ through material, symbolic and everyday practices during the Cold War.
More about "Crafting Entanglements" see the project website https://www.craftingentanglements.com/
