Editor's Note

This special issue was in the works for several years. It took much longer than usual because a significant number of the manuscripts initially submitted for the issue did not make it through the peer review process. We eventually narrowed the issue down to the core group of articles that are published here. In earlier issues of the journal, we published articles discussing the roles of Cuba and the Soviet Union in the wars in southern Africa. The articles published here should be read in conjunction with those earlier articles.

The articles in this issue look both at the perspectives of local actors in Africa (Angola, Mozambique, South Africa) and at the roles of certain external actors—Portugal, the United States, Yugoslavia, and the World Council of Churches—in the process of decolonization and guerrilla warfare. Even after Portugal ended its presence in southern Africa and gave way to the independent states of Angola and Mozambique in 1975, destructive civil wars in those new countries dragged on, fueled by the Cold War. Not until 1991, with the end of the Cold War, did political settlements of the conflicts finally prove feasible.

Southern Africa is not the only region of the world that continues to experience adverse repercussions from the Cold War. The starkest example is the Korean peninsula, where a tyrannical regime in North Korea continues to face its South Korean neighbor. South Korea, too, was ruled by a dictatorship during the Cold War, but over the past thirty years it has evolved into a robustly democratic, extremely prosperous country. Meanwhile, North Korea has remained pervasively repressive and poor. As a result, the divide between the two countries is perhaps wider now than it has ever been. Although many Koreans continue to hope for eventual reunification of their two countries, the practical obstacles are immense. When I went to the Joint Security Area (JSA) of the Demilitarized Zone in late 2017, I saw how South Korean and U.S. forces are constantly on alert to ward off incursions by the North Korean troops on the other side of the JSA—troops who have prepared for all-out war. North Korea's acquisition of a nuclear arsenal since 2004 has merely accentuated what is potentially the most dangerous region in the world.

Recent developments with archives in various parts of the world have yielded mixed results. On the one hand, archival access in the People's Republic of China (PRC) has sharply decreased under Xi Jinping, who became General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in November 2012 and president of China in March 2013. The central CCP archives in Beijing have never been accessible, but some archives in the PRC that were gradually opening before the rise of Xi Jinping have drastically tightened their policies over the past six years. The PRC Foreign Ministry Archive, which had been gradually declassifying its Cold War-era holdings from 2004 through 2013, has re-sealed most of its collections and is not releasing anything new. The Shanghai Municipal Archive, which had been an excellent source of copies of central CCP documents, including some Politburo records, has markedly curtailed access to its holdings in recent years. When I did research at the Shanghai Municipal Archive in 2013, the archivists were extremely helpful and brought me everything I requested. But when I was back there in 2016 and 2017, I received very little. Even some documents I had looked at earlier and had photocopied were no longer accessible. Other regional archives in China, which had been increasingly open before 2013, have severely restricted access to many of their Cold War–era holdings. The more repressive line under Xi Jinping has clearly had a pernicious effect.

On the other hand, in Ukraine and Russia, important archival collections have become available. In Kyiv, the archive of the former state security organs (KGB), now known as the Branch State Archive of the Security Service of Ukraine (HDA-SBU), had been closed after 1991 apart from a brief opening in 2009–2010, but over the past few years the HDA-SBU has become fully open and is extremely accommodating to researchers. When...