Cold War on Five Continents:A Global History of Empire and Espionage by Alfred W. McCoy. Chicago. 2025. Haymarket Books. 9798888905029. 591 pages. hardcover.

DESCRIPTION - A provocative analysis of the deadly Cold War conflicts that devastated countries and communities far from Moscow and Washington. Transforming battlegrounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into veritable hellscapes, the surrogate wars of the Cold War era left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that have persisted into the present. In this ambitious work, Alfred W. McCoy uses a bottom-up, outside-in approach to offer an unexpected new perspective on the longest, most consequential conflict in modern history. McCoy renders an intimate portrait of both embattled covert operatives and committed antiwar protesters, thus humanizing the history of the Cold War—a history that has too often been told in impersonal terms of economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes. As today’s great powers devote humanity’s scarce resources toward ratcheting up a “new cold war” in the face of a worsening climate crisis, McCoy’s history is an important reminder that otherwise- ordinary individuals once helped end a global conflict that threatened nuclear holocaust.

 Alfred W. McCoy is professor of Southeast Asian history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Educated at Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley, and Yale, he has spent the past twenty years writing about the politics and history of Southeast Asia. He is the author of several books on the Philippines, one of which won the country's National Book Award, and the editor of Southeast Asia Under Japanese Occupation. An internationally recognized expert on drug trafficking and organized crime, he is also the author of DRUG TRAFFIC: NARCOTICS AND ORGANIZED CRIME IN AUSTRALIA.

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