This panel invites papers that explore how Cold War intelligence practices, political solidarities, and ideological exchanges shaped African political, intellectual, and cultural life. Building on recent historiography that moves beyond bipolar superpower frameworks toward entangled, multi-sited Cold War histories, the panel foregrounds suspicion, surveillance, and strategic intervention as constitutive features of relationships among African actors, global powers, and transnational networks.
We are particularly interested in how intelligence agencies, philanthropic organizations, universities, media institutions, and other intermediaries shaped African political movements and knowledge production. Recent scholarship has begun to reveal the extent of both covert and overt foreign intervention, ranging from support for student movements and liberal organizations to efforts to cultivate, redirect, or undermine anti-colonial and anti-apartheid actors.
How did African intellectuals, activists, and institutions navigate these entanglements? How did Cold War geopolitics shape African debates about liberalism, socialism, non-alignment, and revolution? How were trust, mistrust, and strategic ambiguity produced in everyday political and intellectual exchange?
Possible themes include:
• Intelligence, surveillance, and political intervention in Africa
• African student movements, universities, and Cold War politics
• Liberalism, anticommunism, and ideological contestation
• Journalism, visual culture, and Cold War publics
• Transnational solidarities, Third Worldism, and their limits
• Philanthropy, academia, and the political economy of knowledge production
We welcome submissions from historians, political theorists, anthropologists, and scholars in related fields, especially work based on new archival research, intelligence sources, oral histories, or interdisciplinary methods. Single-case, comparative, and transnational papers are all welcome. PhD students and junior scholars are particularly welcomed.
By centering African actors while situating them within global Cold War infrastructures, this panel aims to complicate celebratory narratives of solidarity and illuminate how mistrust, ideological conflict, and strategic manipulation shaped everyday political and intellectual life. The panel speaks to renewed interest in Cold War infrastructures, decolonization-era knowledge production, and the methodological challenges of reading archives shaped by secrecy, mediation, and political asymmetry.
Please send the following by Wednesday, 11 March 2026:
• Paper title
• Abstract (200-250 words)
• Short bio (100-150 words)
• Institutional affiliation
Co-chairs / Contacts
Joel Cabrita (Stanford University) – jcabrita@stanford.edu
Jodie Sun (Fudan University) – yuzhou.sun831@gmail.com
Archives of Suspicion: Intelligence, Solidarities, and African Lives in the Cold War (1940s-1980s)
