Does the Third World still exist? Stating the growing empirical diversity of the societies grouped together under this overall label, economists and political scientists have repeatedly proclaimed the “end of the Third World” since the 1970s.¹ In the 1980s, the Third World concept came under attack from a theoretical perspective: Post-structuralist critics condemned it as an essentialist and, indeed, Eurocentric approach, confronting it with what they described as a multiplicity of margins outside the realm of Western modernity.² In 1989–1991, the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the socialist Second World seemed to finalize the doubts...

No event since the Communist Revolution in 1949 had a more significant impact on the Chinese state than did the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. This event has garnered tremendous attention from Sinologists; scholars, however, have traditionally approached the Cultural Revolution from the perspective of the nation-state, analyzing the machinations of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the causes of student factionalism, and the role of political elites in the movement. Few scholars have considered the Cultural Revolution in a global context.¹ This has led to the perception that the Cultural Revolution was an isolated and insular movement that was generally cut...

A study of 1968 and the “Third World” can proceed in at least two directions. First, through a literal attempt to trace the different protest movements that happened around the Third World during the course of that year, taking the events in France, and perhaps the United States, as the implicit model that seeks to produce “1968” as a valorized historical marker in the first place. Such a heuristic, however, can raise questions about its widespread relevance and applicability, not the least of which is due to the fact that “the year of global crisis halfway between the end of...

The war in 1968 between Nigeria and its secessionist province Biafra and the start of the construction of a gigantic hydroelectric dam on the Zambezi river in 1969 in the Portuguese east African colony had extraordinary resonance beyond the country’s borders and generated a wide range of transnational solidarity efforts and humanitarian aid engagement in Europe and North America. Both events in the southern hemisphere allow a close look at the ideological and physical connections and transfers between protest movements in the North and liberation movements in Africa. The severe famine in Biafra due to the ongoing war evoked the...

In 1963, the União Nacional de Estudantes (National Student Union, or UNE) was hopeful of the prospects of reform under progressive President João Goulart heading into 1964. Yet on 1 April 1964, the Brazilian military overthrew Goulart, putting in place a right wing military dictatorship. Four years after the coup, students protesting the increasing authoritarianism and repression of the dictatorship took to the streets, calling for both university reform and the end of the dictatorship. Even the military leadership under presidents Humberto Castelo e Branco (1964–1967) and Artur Costa e Silva (1967–1969) was well aware of the need...

Between 1965 and 1979 the Catholic Major Seminary of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More at Chishawasha, near Salisbury, Rhodesia, experienced extended periods of rebellion by African students, resulting in the seminary having to be closed on three separate occasions. These dates coincided with the conclusion of the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), the Rhodesian Front’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) on 11 November 1965, and African nationalists waging an armed struggle for the liberation of Zimbabwe (1966–1979). Following the student rebellion and seminary closure in 1974, the Rhodesian bishops removed the seminary from the administration of the Jesuit...

In the now quite extensive literature on 1968 there is all too little discussion of South Africa. Mark Kurlansky, for example, in his well-known book 1968:The Year that Rocked the World, only mentions the country twice, in passing. While both events he mentions were related to the racial politics of the country, this chapter will argue that he misses the greater significance of 1968 for South Africa.

Kurlansky first records that 1968 was the year in which the surgeon Christiaan Barnard performed the world’s first successful heart transplant operation in Cape Town. Barnard had in fact carried out the...

In October 1968, riots rocked Kingston, Jamaica. The riots were a reaction to the expulsion of black activist and scholar Dr. Walter Rodney from Jamaica by the Jamaican Labor Party. The following weeks massive riots wreaked havoc upon the economic infrastructure of the island. This chapter will explore how Walter Rodney’s ideas on imperialism, Black Power, and the Jamaican political system had a profound impact on the politicization of reggae music, Rastafarian culture, and the role of reggae in Jamaican and global politics.

Inspired by the Black Power movement in the United States, Dr. Rodney sought to reawaken black consciousness...

On 4 June 1969 soldiers opened fire on a student demonstration in Kinshasa, killing tens of marchers. The exact number of casualties—estimations vary between less than 10 and more than 100 victims—is impossible to establish. After the killing, the army seized the corpses of the dead students and buried them anonymously in a mass grave. These bodies could testify to the scale of the massacre, and identified graves would have constituted material reminders of the event.² However, the efforts to make the dead bodies disappear failed to put a closure to the massacre. June 4th remained an unfinished...

Scholars of the 1960s generally view 1968 as the culmination of the global revolution that was that decade. In 1968 the dynamics of the post–World War II era, the realities of the Cold War, and the exigencies of governance and citizenship in a period of globalization coalesced into a groundswell of popular, oftentimes youthful protest in dozens of countries around the world. The target of these protests generally was authority, most commonly governmental, but also sometimes racial, gendered, and socioeconomic. The impact of these protests was felt socially, politically, culturally, and even diplomatically as countries from the developed to...

This chapter examines the collective identity processes of the Anti-Communist Student Action Front (KAMI) formed in the aftermath of the 1 October 1965 coup in Jakarta. After a discussion of events just prior to and following the coup, I describe and analyze the collective identity processes at work in the formation of this organization. I regard collective identity as a movement’s conceptualization of self, or its self-definition as a movement, which is in turn particularly dependent on cognitive frameworks of action, or action-frames utilized by movement participants.¹ A movement’s self-definition also includes assumptions about boundaries delineated between allies of the...

While in Rome, Claro M. Recto, the vanguard of the Filipino nationalist movement, died on 2 October 1960. His untimely passing signaled the end of the 1950s during which he figured prominently for challenging the pro-Americanism of Presidents Elpidio Quirino and Ramón Magsaysay by advocating an independent foreign policy, a self-reliant economy geared toward industrialization, and a sovereign nation free from iniquitous provisions of Philippine–US military bases treaty. Four days after his death, Philippine Ambassador to London León María Guerrero spoke before the Manila Rotary Club to pay his last respect to his mentor and friend. In a splendid...