The Cold War of Labor Migrants: Opportunities, Struggles and Adaptations across the Iron Curtain and Beyond - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1041135009 ISBN 13: 9781041135005

Publisher: Routledge, 2025

Synopsis

This book challenges conventional wisdom about labor migration during the Cold War era, revealing a complex landscape of mobility that transcended the supposed rigid boundaries between socialist and capitalist worlds.

Drawing on rich case studies from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Western Europe, and Yugoslavia, the contributors demonstrate how the Cold War’s unique socioeconomic and political context fostered unexpected experimentation and adaptation in labor mobility policies and practices. Rather than a simple story of restriction versus freedom, this collection reveals how institutional actors across both blocs functioned as agents of globalization, navigating a terrain where competition and collaboration often coexisted.

By examining labor migration as both lived experience and state- regulated phenomenon, this volume makes a vital contribution to our understanding of how Cold War rivalries shaped human mobility within and across ideological divides. The research presented here underscores the importance of integrating both Western and non- Western perspectives when assessing the history and enduring legacy of international labor migration during this pivotal period. This book is an essential resource for scholars of migration studies, Cold War history, labor economics, and global politics.

The chapters in this book were originally published in Labor History.

About this title

About the Author

Sara Bernard is Lecturer in Societal Transformation at the University of Glasgow. Her research focuses on the post- 1945 migration history of South- Eastern Europe, with a focus on socialist Yugoslavia.
Rory Archer is a social historian whose research focuses on labor, gender, migration, and racialized ethnicity in socialist Yugoslavia. He works as a researcher and lecturer at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the University of Graz, Austria.
Yannis G.S. Papadopoulos studies postwar migration within Europe and to overseas destinations, with a focus on the impact of Cold War in human mobility. He works at the Department of History of Cities, Diaspora and Immigration, Institute for Mediterranean Studies (IMS-FORTH) Rethymno and is teaching at the Studies in Greek Civilization (ELP) program at the Hellenic Open University, Patras, Greece.

Edition details

• Publisher: Routledge
• Publication date: 2025
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1041135009
• ISBN 13: 9781041135005
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 184
• Editor: Bernard Sara, Archer Rory, Papadopoulos Yannis G.S.