Much of the historiography of anticommunism foregrounds diplomatic and political historical approaches. In response, this panel employs bottom-up social and cultural perspectives and puts them in dialogue with state-centered approaches that have dominated the field thus far. Since the end of the Cold War, the historiography has shifted increasingly from grand political narratives to dispersed area studies approaches that are themselves a product of the Cold War. We thus bring together historians working across various regions in order to track divergences and convergences in local anticommunist practices and discourses, to consider the uneven effects of anticommunism's global circulations. Through a comparative analysis of different case studies from the 1920s to the 1980s, this panel emphasizes the global entanglements that shaped anticommunism in order to move away from a bipolar understanding of the Cold War that reduces local cases as mere “proxy wars.” In so doing, we ask: How did non-state actors experience, respond to, collude with, or resist anticommunism? How might non-state sources provide alternative vantage points from which to understand the production of anticommunist sentiments? Is it justifiable to speak of global anticommunism, and how would such a framework alter our understanding of the Cold War?

Heather Salter opens the discussion through her study of English-language newspapers published in the Shanghai International Settlement during the interwar period. Tracking the changing anticommunist discourses articulated in these newspapers—which took a sharp turn with the violent end of the First United Front in 1927—Salter argues that these discourses simultaneously reflected and shaped an emergent British culture of anticommunism that was of global significance. Aimée Plukker takes us to the beginning of the Cold War with a paper that examines the Marshall Plan–funded tourism industry in urban Western Europe. By examining the notion of circulation in tourism policy and advertising such as pamphlets, brochures, and photographs, Plukker argues that the visual economy of U.S. tourism in Western Europe was integral to constituting the capitalist economy of "the West" in opposition to the communist "East." Darren Wan analyzes how anticommunism, in the context of the undeclared war between Malaysia and Indonesia known as Konfrontasi, shaped bureaucrats’ responses to indigenous subjects’ citizenship claims. In so doing, Wan contends that anticommunism’s effects cut across the settler/indigenous binary where the Southeast Asian historiography tends to foreground diasporic communities. Finally, Kyle Burke’s paper examines the mobilization, motives, and experiences of foreign mercenaries who fought for the short-lived state of Rhodesia. Burke argues that mercenaries from the United States, Britain, France, Portugal and elsewhere bonded over a shared sense of white supremacy and a desire to continue the global project of anticommunism in a moment of apparent state failure and weakness in the West, and that their efforts had long legacies among the right in subsequent decades.