Although a vast scholarly and popular literature has dissected the social movements of the 1960s in the United States and Western Europe in the most minute detail, the dearth of work on contemporaneous protest activities in the Third World is surprising. This volume seeks to help rectify that imbalance. Editors Samantha Christiansen and Zachary A. Scarlett argue that “a truly global analysis of this decade is impossible without an in-depth and prolonged conversation about the Third World” (p. 16). The idea of the Third World and especially some of its iconic revolutionary figures appealed powerfully to many activists in the West. Nonetheless, the Third World as it really was “remains terra incognita in the scholarship on the 1960s” (p. 2).
The Third World in the Global 1960s contains a diverse array of case studies of Asian, African, and Latin American social movements. The cases range from China, India, Brazil, Rhodesia,...