Cold War research has long focused on the bipolar order of East-West relations. Without calling these findings into question, we can and should however ask whether and how the bipolar pattern of order was undermined, bypassed or even dissolved during the same time. By Claudia Kemper.

If we consider contemporary history to be the prehistory of the present day, inquiring into the end of the Cold War must take into account not only Europe and North America but to a greater extent Asia, because this is where processes began that have deeply influenced today's global (dis-)order and continue to do so. By Hermann Wentker.

Unraveling the multiple, entangled strands of the history of the Cold War remains one of the great challenges of research into the recent past, and especially in what was then the Third World. Because the frontiers of the rival spheres of influence in the Northern Hemisphere stayed fixed and, for the foreseeable future, seemed impenetrable, from the late 1950s onward the US and USSR increasingly shifted their struggle for resources, dominance and prestige toward the Global South. But American and Soviet leaders were not the only actors who determined the course of events. Historian Bernd Greiner on a topic that deserves greater attention.