The Violent 1950s: Towards a New History of the Global “Postwar” Decade

Call for Papers

The 1950s are often remembered as a decade of recovery, economic growth, and political stability, particularly from Western perspectives. Yet, this image of a war-weary globe fails to account for the pervasive and diverse forms of violence that continued to shape everyday life and political transformation during that decade worldwide.

This conference aims to reassess the so-called postwar years. It reconceptualizes the 1950s as a deeply violent decade, marked not by the absence of conflict, but rather by its reconfiguration on all levels. The decade witnessed some of the most destructive wars of the twentieth century, from the Korean War to anti-colonial struggles in Algeria, Cyprus, Indochina, and Kenya, among other places. Authoritarian regimes in Asia, Latin America, and the Soviet Union enforced ideological conformity through imprisonment, censorship, and political repression, while surveillance, ideological conflict, state and anti-state terror, and subtler forms of violence also pervaded Western Europe. Meanwhile, racial order in the United States, South Africa, and other settler societies, was sustained by repression, police brutality, and lynching.

Beyond the state level, societies and the private domain were sites of intense brutality. For instance, a surge in crime syndicates and transnational networks perpetuated racketeering, gang violence, drug smuggling, and human trafficking. Meanwhile, the domestic sphere, imagined by Western middle-classes as a sanctuary of comfort and harmony, was shaken by gendered and generational conflict and by the challenges associated with  the return to everyday life after widespread exposure to wartime violence. Everywhere, the 1950s were shaped by anticipatory violence in the form of the omnipresent threat of nuclear annihilation 

The conference explores the manifold societal, political, and everyday manifestations of violence in the twilight phase of the shift from war-driven societies to seemingly demobilized ones. The conference aims to challenge the narrative of the 1950s as a peaceful interlude between World War II and the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s. By employing violence as a central analytical lens and by tracing its persistent presence across and within multiple world regions and on different micro- and macro-analytical layers, the conference will assess reciprocal patterns and transfers, compare and link local coercion to global power structures, and underscore how Cold War violence operated unevenly across global hierarchies. On the whole, the 1950s marked a formative moment in the evolution of modern violence—one that normalized counterinsurgency, expanded state surveillance, and globalized coercive practices.

Perpetual conflict blurred the boundaries between wartime and peacetime, embedding violence into systems of governance and everyday experience. Understanding violence in the global 1950s can help us understand how the “postwar” order was constructed through force, fear, and power imbalances, with consequences that continue to shape the contemporary world today.

The conference will take place from February 25–26, 2027, at the German Historical Institute in Washington D.C. In advance of the conference, participants will share papers (max. 4,500 words), which will be discussed among the group and with invited discussants. We welcome contributions that look at violence in the 1950s from different regional and disciplinary angles. We invite submissions from the fields of political, social, and cultural history; likewise, we are eager to engage with research from other disciplines, including historical anthropology, the history of violence, and culture, film, gender, and literary studies. All papers should have a decisive historical focus. The range of potential topics includes, but is not limited to: 

• Violence in post-fascist and war-weary societies, regimes of military occupation

• Transition and circulation of fascist/imperialist practices and practitioners of violence into the immediate postwar years. 

• Early Cold War rearmament policies and debates
• Colonial and anti-colonial violence: colonial repression, anti-colonial struggle, and decolonization
• Justification for violence and the language of security, modernization, anti-communism, and anti-fascism
• Terrorism, guerilla warfare, civil warfare, and revolutionary violence
• Popular representations and mass mediatization of violence
• Violence beyond the state-level: crime, drugs, and human trafficking
• Gendered, racialized, and sexual violence
• Domestic violence 
• Experience of violence and perpetrators’ perspectives: guilt, PTSD, and social reintegration in the 1950s

Please submit a short CV (max. 150 words) and an abstract (max. 350 words) in English through  our online application portal by June 12, 2026. 

Applicants will be notified by June 30, 2026. 

Accommodations will be arranged and paid for by the conference organizers. Participants will make their own travel arrangements; funding subsidies for travel are available upon request (for one presenter per paper) for selected scholars, especially those who might not otherwise be able to attend the workshop, including junior scholars and scholars from universities with limited resources. For further information regarding the event’s format and conceptualization, please contact Andreas Greiner. For questions about the submission platform or logistics (travel and accommodation), please contact our event coordinator Nicola Hofstetter.