Knud Andresen – författare

During the early 1980s, large parts of Europe were swept with riots and youth revolts. Radicalised young people occupied buildings and clashed with the police in cities such as Zurich, Berlin and Amsterdam, while in Great Britain and France, ''migrant'' youths protested fiercely against their underprivileged position and police brutality. Was there a link between the youth revolts in different European cities, and if so, how were they connected and how did they influence each other? These questions are central in this volume. This book covers case studies from countries in both Eastern and Western Europe and focuses not only on political movements such as squatting, but also on political subcultures such as punk, as well as the interaction between them. In doing so, it is the first historical collection with a transnational and interdisciplinary perspective on youth, youth revolts and social movements in the 1980s.

Few would dispute that many Western industrial democracies undertook extensive deregulation in the 1970s and 1980s. Yet this narrative, in its most familiar form, depends upon several historiographical assumptions that bely the complexities and pitfalls of studying the recent past. Across thirteen case studies, the contributors to this volume investigate this “deregulatory moment” from a variety of historical perspectives, including transnational, comparative, pan-European, and national approaches. Collectively, they challenge an interpretive framework that treats individual decades in isolation and ignores broader trends that extend to the end of the Second World War.

This edited collection examines how Western European countries have responded and been influenced by the apartheid system in South Africa. The debate surrounding apartheid in South Africa underwent a shift in the second half of the 20th century, with long held positive, racist European opinions of white South Africans slowly declining since decolonisation in the 1960s, and the increase in the importance of human rights in international politics. While previous studies have approached this question in the context of national histories, more or less detached from each other, this edited collection offers a broader insight into the transnational and entangled histories of Western European and South African societies. The contributors use exemplary case studies to trace the change of perception, covering a plurality of reactions in different societies and spheres: from the political and social, to the economic and cultural. At the same time, the collection emphasizes the interconnections of those reactions to what has been called the last ‘overtly racist regime’ (George Frederickson) of the twentieth century.