Matthew Phillips – författare

This innovative, interdisciplinary and international collection of essays offers fresh perspectives on the history of global diplomacy. Experts in history, international relations, art history and performance art have come together to examine a series of visual sources relating to Asia's role in global diplomacy during the Cold War. They explore how leaders, including Indonesia's Sukarno, the Philippines' Imelda Marcos and Thailand's King Bhumibol, exploited the symbolic value of diplomacy to emphasise their agency in relationships with Great Powers. These case studies demonstrate the significance of Asian diplomacy in understanding the Cold War, shifting away from the use of 'war' as the dominant criterion for analysis of the region. Cold War Asia sheds critical light onto how culture shapes international relations, widening the lens of analysis to embed the role of gender, religion, and ethnicity, as well as the material world, into our understanding of diplomacy.

Thailand’s position during the Cold War was ambiguous: the country’s political leadership was very keen to maintain the country’s independence on the world stage, yet at the same time was anxious to establish the country’s credentials as staunchly anti-communist. However, as this book argues, Thailand, though never formally a client state of the United States, was very closely embedded in the Western camp through the commitment of Thailand’s cosmopolitan urban communities to developing a modern, consumerist lifestyle. Considering popular culture, including film, literature, fashion, tourism and attitudes towards Buddhism, the book shows how an ideology of consumerism and integration into a "free world" culture centred in the United States gradually took hold and became firmly established, and how this popular culture and ideology was fundamental in determining Thailand’s international political alignment.

Thailand’s position during the Cold War was ambiguous: the country’s political leadership was very keen to maintain the country’s independence on the world stage, yet at the same time was anxious to establish the country’s credentials as staunchly anti-communist. However, as this book argues, Thailand, though never formally a client state of the United States, was very closely embedded in the Western camp through the commitment of Thailand’s cosmopolitan urban communities to developing a modern, consumerist lifestyle. Considering popular culture, including film, literature, fashion, tourism and attitudes towards Buddhism, the book shows how an ideology of consumerism and integration into a "free world" culture centred in the United States gradually took hold and became firmly established, and how this popular culture and ideology was fundamental in determining Thailand’s international political alignment.

It pushes extant literary evaluations of entropy into a new realm by interrogating the human cost of entropic circumstances, and shows that we can use the process of entropy as a metaphorical lens through which to further understand the human connections and shared experiences reflected in modernist literature.