A provocative analysis of the deadly Cold War conflicts that devastated countries and communities far from Moscow and Washington.

Transforming battlegrounds in Africa, Asia, and Latin America into veritable hellscapes, the surrogate wars of the Cold War era left behind a legacy of collective trauma and social conflict that have persisted into the present. In this ambitious work, Alfred W. McCoy uses a bottom-up, outside-in approach to offer an unexpected new perspective on the longest, most consequential conflict in modern history.

McCoy renders an intimate portrait of both embattled covert operatives and committed antiwar protesters, thus humanizing the history of the Cold War—a history that has too often been told in impersonal terms of economic growth, nuclear arsenals, or diplomatic ententes.

As today’s great powers devote humanity’s scarce resources toward ratcheting up a “new cold war” in the face of a worsening climate crisis, McCoy’s history is an important reminder that otherwise-ordinary individuals once helped end a global conflict that threatened nuclear holocaust.