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New From the CWIHP Working Papers Series&#8212;<i>Arming Nonalignment: Yugoslavia's Relations with Burma and the Cold War in Asia (1950-1955)</i> by <b>Jovan Cavoski</b>

CWIHP is pleased to announce the publication of the latest addition to the CWIHP Working Papers Series, Working Paper #61, Arming Nonalignment: Yugoslavia's Relations with Burma and the Cold War in Asia (1950-1955) by Jovan Cavoski

Using recently declassified documents from Yugoslav, Chinese, Indian, and U.S. archives, Cavoski examines the hitherto unexplored political, military, and economic partnership between Yugoslavia and Burma during early Cold War years. This relationship not only affected both countries' views on the nonaligned movement, but it also radically influenced the internal situation in Burma and its political and social development.

While, according to Cavoski, Yugoslavia viewed Burma as a window into Asia through which new ties with India, China, and Indonesia could be forged, for Burma this new partnership brought political and military benefits that helped solidify its position on the world stage. The scale of Yugoslav-Burmese military cooperation, Cavoski points out, strengthened Burma's response to internal rebellion and foreign interference. This relationship, in many ways, influenced the way China, India, the U.S., and the USSR viewed the role of Burma and Yugoslavia in world affairs. At the same time, it also became a pattern around which stronger bonds between nonaligned countries were ultimately shaped.

Jovan Cavoski is a PhD candidate at the Peking University School of International Studies and an associated-researcher at the Institute for Recent History of Serbia. His research focuses on the Cold War in the Third World, especially on comparing Chinese, Yugoslav, and Indian foreign policies, superpower influences, as well as on the rise and evolution of the concept of nonalignment in world affairs. Currently his work focuses on the relationship between China and the rise of the strategy of nonalignment during the 1950s and 1960s. A dozen of his articles have already been published or are in the process of publication in journals and volumes in Serbia, China, Russia, Britain, and the United States. He has recently published his first book, Yugoslavia and the Sino-Indian Conflict, 1959-1962 in Serbia, which deals with Yugoslav and nonaligned reactions towards this important international crisis. An earlier version of this CWIHP Working Paper won the second prize for the best paper written and presented at the GWU-UCSB-LSE International Graduate Student Conference held in Santa Barbara in April 2008.

Click here to read Arming Nonalignment: Yugoslavia's Relations with Burma and the Cold War in Asia (1950-1955).

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