WWII
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Shifting Memories of the Second World War in Times of Global Disorder
Eighty years on, the Second World War is losing its moral primacy as global memory shifts, challenged by postcolonial critiques, geopolitical upheaval, and ideological appropriation, reshape how Europe and the world confront the legacies of totalitarianism and liberal democracy.
15.05.2025
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The Significance of War Crimes Trials after 1945: A View from East Asia
The Second World War had a transformative effect on the development of international law. It continues to shape its practice and evolution. While the Nuremberg trials are often acknowledged as a watershed moment, however, scholars sometimes neglected the extent to which the post-war trials in East Asia shaped the development of international law and the process of decolonization. By breaking away from a ‘Eurocentric’ focus on the largest conflict of the twentieth century, we can see more clearly the enduring global legacies of the war.
14.05.2025
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The Many Ends of the Second World War
The end of the Second World War was not a single moment defined by victory and defeat. Rather, it was a pluriform and drawn-out process perpetuated by colonial power politics in the Global South. By Thomas W. Bottelier This article is the third in our series commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II. It is sometimes said that the Second World War began in the Horn of Africa, in 1935, with Italy’s war of aggression on Ethiopia. It is almost never said that it ended there. And yet, it was the first place in the world where the fighting came to an end. Hostilities in Eritrea, then an Italian colony, ceased when the country was occupied by troops from the British Empire in the spring of 1941. Italian Somaliland, which covered the eastern seaboard of modern Somalia, was taken at the same time. Ethiopia, which the Italians had themselves occupied since 1936, was fully liberated that November, when the remnants of the Forze armate dell’Africa Orientale [...]
9.05.2025
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The Depoliticization of 1945
For much of the second half of the twentieth century, the Second World War and its aftermath were interlaced with western Europe’s present. The war was understood to have birthed the world that emerged in its wake. This is no longer so. Our present has been uncoupled from its twentieth-century past. The Second World War has consequently lost its explanatory function for making sense of contemporary socio-political realities.
8.05.2025
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A Clash of Revisionisms
The remembrance of the Second World War has shifted significantly in recent decades – and even more dramatic reinterpretations appear to be underway in our current moment of drastic uncertainty.
7.05.2025
