Odd Arne Westad

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Odd Arne Westad was born on the 5th of January 1960 in Norway. His most contested claim is also his most influential: the Cold War was not primarily a European story. Two rival powers reshaped societies across the developing world, and the consequences of that reshaping stretched far beyond the conflict's end. That argument, refined across fifteen books, made the phrase "global Cold War" a standard term across history and the social sciences. A parallel body of work on China posed a different question. If China has long absorbed outside influences while remaining distinctively itself, what does that history reveal about the country's place in today's world?

  983

• 2. A War Without Borders

  ›

  The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times appeared in 2006. It won the Bancroft Prize that year, along with the Akira Iriye International History Book Award. The Michael Harrington Prize from the American Political Science Association followed. The Council on Foreign Relations shortlisted it for the Arthur Ross Award as well.

  In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Westad argued, the Cold War's ideological dimension was not simply a cover for strategic rivalry. Each superpower acted from genuine conviction that its model of how societies should be organized was universally correct. That insistence on ideology as a real cause of events, not a rationalization for power, distinguished Westad's reading from many earlier accounts. The phrase "global Cold War" had circulated before his book appeared. His analysis gave it enough scholarly weight that historians and social scientists across disciplines adopted it as a standard concept.

  The Cold War: A World History, published in 2017, returned to these arguments on an even wider canvas. The Times Literary Supplement chose it as one of its books of the year. It called the book "a book of resounding importance for appraising our global future as well as understanding our past." Payot published a French translation of the 2006 book in Paris in 2007, under the title La Guerre froide globale, extending Westad's argument into French-language scholarship.

  10

• 3. China Between East and West

  ›

  Restless Empire: China and the World since 1750, published in 2012, surveys more than two centuries of China's encounters with the outside world. It won the Asia Society's Bernard Schwartz Book Award for 2013. Westad's central claim is that China's engagement with foreign ideas, institutions, and people is not a recent phenomenon.

  Contemporary China, in Westad's framing, is a hybrid society built from both Chinese and foreign elements. That analysis cuts against readings that treat China as either purely self-contained or purely reactive to outside pressure. Westad is critical of what he calls an overly nationalistic Chinese foreign policy. He argues that other countries are better served by working with China than by trying to contain it.

  His 2021 book, Empire and Righteous Nation: 600 Years of China-Korea Relations, pushed this regional focus back six centuries. In 2024, he co-authored The Great Transformation: China's Road from Revolution to Reform with Chen Jian, published by Yale University Press. An essay titled "Sleepwalking Toward War" appeared in Foreign Affairs on the 13th of June 2024, carrying his historical arguments into immediate public debate.

  159

• 4. Shaping the Discipline

  ›

  In 2008, Westad co-founded LSE IDEAS at the London School of Economics with Professor Michael Cox. The center brought together scholars working on international affairs, diplomacy, and strategy. He had served as head of the International History Department at LSE since 2003, and LSE IDEAS grew from that institutional base.

  Westad was the founding editor of the journal Cold War History, which created a dedicated scholarly venue for a rapidly expanding research area. He also ran the University of North Carolina Press's book series on the Cold War from 2009 to 2024. Over fifteen years, that editorial role gave him sustained influence over which scholarship reached the widest academic audiences.

  In 2010, Westad and Melvyn Leffler co-edited the three-volume Cambridge History of the Cold War. It gathered the field's leading scholars under a single editorial framework. Grants from the British Arts and Humanities Research Board, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the Leverhulme Trust funded his research. He also served as International Coordinator of the Russian Foreign Ministry's Advisory Group on Declassification and Archival Access.

  839

• 5. From Oslo to Yale

  ›

  Westad completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Oslo before crossing the Atlantic for doctoral study. His PhD was completed at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, under the supervision of Michael H. Hunt. In 1991, he was appointed director of research at the Norwegian Nobel Institute and adjunct professor at the University of Oslo. By 1998, he had moved to London to join the International History Department at the London School of Economics.

  Six languages run through Westad's working life: Norwegian, English, French, German, Mandarin, and Russian. He has lectured in several countries on both history and contemporary international affairs, particularly on China and East Asia.

  In 2014, he became the inaugural holder of the S.T. Lee Chair of US-Asia Relations at Harvard University. He taught at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and served as a Senior Scholar at the Harvard Academy of International and Area Studies. He joined Yale in 2019 as the Elihu Professor of History and Global Affairs. During the spring semester of 2019, he also held the Boeing Company Chair in International Relations at Schwarzman College, Tsinghua University. Since 2016, he has been a guest professor in the History Department at Peking University.

  He is a fellow of the British Academy, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the Academia Europaea. In 2012, he delivered the British Academy's Sarah Tryphena Phillips Lecture, speaking on Ronald Reagan and the re-constitution of American hegemony. In 2011, Westad was nominated as one of two candidates for the presidency of the American Historical Association. His most recent book, The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict, and Warnings from History, is due from Henry Holt and Company in 2026.

  12347