Kristin Plys' new article, "The Cold War from the Global South: Maoism and the Future of Liberalism," was recently published in a special issue of Social Science History on 'What Was the Cold War?' co-edited by Mitchell Stevens and University of Toronto Sociology PhD alum Ioana Sendroiu. Plys' contribution is currently the 3rd most-read article at the journal and has been downloaded 3210 times since appearing on the journal's website. The article assesses the different templates for political and economic development that the Cold War engendered, focusing on the legacies of left- and right-wing alternatives developed in response to their failures. Plys concludes that ideological contestations from the Global South reveal that the Cold War was not a mere rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union; it was a global ideological contestation over liberalism, the constituting ideology of capitalism.
Kristin Plys is an Associate Professor of Sociology and History at the University of Toronto. She was the J. Clawson Mills Scholar in the Director’s Office at the Metropolitan Museum of Art from 2023 to 2024. She is the author of Brewing Resistance (Cambridge University Press, 2020), winner of the Global Sociology Book Award from Canada’s Congress for the Humanities and Social Sciences, and co-author, with Charles Lemert, of Capitalism and Its Uncertain Future (Routledge, 2022), honourable mention for the PEWS Immanuel Wallerstein Book Award from the American Sociological Association.