Where will the conference take place?

The conference will be held in the city of Prague, CZE.

What is the primary focus of this conference?

The conference focuses on how non-state actors, including scientists and activists, challenged the Cold War order.

When does the conference begin and end?

The conference is scheduled to begin on a Monday and conclude on a Tuesday.

Science, Dissent, and Activism: How Non-State Actors Challenged the Cold War Order

Name: Science, Dissent, and Activism: How Non-State Actors Challenged the Cold War Order
Start: 2026-09-07T00:00:00Z
End: 2026-09-08T00:00:00Z
Location: Prague

Sep 7–8, 2026Prague, Czech RepublicIn-person

Starts in 30 daysRegistration open

This conference, held in Prague, CZE, explores the pivotal role of non-state actors, particularly scientists and activists, in challenging the Cold War order. It aims to shed light on how these groups, often operating outside traditional state structures, influenced geopolitical dynamics and contributed to the eventual transformation of the global landscape. The event focuses on the diverse strategies and impacts of these non-state actors across various regions and political systems during the Cold War era.

Committees & topics

Topics
Non-State Actors and the Reconfiguration of Political Authority During the Cold War · Science as a Resource for Dissent, Mediation, and Legitimacy · Institutional Contexts of Non-State Action: Conferences, Committees, Universities, Research Institutes, and NGOs · Loyalty, Autonomy, and Internationalism in Scientific and Expert Communities · Informal Diplomacy, Expert Forums, and the Politics of "Neutral" Knowledge · Dissenting Expertise in Socialist, Authoritarian, and Post-Colonial Contexts · Activism, Morality, and Responsibility in Nuclear, Environmental, and Peace Debates · Knowledge Circulation, Surveillance, and Control Across Ideological Borders

Why it matters

Understanding the influence of non-state actors during the Cold War is crucial for contemporary international relations. While state-centric narratives often dominate historical accounts, this conference highlights the agency of individuals and groups who, through scientific collaboration, dissent, and activism, carved out spaces for alternative perspectives and actions. Their efforts demonstrate that power dynamics are not solely confined to governmental bodies but are also shaped by grassroots movements, intellectual networks, and moral appeals.

The insights gained from this examination offer valuable lessons for today's complex global challenges. In an era where non-state actors, from NGOs to transnational corporations, wield significant influence, studying historical precedents of their impact can inform current strategies for diplomacy, advocacy, and conflict resolution. It underscores the importance of considering a broader spectrum of stakeholders when analyzing international events and formulating policy, moving beyond a purely state-focused lens.

How to prepare

For those preparing to engage with the themes of this conference, a deep dive into the concept of stakeholder mapping and hidden stakeholders would be particularly beneficial. Understanding how non-state actors, often overlooked in conventional analyses, can exert significant influence is key. Consider how these groups developed engagement strategies to navigate restrictive political environments and build transnational networks.

Participants should also consider the diverse forms of dissent and activism that emerged during the Cold War. This includes scientific exchanges that transcended political divides, human rights advocacy, peace movements, and environmental campaigns. Analyzing these varied approaches through a lens of dynamic analysis will help in understanding their effectiveness and limitations in challenging established state power structures.

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Czech Republic

As the host nation, CZE provides a historical context for the conference, having been a focal point of Cold War divisions and a site where dissent against Soviet influence was significant.

Role in topic

CZE, then part of Czechoslovakia, experienced direct Soviet influence, making it a critical location for studying both state control and the emergence of non-state resistance and intellectual dissent within the Eastern Bloc.

United States

The USA, as a leading superpower during the Cold War, was a primary target and counterpoint for many non-state actors, both those aligned with and those critical of its policies.

Role in topic

Non-state actors in the USA engaged in various forms of activism, from anti-war movements to scientific collaborations, influencing domestic and international policy and often serving as a model or a critique for movements elsewhere.

United Kingdom

The GBR played a significant role as a Western European nation where non-state actors, particularly peace and disarmament movements, were highly active and influential.

Role in topic

GBR was a hub for various non-state organizations, including those advocating for nuclear disarmament and human rights, which often worked transnationally to challenge Cold War policies and promote dialogue.

Poland

POL represents a key example of a nation within the Eastern Bloc where non-state actors, particularly the Solidarity movement, played a decisive role in challenging the communist regime.

Role in topic

The rise of independent trade unions and intellectual dissent in POL demonstrated the power of organized non-state actors to mobilize populations and directly confront state authority, ultimately contributing to the collapse of the Cold War order.

Topics & background

The background behind each topic and the actors that shape it.

Non-State Actors and the Reconfiguration of Political Authority During the Cold War

The bipolar order that emerged after 1945 was never solely a contest between states. From the late 1940s onward, churches, peace movements, learned societies, foundations, and transnational professional networks carved out spaces of action that neither Washington nor Moscow could fully control. Bodies such as the Pugwash Conferences (founded 1957), the World Council of Churches, Amnesty International (1961), and an expanding ecology of philanthropic foundations — Ford, Rockefeller, Volkswagen — channeled resources, ideas, and personnel across blocs, often in ways that complicated official policy. These actors did not merely lobby governments; they reframed what counted as legitimate authority on questions of security, human rights, development, and science. Helsinki monitoring groups after 1975, Solidarity-linked intellectuals in Poland, and Western détente lobbies all drew on transnational connections to pressure their own states. By the late Cold War, scholars increasingly spoke of a 'transnational' rather than purely interstate history of the period, in which non-state actors shaped agendas from nuclear restraint to dissident protection. The historiographical debate today concerns how decisive these actors actually were. Did they meaningfully reconfigure political authority, or did they operate only within margins tolerated by superpowers? The answer varies by issue area and region, and remains central to understanding the end of the Cold War.

Key players

United States
Host to major foundations, peace groups, and dissident networks shaping Western Cold War policy.
SUN
Soviet Union, whose tolerance and repression of non-state activity defined the limits of transnational engagement in the East.
Poland
Site of Solidarity and Catholic networks that demonstrated non-state challenges to socialist authority.
United Kingdom
Base for CND, Amnesty International, and influential scientific dissent.
Germany
West Germany hosted peace movements, Ostpolitik-era civic exchanges, and church-mediated dialogue across the Iron Curtain.
Switzerland
Switzerland provided neutral venues (Geneva, Pugwash sessions) for non-state and back-channel diplomacy.

Science as a Resource for Dissent, Mediation, and Legitimacy

Science occupied an unusually charged place in the Cold War. Nuclear weapons, space exploration, and biomedical research bound scientists tightly to state power, yet the universalist self-image of science also gave researchers a language of authority that could be turned against governments. The 1955 Russell–Einstein Manifesto and the subsequent Pugwash movement modeled how scientists could speak as a transnational community on questions of nuclear risk, lending moral and technical legitimacy to arms control proposals. Scientific expertise simultaneously served as a mediating resource. Back-channel discussions among physicists contributed to the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1963), the ABM Treaty (1972), and later the Biological Weapons Convention. In the East, figures such as Andrei Sakharov used scientific standing to legitimize human rights advocacy; in the West, scientists organized against the Vietnam War, ABM deployments, and the Strategic Defense Initiative. Environmental science, from acid rain to ozone depletion, similarly opened transnational arenas. The central tension was that science's claim to neutrality was both its strength and its vulnerability. Governments courted scientific endorsement while suspecting scientists of disloyalty; activists invoked scientific consensus while disputing official expertise. Understanding how science became a contested resource — for dissent, mediation, and legitimacy — is key to the conference's broader inquiry.

Key players

United States
Center of Cold War big science and of scientists' movements (FAS, UCS) critical of weapons policy.
SUN
Soviet Union, where scientists like Sakharov turned professional prestige into political dissent.
United Kingdom
Origin of the Russell–Einstein Manifesto and a hub of Pugwash organizing.
Canada
Hosted the first Pugwash Conference (1957) and supported scientist-led arms control diplomacy.
Sweden
Through SIPRI and the Myrdals, projected neutral scientific authority into disarmament debates.

Institutional Contexts of Non-State Action: Conferences, Committees, Universities, Research Institutes, and NGOs

Non-state action during the Cold War did not float free of institutions; it depended on a dense infrastructure of universities, research institutes, learned academies, and NGOs that supplied funding, venues, and credibility. The Pugwash Conferences, IIASA in Laxenburg (founded 1972 as an East–West research bridge), SIPRI in Stockholm (1966), the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and bodies such as the International Council of Scientific Unions structured how transnational expertise was produced and circulated. Universities served as recruiting grounds and protective canopies for dissenting expertise, while philanthropic foundations underwrote exchanges, fellowships, and area studies programs. NGOs ranging from Amnesty International to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (Nobel Peace Prize, 1985) translated expert findings into public campaigns. UN-affiliated forums — UNESCO, WHO, UNEP — provided semi-official platforms that non-state actors could leverage. These institutions were not neutral containers. They were funded, surveilled, and at times penetrated by intelligence services on both sides, and their agendas reflected Cold War priorities even when they aspired to universality. Mapping this institutional ecology is essential to assessing the reach and limits of non-state challenges to the Cold War order.

Key players

Austria
Austria hosted IIASA, the flagship East–West systems-analysis institute.
Sweden
Home to SIPRI and a leader in funding independent peace and security research.
United States
Underwrote universities, foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, MacArthur), and major NGOs shaping global expert networks.
SUN
Soviet Union, where academies of sciences served as both partners and gatekeepers for transnational scientific contact.
France
Hosted UNESCO and key European scientific bodies central to non-state networking.
Switzerland
Geneva-based UN agencies and ICRC anchored a global NGO and expert ecosystem.

Loyalty, Autonomy, and Internationalism in Scientific and Expert Communities

Cold War scientists and experts lived inside overlapping loyalties: to their states, to their disciplines, and to a self-consciously international community of peers. These commitments often pulled in different directions. Classified weapons work demanded secrecy and patriotism; disciplinary norms valued openness and free exchange; international bodies invoked a universalist ethos that transcended bloc politics. The Oppenheimer security hearing (1954), the persecution of Soviet geneticists under Lysenko, and the McCarthy-era loyalty oaths illustrated how high the stakes of these tensions could be. Many scientists navigated these pressures by carving out hybrid roles — advising governments while quietly supporting arms-control NGOs, attending Pugwash while remaining classified consultants, or signing samizdat petitions while keeping institutional posts. Internationalism could be a refuge, a cover, or a genuine creed; for some, like Joseph Rotblat, it became the organizing principle of a career. The question for historians is how to characterize this hybridity. Was expert internationalism a meaningful counterweight to state power, or largely an elite consolation that left underlying loyalties intact? Comparative studies across East, West, and the Global South suggest the answer differs sharply by political system and discipline.

Key players

United States
Loyalty-security regimes and weapons labs shaped American scientists' negotiation of autonomy.
SUN
Soviet Union, where official internationalism coexisted with tight control over scientific contacts.
United Kingdom
British scientific community produced influential models of internationalist dissent (Rotblat, Blackett).
Germany
Divided Germany generated distinct East and West traditions of scientific loyalty and cross-border contact.
France
French scientists balanced Gaullist autonomy, communist affiliations, and European integration.

Informal Diplomacy, Expert Forums, and the Politics of "Neutral" Knowledge

Alongside formal interstate negotiations, the Cold War was managed through a parallel circuit of informal diplomacy: Track II meetings, expert working groups, and back-channel conversations conducted under the banner of technical or scholarly exchange. Pugwash, the Dartmouth Conferences (begun 1960), the Palme and Brandt Commissions, and IIASA workshops all served as venues where officials, ex-officials, and experts could explore positions that governments could not yet voice publicly. The legitimacy of these forums rested on a claim to neutrality — that science, scholarship, or humanitarian concern stood above ideology. In practice, 'neutral' knowledge was actively produced: through careful site selection (often in non-aligned or neutral states), curated participant lists, and rhetorical framings that bracketed contentious political questions. Neutral states like Sweden, Austria, Finland, and Switzerland invested heavily in this infrastructure, both for prestige and as a foreign-policy resource. Critics have long noted that neutrality could mask power: Western funding, English-language dominance, and particular disciplinary frameworks shaped what counted as legitimate expertise. Yet expert forums also produced concrete results, from CSCE follow-up processes to confidence-building measures, making them an indispensable element of Cold War order — and disorder.

Key players

Sweden
Used neutrality and SIPRI to broker arms-control and North–South dialogues.
Austria
Vienna and Laxenburg served as neutral ground for East–West expert diplomacy.
Finland
Hosted the CSCE process and cultivated a distinctive 'Finlandized' expert diplomacy.
Switzerland
Geneva anchored disarmament talks and humanitarian expert networks.
United States
Major participant in Track II channels, often via foundations and ex-officials.
SUN
Soviet Union, whose selective engagement in expert forums made them politically valuable.

Dissenting Expertise in Socialist, Authoritarian, and Post-Colonial Contexts

Dissent by experts was not a uniquely Western phenomenon, though it took strikingly different forms beyond the liberal democracies. In the Soviet bloc, scientists, economists, and writers used their professional standing to challenge official orthodoxy: Sakharov on nuclear policy and human rights, Czechoslovak reform economists around 1968, Polish KOR intellectuals after 1976, and Charter 77 signatories drew on technical credibility and Helsinki commitments to press their governments. The costs ranged from career destruction to internal exile and imprisonment. In authoritarian regimes elsewhere — Franco's Spain, Latin American military governments, apartheid South Africa — universities and professional associations became contested terrain, with expert exiles forming influential diasporic networks. In post-colonial states, experts navigated tensions between developmentalist agendas, non-alignment, and superpower patronage. Figures associated with UNCTAD, the New International Economic Order, and dependency theory mobilized economic expertise to challenge the Cold War's terms, while scientists in India, Egypt, and elsewhere built indigenous research bases that resisted easy bloc alignment. These trajectories complicate any single narrative of 'dissent.' They show how expertise could underwrite very different political projects — liberal-democratic, reform-socialist, nationalist, or Third Worldist — while still operating within the constraints of Cold War geopolitics.

Key players

SUN
Soviet Union, primary arena of high-profile scientific and intellectual dissent (Sakharov, Medvedev).
CSK
Czechoslovakia, where reform experts and Charter 77 connected science, economics, and human rights.
Poland
Polish intellectuals and KOR linked expert dissent to worker movements.
India
India built non-aligned scientific and economic expertise central to Third World agendas.
Argentina
Argentine experts under military rule exemplified Latin American patterns of repression and exile.
South Africa
South African academic and scientific communities were divided by apartheid and international boycotts.

Activism, Morality, and Responsibility in Nuclear, Environmental, and Peace Debates

The Cold War generated unprecedented debates about moral responsibility for collective survival. The advent of thermonuclear weapons, fallout from atmospheric testing, and later evidence of ecological damage forced scientists, religious leaders, and citizens to ask what duties experts and publics owed to future generations. Movements such as CND in Britain (founded 1958), SANE in the United States, the Nuclear Freeze campaign of the 1980s, and the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War turned these moral concerns into mass politics. Environmental activism developed in parallel and increasingly intertwined with peace concerns. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, the rise of Greenpeace, and the emergence of acid-rain and ozone diplomacy made ecology a transnational political field. By the 1980s, 'nuclear winter' research explicitly fused environmental and nuclear concerns, and Green parties in Western Europe embedded both in electoral politics. These movements challenged the Cold War's framing of security as a matter of states and weapons. They insisted that responsibility extended to scientists who built the bombs, governments that deployed them, and citizens who tolerated them — reshaping public debate and contributing, in contested ways, to arms-control breakthroughs and to environmental governance.

Key players

United States
Home to the Freeze campaign, SANE, and environmental movements that reshaped global agendas.
United Kingdom
CND and British scientists provided early templates for nuclear protest.
Germany
West Germany's peace and Green movements fused anti-nuclear and ecological politics.
SUN
Soviet Union, target and reluctant interlocutor of Western peace movements, eventually engaged via IPPNW and glasnost.
Japan
Hibakusha testimony and Japanese anti-nuclear activism shaped global moral discourse.
Netherlands
The Netherlands was a focal point of 1980s Euromissile protests and ecological NGO activity.

Knowledge Circulation, Surveillance, and Control Across Ideological Borders

The Cold War was a contest over the movement of ideas as much as of armies. Both blocs invested heavily in promoting their own knowledge — through Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Moscow, cultural exchanges, translation programs, and scholarship schemes — while restricting the circulation of inconvenient information. Samizdat and tamizdat in the East, smuggled scientific preprints, jammed broadcasts, and contested visa regimes were the everyday texture of this struggle. Surveillance shaped these flows. Intelligence services on both sides monitored scientific conferences, scholarly exchanges, and NGO networks; the Stasi files, CIA programs such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and KGB operations against dissidents all illustrate the depth of state penetration into ostensibly civilian knowledge spaces. Export controls (COCOM in the West) restricted dual-use technology, while socialist states limited emigration of trained personnel. Despite these controls, knowledge circulated — through Helsinki networks, scientific correspondence, exile communities, and clandestine publishing. By the 1980s, photocopiers, fax machines, and early computing made restriction harder, contributing to the erosion of information monopolies. Studying this push-and-pull between circulation and control is essential to understanding how non-state actors helped destabilize the Cold War order.

Key players

United States
Ran extensive cultural diplomacy, broadcasting, and covert influence programs alongside export controls.
SUN
Soviet Union, the principal architect of socialist information control and counter-broadcasting.
DDR
East Germany's Stasi exemplified intensive surveillance of cross-border knowledge contacts.
United Kingdom
Britain combined BBC World Service influence with significant intelligence-led monitoring of exchanges.
France
Paris was a key node for exile publishing, dissident networks, and East–West intellectual contact.
CSK
Czechoslovakia produced major samizdat networks and Charter 77's transnational links.

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Czech Republic September 2026

By committee

Frequently asked questions

Science, Dissent, and Activism: How Non-State Actors Challenged the Cold War Order

Sep 7–8, 2026Prague, Czech RepublicIn-person

Starts in 30 daysRegistration open

Committees & topics

Topics
Non-State Actors and the Reconfiguration of Political Authority During the Cold War · Science as a Resource for Dissent, Mediation, and Legitimacy · Institutional Contexts of Non-State Action: Conferences, Committees, Universities, Research Institutes, and NGOs · Loyalty, Autonomy, and Internationalism in Scientific and Expert Communities · Informal Diplomacy, Expert Forums, and the Politics of "Neutral" Knowledge · Dissenting Expertise in Socialist, Authoritarian, and Post-Colonial Contexts · Activism, Morality, and Responsibility in Nuclear, Environmental, and Peace Debates · Knowledge Circulation, Surveillance, and Control Across Ideological Borders

Why it matters

How to prepare

Country perspectives

Where the most-relevant 4 countries stand on the core issues in play. Click through for the full country profile.

Czech Republic

As the host nation, CZE provides a historical context for the conference, having been a focal point of Cold War divisions and a site where dissent against Soviet influence was significant.

Role in topic

United States

The USA, as a leading superpower during the Cold War, was a primary target and counterpoint for many non-state actors, both those aligned with and those critical of its policies.

Role in topic

United Kingdom

The GBR played a significant role as a Western European nation where non-state actors, particularly peace and disarmament movements, were highly active and influential.

Role in topic

Poland

POL represents a key example of a nation within the Eastern Bloc where non-state actors, particularly the Solidarity movement, played a decisive role in challenging the communist regime.

Role in topic