Western Powers
Communist Powers
The Cold War
Colonies
Outside Conflict
100

The process in which many African and Asian states won their independence from Western colonial rule, in most cases by negotiated settlement in some cases through violent military confrontations.

What is decolonization?

200

An early twenty-first-century initiative of the Chinese government to create a global infrastructure of roads, railways, port facilities, and energy pipelines.

What is the Belt and Road Initiative/the New Silk Road?

200

The geopolitical and ideological conflict between communist regimes and capitalist powers after WWII, spreading from Eastern Europe through Asia; characterized by the avoidance of direct military conflict between the USSR and the United States and an arms race in nuclear weapons.

What is the Cold War?

200

The late twentieth-century political shift that brought popular movements, multiparty elections, and new constitutions to countries around the world.

What is the globaization of democracy?

300

An alliance formed in 1957 by six West European countries dedicated to developing common trade policies and reduced tariffs; it gradually developed into the larger European Union.

What is the European Economic Community?

300

The leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to 1991 whose efforts to reform the USSR led to its collapse.

Who is Mikhail Gorbachev?

300

Major standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union in 1962 over Soviet deployment of nuclear missiles in Cuba; the confrontation ended in compromise, with the USSR removing its missiles in exchange for the United States agreeing not to invade Cuba.

What is the Cuban Missile Crisis?

300

The political leader of the Indian drive for independence from Great Britian, rejected the goal of modern industrialization and advocated nonviolence.

Who is Ghandi?

300

The struggle between the Jewish state of Israel and the adjacent Palestinian Muslim territories that has generated periodic wars and upheavals since 1948.

What is the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict?

400

The huge U.S. government initiative to aid in the post-World War II restoration of Europe that was put into effect in 1948.

What is the Marshall Plan?

400

AKA the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a massive campaign launched by Mao Zedong in the mid-1960s to combat the capitalist tendencies that he believed reached into even the highest ranks of the Communist Party; the campaign threw China into chaos.

What is the Cultural Revolution?

400

A military alliance between the Soviet Union and communist states in Eastern Europe, created in 1955 as a counterweight to NATO; expressed the tensions of the cold war in Europe.

What is the Warsaw Pact?

400

The political party led by Mahatma Gandhi that succeeded in bringing about Indian independence from Britain in 1947.

What is the Indian National Congress?

400

The establishment of a radically Islamist government in Iran in 1979; helped trigger a war with Iraq in the 1980s.

What is the Iranian Revolution?

500

The Communist push for collectivization that created "people's communes" and aimed to mobilize China's population for rapid development.

What is the Great Leap Forward?

500

A military alliance, created in 1949, between the United States and various European countries; largely aimed at defending against the threat of Soviet aggression during the cold war.

What is NATO/the North American Treaty Organization?

500

The conflict beginning in 2011 that generated over 12 million refugees and asylum seekers by mid-2016 and engaged both regional and world powers on various sides of the conflict.

What is the Syrian Civil War?