Unravelling Threads of Solidarity: Anti-Imperialism and Polish-Middle Eastern Connections during the Cold War

This project explores Cold War-era connections between the Polish People's Republic and Middle Eastern states across economic, political, and cultural spheres. It asks: How did the anti-imperialist rhetoric of the Soviet Union and its allies shape East-South cooperation? What forms of agency emerged beyond state-level diplomacy, and how did individuals and institutions both enact and experience cooperation on the ground? In addressing these questions, the project aims to challenge conventional binaries-such as local/global and state/society-to recover underexplored forms of agency in Cold War entanglements. Recent scholarship has increasingly moved beyond superpower-centric narratives, responding to long-standing critiques of Cold War historiography that treated the Global South as merely a side-show or passive arena for the US-USSR rivalry. Building on this shift, a rapidly growing body of literature has turned to East-South relations, illuminating the complex and often multidirectional exchanges between Eastern Europe and the Global South. Studies have examined African and Latin American student exchanges with the USSR, Czechoslovak engineers in Egypt, and East German educators in Angola. However, Poland's role remains largely understudied-especially in relation to the Middle East, where its engagements were frequent and multifaceted. This project addresses the gap by examining Polish-Middle Eastern relations across three key dimensions: (1) labour and expertise exchanges, (2) state aid and anti-colonial solidarity campaigns, and (3) cultural cooperation. It contributes to a body of literature dominated by East German, Czechoslovak, and Soviet case studies and broadens the scope of inquiry into Middle Eastern cooperation beyond economic and military dimensions. Methodologically, the project combines archival research with analysis of personal narratives to illuminate both the institutional architecture and lived experiences of Polish-Middle Eastern economic cooperation. Focusing on Polish construction export which dominated these relations, it draws on bilateral agreements, as well as internal government documents and that of the Polish United Workers' Party (PZPR). It also draws on records from the Central Agencies of Foreign Trade - which coordinated the export of labour and technical expertise to key partners such as Libya, Iraq, and Syria - to provide insight into other institutional stakeholders in cooperation. For the everyday experience, the project turns to memoirs and oral testimonies of Polish workers contracted abroad for insights which are often absent from archival materials, and reveal how ideology, professional identity, and practical challenges intersected in lived experience. Political and cultural cooperation are similarly examined through archival records, including state visit documentation, delegation reports, and materials from the PZPR and various government ministries. The project also investigates the role of the Polish Committee of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, and Asia -an organisation that has received little scholarly attention to date-in order to expand understandings of anti-colonial solidarity beyond Western conceptions of 'bottom-up' activism. Cultural relations are further analysed through contemporaneous socio-cultural magazines that reported on exhibitions, film weeks, student exchanges, and diplomatic visits. These sources reveal both the instances of cultural diplomacy as well as the narratives used to shape Polish perceptions of the Middle East. By investigating these multifaceted connections between Poland and Middle Eastern states, this project seeks to challenge the unidirectional treatment of Cold War exchanges and explore the policy, practice, and lived experiences of transnational cooperation. In doing so, it works to recover various forms of agency at the peripheries of global order, bridging both geographic and epistemic div