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Monday, Dec. 18 //4–5:30 pm (ET)
Defectors, the new book by award-winning historian Erik R. Scott, shows how the Cold War treatment of those fleeing the Communist world shaped present-day restrictions on cross-border movement. This far-ranging study charts a global struggle over defectors that unfolded among rival intelligence agencies operating in the shadows of an occupied Europe, in the forbidden border zones of the USSR, in the disputed straits of the South China Sea, on a hijacked plane 10,000 feet in the air, and around the walls of Soviet embassies. Challenging our conventional understanding of Cold War divisions, it reveals that the competition for defectors paved the way for collusion between the superpowers, who found common cause in regulating the spaces through which defectors moved.
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