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AP World History: Modern · Unit 8 of 9
Cold War & Decolonization
8–10% of the exam5 lessons · 70 min38 terms
What this unit covers
The topics below follow the published World History course framework for Unit 8. This unit is worth 8–10% of the exam, so budget your time against that rather than against how long the unit takes to teach.
Cold WarDecolonizationNew nationsNon-alignment
Lessons in this unit
- The Cold War: A Bipolar World14 min · 3 objectivesExplain the ideological and geopolitical origins of the Cold War · Analyze the strategies the superpowers used to compete without direct war · Assess how the Cold War played out through proxy conflicts globally
- Decolonization and New Nations14 min · 3 objectivesExplain the causes of decolonization after World War II · Compare violent and negotiated paths to independence · Analyze the challenges facing newly independent nations
- Non-Alignment and the End of the Cold War13 min · 3 objectivesExplain the goals of the Non-Aligned Movement in the Cold War world · Analyze the causes of the Soviet Union’s collapse · Assess how the end of the Cold War reshaped the global order
- Proxy War: Why the Cold War Was Fought Elsewhere15 min · 3 objectivesExplain why nuclear weapons pushed superpower conflict into third countries · Compare Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Angola, and Afghanistan as proxy conflicts · Analyze the costs of superpower competition for the countries where it was fought
- How Independence Was Won: Negotiation, War, and Partition14 min · 3 objectivesCompare negotiated, armed, and partitioned paths to independence · Explain why the Second World War accelerated decolonization · Analyze the inherited problems facing new states
Every term in Unit 8
All 38 terms we publish for Cold War & Decolonization, with definitions. Reading them through is the fastest way to find the ones you cannot define — then drill those in cram mode until you can produce them without the prompt.
- Green Revolution
- Mid-twentieth-century diffusion of high-yield seed varieties, chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation, associated with Norman Borlaug. Significance: averted predicted famine in Mexico, India, and elsewhere, but increased input and groundwater dependence and widened inequality between large and small farmers.
- Cold War
- Ideological and geopolitical rivalry between the US and USSR, fought through proxy wars, arms and space races, and alliance systems.
- Containment and the Truman Doctrine
- US policy of resisting communist expansion wherever it appeared, beginning with aid to Greece and Turkey in 1947.
- Marshall Plan
- US aid rebuilding Western Europe, which revived trading partners and reduced communism's appeal.
- NATO and the Warsaw Pact
- Opposed collective-security alliances that formalized Europe's division and made local crises potentially global.
- Proxy wars
- Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Angola — superpower competition fought through local forces, with local costs.
- Non-Aligned Movement
- States led by India, Egypt, Indonesia and Yugoslavia refusing either bloc, asserting a third path for newly independent nations.
- Indian independence and partition
- Gandhi's nonviolent campaign ended British rule in 1947; partition into India and Pakistan displaced millions and killed hundreds of thousands.
- Gandhi and satyagraha
- Nonviolent resistance as a deliberate strategy that made repression politically costly for the occupier. Adopted by movements worldwide.
- Chinese Communist Revolution
- Mao's victory in 1949 after civil war, followed by land redistribution, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution.
- Great Leap Forward
- Forced collectivization and backyard industry that produced famine killing tens of millions — ideology overriding agricultural reality.
- Cultural Revolution
- Mao's mobilization of youth against party and intellectual authority, closing schools and destroying cultural heritage.
- African decolonization
- Independence across the continent from the late 1950s, mostly negotiated but violently contested in Algeria and Kenya.
- Apartheid and its end
- South African legal racial separation from 1948, ended by internal resistance and international sanctions with Mandela's release in 1990.
- Iranian Revolution (1979)
- Replaced a Western-aligned monarchy with an Islamic republic, showing that opposition to superpower influence need not be secular or leftist.
- Collapse of the Soviet Union
- Economic stagnation, Gorbachev's glasnost and perestroika, and nationalist movements ended the USSR in 1991.
- Why the Cold War was fought elsewhere
- Nuclear deterrence made direct superpower war irrational, so competition displaced into proxy wars, arms and space races, espionage and client patronage.
- Mutually assured destruction
- Once both sides could guarantee retaliation, neither could expect to gain from a first strike — the logic that kept the conflict indirect and its casualties in third countries.
- Korean War outcome
- Roughly three million dead, mostly Korean civilians, and a division near the original line that still stands. Containment achieved at very high cost.
- Domino theory
- The claim that one communist victory would topple neighboring states in sequence, which reframed a local anticolonial war in Vietnam as a test of global containment.
- Cuban Missile Crisis resolution
- Soviet withdrawal of missiles against a private American pledge to remove missiles from Turkey and not to invade Cuba — a bargain both leaders could present as a win.
- Angola after 1975
- Independence from Portugal became a decades-long civil war with Soviet and Cuban forces on one side and American and South African backing on the other.
- Soviet war in Afghanistan
- A decade-long conflict against American-armed insurgents whose failure contributed materially to Soviet collapse.
- Cold War coups
- Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Chile in 1973 — elected or non-aligned governments removed and replaced with friendlier ones, with consequences lasting decades.
- Cost of proxy conflict locally
- Militarized politics, entrenched authoritarian clients, development spending diverted to arms, and civil wars prolonged because external supply removed the need to negotiate.
- Bandung Conference (1955)
- Twenty-nine mostly newly independent Asian and African states pressing anticolonialism, sovereignty and refusal of bloc membership — the origin of the Non-Aligned Movement.
- Non-alignment as strategy
- Refusing commitment let states solicit aid from both sides, which is exactly what Nasser did in financing the Aswan Dam after American withdrawal.
- New International Economic Order
- A 1970s demand that former colonies get better terms of trade and control over their own resources, connecting decolonization to the globalization debates that followed.
- Why decolonization came after 1945
- Imperial powers exhausted and visibly beaten, colonial soldiers returning with expectations, both superpowers nominally anticolonial, and nationalist movements with decades of organization ready.
- Three paths to independence
- Negotiated as in India and Ghana, armed as in Algeria, Vietnam and Kenya, or partitioned as in India–Pakistan and Palestine. Settler population or strategic commitment predicts which.
- Algerian War (1954–62)
- France treated Algeria as part of France and fought a war marked by torture and mass civilian death before de Gaulle conceded independence.
- Mau Mau
- Kenyan insurgency suppressed with mass detention and killing, showing that negotiated independence elsewhere in British Africa was not the universal pattern.
- What new states inherited
- Imposed borders, extractive single-export economies, thin administration, and hardened ethnic categories — the structural explanation for post-independence instability.
- Belgian identity cards in Rwanda
- Colonial classification of Hutu and Tutsi was recorded on identity documents later used to organize the 1994 genocide — divide and rule with a lethal afterlife.
- Windrush generation
- South Asian and Caribbean migration to Britain from 1948, part of the postwar movement of colonized peoples to the imperial center.
- Gastarbeiter
- Turkish and other guest workers recruited to West Germany for postwar labor shortages, whose permanent settlement reshaped German society and citizenship debates.
- Remittances
- Money sent home by diaspora workers, which became a major component of some national economies and a direct link from decolonization to globalization.
- Partition scale
- Roughly ten to fifteen million displaced and hundreds of thousands to a million or more killed in the 1947 division of India and Pakistan.
What examiners penalize here
- For the Soviet collapse, marshal *multiple* causes: economic stagnation, the arms-race burden, the Afghanistan war, Eastern European pressure, and Gorbachev’s reforms (glasnost and perestroika) that backfired. Layering several factors makes a stronger causation argument than naming just one.
- For AP World, always ask what a Cold War conflict looked like **to the people living in it**. Vietnam was an anticolonial war before it was a Cold War front; Angola was a decolonization crisis before it was a proxy war. Naming the local cause first, then the superpower overlay, is the framing that scores.
Practice World History
Our practice bank is drawn from across the whole course rather than filtered to one unit, which is closer to how the exam asks anyway — it will not tell you which unit a question is testing.
Questions about this unit
How much of the AP World History: Modern exam is Unit 8?
Unit 8, Cold War & Decolonization, is worth 8–10% of the World History multiple-choice section according to the published course framework. Across all 9 units that makes it a middling share, roughly what an even split across units would give.
What topics are covered in World History Unit 8?
Cold War & Decolonization covers Cold War, Decolonization, New nations and Non-alignment. We publish 38 terms with definitions for this unit, all of them on this page.
How should I study World History Unit 8?
Read the 5 lessons below first — about 70 minutes — then drill the 38 terms in cram mode until you can produce each definition from memory rather than just recognize it. Recognition is what makes a unit feel finished when it is not. Finish with practice questions and read the explanation for every one you get right by elimination as well as the ones you miss.
All 9 units of AP World History: Modern
Unit names, topics and exam weights follow the published College Board course framework for AP World History: Modern. AP® is a trademark registered by the College Board, which does not endorse this site.