The Cold War inspired dozens of international organizations that were "non-governmental" in name only. Sponsor states directed their work and paid their bills in private, while insisting on their autonomy and neutrality in public. Despite the reorientation of Cold War historiography since 2000, from national to transnational phenomena, the "front organizations" detailed on this site remain stuck in the shadows that they worked so hard to escape. The unspoken consensus is that there's not much sense in writing about what contemporaries didn't read or watch. CIA-backed fronts never recovered from their unveiling in the leftist magazine Ramparts in 1967. Their communist counterparts, meanwhile, never had any traction to lose.

This site serves two purposes. The first is to open the "world democratic federations" to a fresh evaluation based on reliable data, united on a single site. The second is to challenge our assumptions about Cold War geography by homing in on the federations' favored propaganda medium: the international event. Uber's kepler.gl mapping tool lets us track the fronts' movements across space and time, from west, to south, to east.