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The far left were an important force on English University and Polytechnic campuses in the 1970s and 1980s but they did not control or direct student politics. By exploring the debates within the far left about students and the role of student activism this chapter sheds new light on the functioning of the far left within the student milieu. It also examines student politics in this period which, to date, have been under-researched. Many student political leaders in this period went on to important roles in mainstream politics. In exploring student politics we can, therefore, gain a greater understanding of British politics, society and culture in this period when Higher Education was changing rapidly and becoming increasingly open to the ‘masses’.

Chapter four examines the emergence of a revolutionary left in Chile in the first years of Eduardo Frei’s presidency. Although this process would not dominate left-wing politics at a national level until later in 1960s, it resonated soon after Allende’s 1964 electoral defeat, influenced both by reformist projects and repressive efforts to contain them. By 1966, Beatriz was part of a weak but emergent revolutionary wing of the Chilean Socialist Party, inspired by local circumstances and international influences. These first years of the Frei government were dynamic, and productive. Beatriz and her cohort of medical students and socialist militants came into direct contact with the state’s new approach to healthcare, family planning, women, agricultural reform, and poverty. Beatriz benefitted from, and was shaped by, the reformist environment she inhabited, emerging like many of the radical left as a product of combined frustrations and opportunities it provided. By 1967, Beatriz had her first formal job in a community health center, epitomizing many of the Christian Democrat’s reformist goals. Closer to home, she had also fallen in love and married a young Socialist Party militant, Renato Julio, involved in effervescent student politics.

Having returned to Santiago to undertake practical medical training, Beatriz’s extra-curricular life became subsumed in her father’s third presidential campaign. Chapter three zooms in on Chile’s 1964 presidential election, examining the way it intersected with Beatriz’s life and how she participated in it. Because it was particularly relevant for Beatriz, the chapter deals primarily with youth mobilization and gendered dimensions of the campaign. It also argues that the way the election was fought, the issues it highlighted, and its outcome engrained Cold War logics more firmly into Chilean politics than ever before, initiating a new phase of ideological conflict, mobilization, and radicalization.

This chapter by Nadeem Farooq Paracha brings oral history and memoir to the fore. Paracha interweaves national, social and personal histories in an extraordinary analysis of how alcohol, its sale and consumption, became intrinsic to Karachi’s leftist political culture in the euphoria of the post-Zia years; how political rebellion involving alcohol fueled violence on Karachi’s student campuses; and shaped Paracha’s personal nemesis and life trajectory into journalism rather than militancy. The adage that the ‘personal is political’ acquires enriched meaning in these unfoldings of a simultaneously painful, exhilarating, and destructive era that shaped one radical element of the city’s political commentariat. The politics surrounding alcohol from 1970-90 offer a perfect lens, Paracha shows us, onto transformations of religion, morality, and revolution within student support for the Pakistan People’s Party in a saturnalian urban setting.

Chapter six examines revolutionary upheaval in the last years of Eduardo Frei’s presidency and Beatriz’s role in it while remaining committed to the ELN’s Bolivian project and Cuba’s revolutionary regime. It describes the fragmentation of the Left and the growing specter of violence in Chile, characterized by the government’s reliance on force and a growing propensity on the left to confront it. It asks how Beatriz responded, noting the role she played as a confidant of Chile’s revolutionary left leaders, her father, and Cuba’s intelligence apparatus through her love affair with one of its principal officials. Beatriz’s internationalist preoccupations and her age separated her from local developments and youth movements. Yet, as a lecturer at a new public health department, recruiter for the ELN and collaborator of the MIR, she was involved and complicit in political and societal upheaval – serving as a mediator, facilitator, and bridge between different factions. She was nevertheless pessimistic and depressed about the pace of change. When the ELN ran into trouble in Bolivia and was progressively abandoned by Cuba, her romanticization of guerrilla insurgencies diminished. Like many others on the radicalized left, she was also sceptical about electoral strategies for bringing about radical change.

Chapter 5 examines the Fédération des étudiants nationalistes (FEN). For this important and very visible far-right wing student group founded in 1960, Europe and its defence were central terms of reference, even obsession. The group was active in French student politics, producing and distributing journals, contesting student representative positions, organising political meetings and demonstrations, and revelling in street fights. The FEN concerned itself with a whole range of subjects from trivial issues of student life to grand theories of hierarchy in world politics. Its brand of nationalism was located within a vision of an integral Europe. Indeed, a nation was reckoned to be a European privilege and the notion of non-European nationalisms was as outrageous as it was dangerous. As such, Europe was only of value to the group to the extent that it extended to the non-European world. Should decolonisation be carried to its conclusion and Europe reduced to its European geographical limits, Europe would be worth very little at all.