Myths and realities of putinism and NATO expansion

The Russia-Ukraine war that dramatically escalated on February 24, 2022, with Putin's decision to launch a full-scale invasion, changed the political, moral, and academic environment for the discussion about NATO's role in Europe and the story of its post-1991 expansion to the East. In the chorus of indignation and condemnation of the Russian invasion, it became near-impossible to speak and write about the causes and consequences of the NATO expansion in a balanced, dispassionate way. Suddenly we have a war-driven consensus that NATO had nothing to do with the origins of the war in Eastern Europe

A failed empire: the Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev

Western interpretations of the Cold War--both realist and neoconservative--have erred by exaggerating either the Kremlin's pragmatism or its aggressiveness, argues Vladislav Zubok. Explaining the interests, aspirations, illusions, fears, and misperceptions of the Kremlin leaders and Soviet elites, Zubok offers a Soviet perspective on the greatest standoff of the twentieth century. Using recently declassified Politburo records, ciphered telegrams, diaries, and taped conversations, among other sources, Zubok explores the origins of the superpowers' confrontation under Stalin, Khrushchev's contradictory and counterproductive attempts to ease tensions, the surprising story of Brezhnev's passion for détente, and Gorbachev's destruction of the Soviet superpower as the by-product of his hasty steps to end the Cold War and to reform the Soviet Union. The first work in English to cover the entire Cold War from the Soviet side, A Failed Empire provides a history different from those written by the Western victors. 2008 Marshall Shulman Book Prize, American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies A Washington Post Book World Best of 2008 selectio

International relations

What do we study in international relations? How do we study it? And how do we apply it? Using these guiding questions as a framework, International Relations shows students how to think critically about issues in world politics. In each chapter, a brief opening case is followed by a description of key developments, an explanation of the main approaches to analyze them, and applications of those approaches in individual, state, and global contexts. The authors provide extensive historical information throughout, giving students a holistic frame of reference from which to understand current events

The war in Ukraine

This short article offers some tentative suggestions about how the history of the Cold War and its aftermath as experienced by Central and Eastern European states may inform our understanding of the current war in Ukraine. In doing so, this contribution has no pretensions to be either final in its suggestions nor exhaustive in considering the rich literature about Central and Eastern Europe’s political, economic, social and cultural Cold War experiences. In fact, given its nature, this piece is more likely to be found quite deficient in both. It will first address the definition and scope of 'Eastern Europe' and then delve into a discussion of the agency of Eastern European states during the Cold War vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. In its concluding remarks, this article will briefly consider the developments of the post-Cold War period and draw some considerations about the war in Ukraine and the question of a 'new Cold War'