Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan

Changing Course: Ideas, Politics, and the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan
ISBN-10
0691016771
ISBN-13
9780691016771
Series
Changing Course
Category
History
Pages
172
Language
English
Published
1998
Publisher
Princeton University Press
Author
Sarah Elizabeth Mendelson

Description

In Changing Course, Sarah Mendelson demonstrates that interpretations which stress the impact of the international system, and particularly of U.S. foreign policy, or which focus on the role of ideas or politics alone, fail to explain the contingent process of change. Mendelson tells a story of internal battles where "misfit" ideas - ones that severely challenged the status quo - were turned into policies. She draws on firsthand interviews with those who ran Soviet foreign policy and the war in Afghanistan, and on recently declassified material from Soviet archives, to show that both ideas and political strategies were needed to make reform happen.

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