Vladimir Tismaneanu is Professor of Government and Politics, University of Maryland at College Park. He is the author of Reinventing Politics: Eastern Europe from Stalin to Havel (Free Press). Eastern Europe has become an ideological battleground since the collapse of the Soviet Union, with liberals and authoritarians struggling to seize the ground lost by Marxism. In Fantasies of Salvation, Vladimir Tismaneanu traces the intellectual history of...

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, three ideas dominate the world: peace as the preferred basis for relations between and among different countries, democracy as the optimal way to organize political life, and free markets as the indispensable vehicle for the creation of wealth. While not practiced everywhere, these ideas have-for the first time in history-no serious rivals. And although the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were terrible...

With the collapse of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance in 1991, the Eastern European nations of the former socialist bloc had to figure out their newly capitalist future. Capitalism, they found, was not a single set of political-economic relations. Rather, they each had to decide what sort of capitalist nation to become. In Capitalist Diversity on Europe's Periphery, Dorothee Bohle and Béla Geskovits trace the form that capitalism took in...

'Powerful and clarifying ... The book's combination of careful argument and cogent illustration will make this a landmark volume in Gramscian studies.' John Agnew, University of California, Los Angeles, and author of Hegemony: The New Shape of Global Power 'Morton draws upon an impressive knowledge of Gramsci's writings to provide new insights into key processes in today's world order.' Anne Showstack Sassoon, Emeritus Professor, Kingston University...

How can we rebel against the capitalist system? John Holloway argues that by creating, cracks, fractures and fissures that forge spaces of rebellion and disrupt the current economic order. John Holloway, author of the groundbreaking Change the World Without Taking Power, sparked a world-wide debate among activists and scholars about the most effective methods of fighting capitalism from within. From campaigns against water privatisation, to...

Nina Bandelj is assistant professor of sociology and faculty associate at the Center for the Study of Democracy at the University of California, Irvine. From Communists to Foreign Capitalists explores the intersections of two momentous changes in the late twentieth century: the fall of Communism and the rise of globalization. Delving into the economic change that accompanied these shifts in central and Eastern Europe, Nina Bandelj presents a pioneering...

"A book for high school students about the creation and eventual fall of the Soviet Union."--Provided by publisher.

Promoting democracy has long been a priority of Western foreign policy. In practice, however, international attempts to expand representative forms of government have been inconsistent and are often perceived in the West to have been failures. The states of Central Asia, in particular, seem to be "democracy resistant," and their governments have continued to support various forms of authoritarianism in the decades following the Soviet Union's collapse....

Tim McDaniel is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His books include Autocracy, Modernization, and Revolution in Russia and Iran (Princeton) and Autocracy, Capitalism, and Revolution in Russia. Boris Yeltsin's attempts at democratic reform have plunged a long troubled Russia even further into turmoil. This dramatic break with the Soviet past has left Russia politically fragmented and riddled with corruption, its people...

Bastards of Utopia, the companion to a feature documentary film of the same name, explores the experiences and political imagination of young radical activists in the former Yugoslavia, participants in what they call alter globalization or "globalization from below." Ethnographer Maple Razsa follows individual activists from the transnational protests against globalization of the early 2000s through the Occupy encampments. His portrayal of activism...