Exporting Revolution

In her new book, Exporting Revolution, Margaret Randall explores the Cuban Revolution's impact on the outside world, tracing Cuba's international outreach in health care, disaster relief, education, literature, art, liberation struggles, and sports. Randall combines personal observations and interviews with literary analysis and examinations of political trends in order to understand what compels a small, poor, and underdeveloped country to offer its resources and expertise. Why has the Cuban health care system trained thousands of foreign doctors, offered free services, and responded to health crises around the globe? What drives Cuba's international adult literacy programs? Why has Cuban poetry had an outsized influence in the Spanish-speaking world? This multifaceted internationalism, Randall finds, is not only one of the Revolution's most central features; it helped define Cuban society long before the Revolution.

This book theorizes a mechanism underlying regime-change waves, the deliberate efforts of diffusion entrepreneurs to spread a particular regime and regime-change model across state borders. Why do only certain states and nonstate actors emerge as such entrepreneurs? Why, how, and how effectively do they support regime change abroad? To answer these questions, the book studies the entrepreneurs behind the third wave of democratization, with a focus on the new eastern European democracies - members of the European Union. The study finds that it is not the strongest democracies nor the democracies trying to ensure their survival in a neighborhood of nondemocracies that become the most active diffusion entrepreneurs. It is, instead, the countries where the organizers of the domestic democratic transitions build strong solidarity movements supporting the spread of democracy abroad that do. The book also draws parallels between their activism abroad and their experiences with democratization and democracy assistance at home.

Reassesses the role of revolution as a force that has shaped the development of world politics.

‘A landmark work giving a global panorama of Mao's ideology filled with historic events and enlivened by striking characters’ Jonathan Fenby, author of The Penguin History of China Since the 1980s, China seems to have abandoned the utopian turmoil of Mao’s revolution in favour of authoritarian capitalism. But Mao and his ideas remain central to the People’s Republic. With disagreements between China and the West on the rise, the need to understand the political legacy of Mao is urgent and growing. A crucial motor of the Cold War: Maoism shaped the course of the Vietnam War and brought to power the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; it aided anti-colonial resistance movements in Africa; it inspired terrorism in Germany and Italy, and wars and insurgencies in Peru, India and Nepal, some of which are still with us today. Starting with the birth of Mao’s revolution in northwest China in the 1930s and concluding with its violent afterlives in South Asia and resurgence in the People’s Republic today, Julia Lovell re-evaluates Maoism as both a Chinese and an international force, linking its evolution in China with its global legacy. 'Wonderful' Andrew Marr, New Statesman

This book analyzes the historical quest of the Islamic Republic of Iran to export its revolution to the Muslim countries in the Middle East and beyond. The authors argue that Iran exported its revolution by using proxies such as Hezbollah, the Iraqi Shite militias, and the Houthis. The study unravels the casual chain behind less-known cases of Iranian sponsorship of al Qaeda (Central) and al Qaida in Iraq. It combines rigorous theory with detailed empirical analysis which can add to the current debate about ways to roll back Iran’s revolutionary export.

In this age of globalization, the eighteenth-century priest and abolitionist Henri Grégoire has often been called a man ahead of his time. An icon of antiracism, a hero to people from Ho Chi Minh to French Jews, Grégoire has been particularly celebrated since 1989, when the French government placed him in the Pantheon as a model of ideals of universalism and human rights. In this beautifully written biography, based on newly discovered and previously overlooked material, we gain access for the first time to the full complexity of Grégoire's intellectual and political universe as well as the compelling nature of his persona. His life offers an extraordinary vantage from which to view large issues in European and world history in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and provides provocative insights into many of the prevailing tensions, ideals, and paradoxes of the twenty-first century. Focusing on Grégoire's idea of "regeneration," that people could literally be made anew, Sepinwall argues that revolutionary universalism was more complicated than it appeared. Tracing the Revolution's long-term legacy, she suggests that while it spread concepts of equality and liberation throughout the world, its ideals also helped to justify colonialism and conquest.

Cuba has been transformed more radically within one decade than almost any society in recent history. Yet the Cuban Revolution is poorly understood abroad because of its physical and political isolation, the controversies between adherents of the old and new regimes, and the murky skirmishes of the cold war. This collection of essays is a comprehensive and authoritative study of almost all major aspects of socialist Cuba. It draws together the talents of the ablest group of Cuban specialists ever represented in a single volume.