War Revolution And Governance

In fourteen original essays, Baltic scholars offer bold views and fresh empirical perspectives on the events that have shaped the Baltic region throughout the twentieth century from the Great War, to ensuing wars of independence and interwar sovereignty, to World War II and post-war Sovietization experiments, to the fall of the Soviet Union.

For some rebel groups, governance is not always part of a military strategy but a necessary element of realizing revolution through civil war.

"Although prevailing views suggest rebel groups govern to enhance their organizational capacity, this book demonstrates that some rebels undertake costly governance projects that can imperil their cadres during war. The origins for this choice rest with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during the Chinese Civil War, which, unlike most previous rebel groups, knowingly introduced challenging governance projects. The CCP nevertheless propagated its governance strategy globally, creating a strategic model available to active and future rebel leaders. What determines if rebel leaders apply this model is the transformativity of their long-term goals. Only rebel groups whose leaders share the CCP's similarly transformative, revolutionary ambitions decide to completely imitate the CCP's model, including governance. Over time, international actors increasingly rewarded revolutionary rebel groups' conformity to the CCP's model. Reduced compatibilities between the transformativity of rebel groups' goals and the CCP's objectives reduces the extent to which these leaders decide to imitate the CCP's behavior. Using archival data from six countries, primary rebel sources, fieldwork and quantitative analysis, Governing for Revolution underscores the mimicry of and ultimate convergence in revolutionary rebels' governance, despite vast differences in ideology, that persists even today"--

In early 1918 the French government adopted the policy of unremitting hostility that characterized its early relations with the Soviet government. That policy brought about political, economic, and military intervention in the Russian Revolution, and the diverse motives behind that intervention emerge in this study. When a population exasperated by the sufferings of war overthrew the tsarist government in early 1917, French interests- military, diplomatic, business, and financial - hoped that revolution could be turned back. But although the French government viewed with distaste the subsequent Bolshevik seizure of power, it did not reach its decision to intervene without internal debate or dissent. French stakes in Russia were high because of the long-standing Franco-Russian alliance and the heavy French investments there. As World War I drew to a close in late 1918, the French government planned to send troops freed by the armistice to Russia to begin the task of reversing Soviet power. Events proved this undertaking too difficult for a war-weary French citizenry, who rather admired the government of the Soviets and who had seen more than enough sacrifice. French troops sent to the Ukraine and Crimea were not willing men, and their commanders were unable to rally the local population to fight the Bolsheviks. In April 1919 the last French troops were withdrawn from the Crimea as mutiny swept the French fleet in the Black Sea. Still not prepared to reconcile itself to Soviet Russia, the French developed the policy of a cordon sanitaire to contain the revolutionary expansion of Bolshevism until, they hoped, the Russian people would come to their senses and overthrow the Soviet regime. This book, the first to concentrate on French involvement in the Russian Revolution, is based on an intensive use of French archival sources, closed until recently. It is unique in its examination of the economic motivations behind intervention and provides new insights into France's relations with its allies.

A distinguished political theorist sounds the alarm about the counterinsurgency strategies used to govern Americans Militarized police officers with tanks and drones. Pervasive government surveillance and profiling. Social media that distract and track us. All of these, contends Bernard E. Harcourt, are facets of a new and radical governing paradigm in the United States--one rooted in the modes of warfare originally developed to suppress anticolonial revolutions and, more recently, to prosecute the war on terror. The Counterrevolution is a penetrating and disturbing account of the rise of counterinsurgency, first as a military strategy but increasingly as a way of ruling ordinary Americans. Harcourt shows how counterinsurgency's principles--bulk intelligence collection, ruthless targeting of minorities, pacifying propaganda--have taken hold domestically despite the absence of any radical uprising. This counterrevolution against phantom enemies, he argues, is the tyranny of our age. Seeing it clearly is the first step to resisting it effectively.

October 1917, heralded as the culmination of the Russian Revolution, remains a defining moment in world history. Even a hundred years after the events that led to the emergence of the world's first self-proclaimed socialist state, debate continues over whether, as historian E. H. Carr put it decades ago, these earth-shaking days were a "landmark in the emancipation of mankind from past oppression" or "a crime and a disaster." Some things are clear. After the implosion of the three-hundred-year-old Romanov dynasty as a result of the First World War, Russia was in crisis-one interim government replaced another in the vacuum left by imperial collapse. In this monumental and sweeping new account, Laura Engelstein delves into the seven years of chaos surrounding 1917 --the war, the revolutionary upheaval, and the civil strife it provoked. These were years of breakdown and brutal violence on all sides, punctuated by the decisive turning points of February and October. As Engelstein proves definitively, the struggle for power engaged not only civil society and party leaders, but the broad masses of the population and every corner of the far-reaching empire, well beyond Moscow and Petrograd. Yet in addition to the bloodshed they unleashed, the revolution and civil war revealed democratic yearnings, even if ideas of what constituted "democracy" differed dramatically. Into that vacuum left by the Romanov collapse rushed long-suppressed hopes and dreams about social justice and equality. But any possible experiment in self-rule was cut short by the October Revolution. Under the banner of true democracy, and against all odds, the Bolshevik triumph resulted in the ruthless repression of all opposition. The Bolsheviks managed to harness the social breakdown caused by the war and institutionalize violence as a method of state-building, creating a new society and a new form of power. Russia in Flames offers a compelling narrative of heroic effort and brutal disappointment, revealing that what happened during these seven years was both a landmark in the emancipation of Russia from past oppression and a world-shattering disaster. As regimes fall and rise, as civil wars erupt, as state violence targets civilian populations, it is a story that remains profoundly and enduringly relevant.

A groundbreaking study of one of the most crucial yet least understood issues of the twenty-first century: the governance of the Internet and its content

Reinterpreting the emergence of the Soviet state, Holquist situates the Bolshevik Revolution within the continuum of mobilization and violence that began with World War I and extended through Russia's civil war, thereby providing a genealogy for Bolshevik political practices that places them clearly among Russian and European wartime measures.