More than three decades after the Soviet Union pulled its troops out of Afghanistan, new studies on Moscow’s intervention and its consequences continue to appear. Although the war still receives only a fraction of the attention afforded to the American war in Vietnam, the last few decades have seen important studies on the intervention, the…
Tag: state building
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-27 on Muschik, Building States
For too long, the histories of the United Nations (UN) and other international organizations were blighted by the misconception that institutional history tended to be rather inward looking and teleological in its treatment of themes and issues, offering few insights on the political functioning of organizations. In more recent years, there has been a renewed…
H-Diplo|RJISSF Roundtable 15-1 on Goscha, The Road to Dien Bien Phu
How was the Vietnamese Communist state formed? In Christopher Goscha’s The Road to Dien Bien Phu, that state was initially an “archipelago state” (1945–49)—“archipelago” in the sense of both its territorial shape and its coalitional politics—which then transformed into a “War Communist state” (since 1950), one that was dominated at the core by the Communist…
Review Essay 57 on Warlord Survival: The Delusion of State Building in Afghanistan
There is a persistent paradox in the literature (and policy-related discourse) on warlordism that spills over into the larger scholarship on political violence and state formation: while some observers regard warlords as insurmountable spoilers, too strong and sinister to be tamed, others characterize them as paper tigers that could be easily dismissed with the right…