Fellow’s publication ‘Book of the Month’ at Cambridge University Press
A book on the global history of 1989 co-authored by AIAS Fellow Bogdan C. Iacob is ‘Book of the Month’ at Cambridge University Press in November.
AIAS Fellow and historian Bogdan C. Iacob has co-authored with James Mark, Ljubica Spaskovska, and Tobias Rupprecht the book 1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2019), which was designated ‘Book of the Month’ in November by Cambridge University Press.
It is the first monograph to place the fall of state socialism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in global context, and to examine the forgotten 1989s which have their legacies in today’s illiberal turn in the region.
The book shows that Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union were not isolated, as the image of a crumbling Berlin Wall supposedly conveyed: 1989 was not the entry into the global but a choice about the form such integration would take.
From the 1970s, with the exhaustion of anti-imperialist internationalism, the rise of radical Islam, and the spread of liberal democracy and neoliberalism, eastern European and Soviet elites and oppositions reimagined their region’s place only as part of a western political and cultural realm. Alternative visions circulated at the time, whether based on socialist democracy, authoritarian transformation, or warnings against excessive westernisation. These would return to the region, questioning the liberal myth of 1989, and informing the populist counter-revolutions of the 2010s.
Read more about the book
1989: A Global History of Eastern Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2019) by Bogdan C. Iacob, James Mark, Ljubica Spaskovska, and Tobias Rupprecht, https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/1989/D549CD776FF56675EF4D25ADEF2FA0E4
Cambridge University Press’s “Book of the Month” for November https://www.facebook.com/CUPBookshop/posts/3388376561203172
A summary of the main ideas of the book here
https://www.eurozine.com/the-struggle-over-1989/
Contact
Bogdan C. Iacob, Associate Professor, AIAS-COFUND Fellow
Email: bogdaniacob@aias.au.dk
Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, AIAS
Høegh-Guldbergs Gade 6B
DK-8000 Aarhus C
Denmark