The International Politics of Eurasia: v. 9: The End of Empire? Comparative Perspectives on the Soviet Collapse

The collapse of the Soviet Union was part of a tumultuous process of imperial disintegration, new state-building, and potential imperial reconstruction unprecedented in recent decades. The daunting task of understanding the forces now in motion in Eurasia requires historical, comparative, interdisciplinary insights. This volume assembles an interdisciplinary group of scholars to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct the Soviet empire in the context of Tsarist, Hapsburg, Ottoman, British, French and German precedents. Topics include: imperial development (Bruce Parrott and David Lake); imperial disintegration (Roman Szporluk, Soloman Wank and Michael Fry); peripheral successor states (Mark R. Bessinger, Dankwart A. Rustow, Robert I. Rotberg and Ali A. Mazrui); metropolitan successor states (S. Frederick Starr, Carole Find, Miles Kahler; and prospects (Hendrik Spruyt and Karen Dawisha).