Online Event
Tuesday, April 9, 2024 from 10:00-11:00am EDT
Vassily Klimentov will be discussing his book, A Slow Reckoning: The USSR, the Afghan Communists, and Islam, published by Northern Illinois University Press / Cornell University Press.
A Slow Reckoning examines the Soviet Union’s and the Afghan Communists’ views of and policies toward Islam and Islamism during the Soviet-Afghan War (1979–1989). As Klimentov demonstrates, the Soviet and Communist Afghan disregard for Islam was telling of the overall Communist approach to reforming Afghanistan and helps explain the failure of their modernization project. The book also discusses Soviet attitudes toward Islamism in the late 1980s as Arab foreign fighters joined the Mujahideen in fighting the Soviets in Afghanistan. Drawing on his book’s findings, Vassily Klimentov will also explain how the Soviet experience in Afghanistan is important to understanding both the US failure in Afghanistan in the 2000s and conflicts involving Russia in the post-Soviet space.
SPEAKERS
Vassily Klimentov is a Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF) Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer at the University of Zurich. He was previously an SNF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies at the European University Institute in Florence. He received his PhD in International History and International Relations/Political Science from the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies in Geneva. Prior to this, he had spent several years as an aid worker, including for two years in the Middle East.
Artemy Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and post-Soviet Studies at Temple University. He earned his BA from The George Washington University and his MA and PhD from the London School of Economics, after which he spent a decade teaching at the University of Amsterdam. His first book was A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard University Press, 2011). His second book, Laboratory of Socialist Development: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell University Press, 2018), won the Davis and Hewett prizes from the Association of Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. He is currently working on a project that studies the legacies of socialist development in contemporary Central Asia to examine entanglements between socialist and capitalist development approaches in the late 20th century.
MODERATOR
Aitolkyn Kurmanova is the Senior Editor of Central Asian Analytical Network (CAAN) and Voices on Central Asia. She is a producer, multimedia editor (English and Russian), and founder of several media projects, including analytical journals, podcasts, and cultural programs on Central Asia. She is also a consultant and researcher on Central Asia’s political risks and economic strategies and authored several studies on regional economic cooperation, trade, commodity and financial markets.
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