Kunakhovich, Kyrill, and Kosicki, Pyotr / The Long 1989: Decades of Global Revolution

Kyrill Kunakhovich is Assistant Professor of History, University of Virginia.

The fall of communism in Central and Eastern Europe is now the frame of reference for any mass mobilization, from the Arab Spring to the Occupy movement to Brexit. The Long 1989 is about the slow, uneven spread of 'nineteen eighty-nine' across the world -- as a set of ideas, discourses, and normative models of revolution. This book's ten chapters consider how revolutionary events in Europe resonated many years later and thousands of miles away: in China and South Africa, Chile and Afghanistan, Turkey and the USA. They trace the circulation of people, practices, and ideas that linked these countries, turning local developments into a global phenomenon. It is now a platitude to call 1989 a 'world event,' but the chapters in this volume show -- for the first time in the scholarship -- how it actually became one. At the same time, they examine the many shifts that revolution underwent in transit. All ten chapters detail the process of mutation, adaptation, and appropriation by which foreign affairs gained meaning on the ground. They interrogate the uses and understandings of 'nineteen-eighty-nine' in particular national contexts, often many years after the fact. Taken together, the chapters in this volume ask how the fall of communism in Europe became the basis for revolutionary action around the globe. They invite us to rethink the revolutions of 1989 by expanding their chronological and geographic scope. In so doing, The Long 1989 meets 21st-century imperatives, highlighting both continuity and rupture in a world grappling with the resurgence of populism, fanaticism, and fear, but also powerful grassroots action crossing borders and oceans. In sum, this book proposes a paradigm shift in global thinking about revolution, protest, and the international system.

9789633862834

Central European University Press

August 2019

Hardcover

Kunakhovich, Kyrill, and Kosicki, Pyotr / The Long 1989: Decades of Global Revolution