In The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, Metta Spencer recounts the political and military changes that have occurred in Russia up to mid-2010. Using hundreds of interviews she conducted with officials, dissidents, and liberal intellectuals, she describes the various groups, forces, and individuals that worked to liberalize the totalitarian Soviet Union and its fellow nations behind the Iron Curtain, and which ultimately brought about the dissolution of those repressive governments. Spencer identifies four political orientations to describe Soviet society: 'Sheep,' ordinary citizens who accepted the undemocratic regime they lived in without challenging it; 'Dinosaurs,' hard-line Communist officials; 'Termites,' including Mikhail Gorbachev and his advisers and government; and 'Barking Dogs,' a few hundred dissidents who made 'a lot of noise' protesting, hoping to awaken a grass-roots demand for democracy. The strange rivalry between the Termites and Barking Dogs would ultimately doom perestroika. Spencer's research dispels the widely-held perception that US President Ronald Reagan 'won' the Cold War by standing firm until the Soviet Union 'blinked first.' There are vitally important lessons to be learned from the Soviet period, about how to assist citizens of totalitarian and authoritarian regimes around the world. The irony is that transnational civil society organizations, major sources of the progress in Soviet Russia, are still needed today in authoritarian Russia, under Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev, for totalitarianism remains a potential social trap. In The Russian Quest for Peace and Democracy, Metta Spencer suggests new ways of building urgently-needed social capital in today's Russia, where democracy has yet to flourish.

This book examines the concept of peace leadership, bringing together scholars and practitioners from both peace and conflict studies and leadership studies. The volume assesses the activities of six peace leaders, the place and role of women and youth in leading for peace, military peace leadership, Aboriginal peace leadership, and theoretical frameworks that focus on notions of ecosystems, traits, and critical care. It provides insights into how Peace Leaders work to transform inner and external blockages to peace, construct social spaces for the development of a culture of peace, and sustain peace efforts through deliberate educative strategies. Conceptually, the primary aim of this book is to obtain a better understanding of peace leadership. Practically, this book presents one means of influencing our community (communities) to face its problems for the sake of challenging and helping our readers to understand and make progress on all that stands in the way of peace (connectedness). The contributions to this volume are drawn together by the overarching aim of this volume, which addresses the following question: What are the concerns, dilemmas, challenges, and opportunities for those who choose to lead and take risks for peace? This book will be of much interest to students of peace studies, conflict resolution, leadership studies and IR in general.