A historical account of ideology in the Global South as the postwar laboratory of socialism, its legacy following the Cold War, and the continuing influence of socialist ideas worldwide. In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran. These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced TanzaniaÕs approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model. Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.

Taking Power analyzes the causes behind some three dozen revolutions in the Third World between 1910 and the present. It advances a new theory that seeks to integrate the political, economic, and cultural factors that brought these revolutions about. It attempts to explain why so few revolutions have succeeded, while so many have failed. The book is divided into chapters that treat particular sets of revolutions and it closes with speculation about the future of revolutions in an age of globalization.

A major reassessment of the rise and global impact of revolutionary Third World radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s.

The ten essays in this volume represent state-of-the-art surveys of ten singular episodes in U.S. interaction with the Third World since 1945. Each author seeks to present a unique approach to a specific topic within U.S. -- Third World relations. The essays cover the globe and include studies of the Middle East, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. They make use of a variety of source material and employ a wide range of analytical devices, such as the national security paradigm, the idea of economic development, and culture. The essays present a multihued portrait of the different ways policy makers in the United States dealt with Third World problems. The essays make clear the multitude of considerations that affected policy making; the many different actors, both official and nonofficial, who came to influence the policy-making process; and the possibilities for future research into U.S. relations with the nations of the Third World. They are designed not only to present the current state of the literature but also to suggest some avenues for future research.

A never-before published history of the Russian Bolshevik Revolution and its post-colonial legacy, woven together from lecture excerpts by the renowned Pan-African revolutionary socialist theorist In his short life, Guyanese intellectual Walter Rodney emerged as one of the foremost thinkers and activists of the anticolonial revolution, leading movements in North America, Africa, and the Caribbean. Wherever he was, Rodney was a lightning rod for working-class Black Power organizing. His deportation sparked Jamaica’s Rodney Riots in 1968, and his scholarship trained a generation how to approach politics on an international scale. In 1980, shortly after founding the Working People’s Alliance in Guyana, the 38-year-old Rodney was assassinated. Walter Rodney’s The Russian Revolution collects surviving texts from a series of lectures he delivered at the University of Dar es Salaam, an intellectual hub of the independent Third World. It had been his intention to work these into a book, a goal completed posthumously with the editorial aid of Robin D.G. Kelley and Jesse Benjamin. Moving across the historiography of the long Russian Revolution with clarity and insight, Rodney transcends the ideological fault lines of the Cold War. Surveying a broad range of subjects—the Narodniks, social democracy, the October Revolution, civil war, and the challenges of Stalinism—Rodney articulates a distinct viewpoint from the Third World, one that grounds revolutionary theory and history with the people in motion.

The first truly global history of revolutions and revolutionary waves in the modern age, from Atlantic Revolutions to Arab Spring.