Papers by Matthew Evangelista
PonarsEuarasia - Policy Memos, 2012
In August 1990 Boris Yeltsin traveled to Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, to urge the local autho... more In August 1990 Boris Yeltsin traveled to Kazan, the capital of Tatarstan, to urge the local authorities to "take as much autonomy as you can swallow." Ten years later, newly elected President Vladimir Putin visited the same city during a festival and dunked his head into a bucket of fermented mare's milk as part of a local folk ritual. But he wasn't swallowing any of his predecessor's pro-autonomy rhetoric. Propelled into office by popular support for revival of the war against the separatist republic of Chechnya, Putin pledged from the start to bring the rest of the regions into line as well. Although a noticeable departure from Yeltsin's laissez-faire approach, Putin's intention to strengthen the center at the expense of the regions is hardly unprecedented. His views are consistent with those of most of the prime ministers who served under Yeltsin and of national political leaders across the spectrum. Will Putin's attempts at reforming center-regi...
1. Virginia Woolf's purse 2. Algeria: a world constructed out of ruins 3. Yugoslavia: archety... more 1. Virginia Woolf's purse 2. Algeria: a world constructed out of ruins 3. Yugoslavia: archetype or anomaly? 4. Chechnya: virgins, mothers, and terrorists 5. Quebec: oui, no, or femme 6. 'To live to see better times': gender, nationalism, sovereignty, equality.
n May 1945, a few weeks after the war in Europe ended, James Agee, writing in The Nation, praised... more n May 1945, a few weeks after the war in Europe ended, James Agee, writing in The Nation, praised John Huston’s just-released documentary, The Battle of San Pietro, as the best war movie he had ever seen. That the filmmakers were themselves combat veterans explained, for Agee, “how they all lived through the shooting of the film; how deep inside the fighting some of it was made; how well they evidently knew what to expect.” However, we learned years ago – although many film critics and viewers still seem unaware – that Huston and his crew were not actually present during the fighting that destroyed the village of San Pietro Infine in December 1943. Huston reconstructed the battle and restaged and filmed the combat scenes over the course of the following months, inviting his viewers to assume that they were witnessing a real battle as it unfolded, and in subsequent interviews and his own memoirs, he maintained the falsehood. The story of Huston’s manipulation is not new. Lance Bertel...
Italy from Crisis to Crisis
Ending the Cold War, 2004
A main cause of the Cold War was a Western perception of a Soviet military threat at the end of W... more A main cause of the Cold War was a Western perception of a Soviet military threat at the end of World War II. Concerns were initially focused on areas contingent to the Soviet Union, particularly in Europe, where the Red Army had defeated the forces of Nazi Germany and occupied the territories of neighboring countries in Eastern Europe. Later, following the first test of a Soviet atomic bomb in 1949, the threat of a Soviet nuclear attack against the United States and its allies began to loom large in Western fears. Symmetrically, a key factor in ending the Cold War was the Soviet effort, launched by Mikhail Gorbachev, to reduce such fears of Soviet military aggression. The effort consisted of new initiatives in the realm of arms control and unilateral reductions of Soviet military capability. Some of these actions constituted significant turning points because they represented major departures from past practice and policies that would be difficult to reverse.
European Review of International Studies
Russia’s brutal wars against the separatist republic of Chechnya, starting in the mid-1990s, enta... more Russia’s brutal wars against the separatist republic of Chechnya, starting in the mid-1990s, entailed untold numbers of war crimes and human rights abuses, including kidnapping, extrajudicial killings, torture, murder, and vast destruction of property and civilian life by aerial bombardment and artillery barrages. Blocked from pursuing justice through the Russian courts or by having the Russian government fulfill its obligations under the Geneva Conventions, victims instead worked with activists and lawyers to bring cases before the European Court of Human Rights. Starting in 2003, the Court has found against Russia in some 250 cases – in effect bringing the higher standards of human rights law to the domain of armed conflict, normally regulated (with mixed success) by international humanitarian law (“laws of war”). The first step in the process of understanding this normative change is to identify and understand the transformation: from a normative standpoint, the Court rulings con...
European History Quarterly
Journal of American History
Oxford Scholarship Online
This chapter offers an assessment of the status of the Geneva Conventions as a normative regime a... more This chapter offers an assessment of the status of the Geneva Conventions as a normative regime and how it matters. The book’s case studies support the intuition that states fighting guerrilla insurgencies and terrorists face challenges in adhering to the laws of war. Yet many cases exhibit more compliance than the rationalist accounts would anticipate. In exploring mechanisms of noncompliance as well as compliance, the chapter highlights the importance of disaggregating the process—from leaders to individual soldiers—and highlights some of the counterintuitive insights that emerge. The international system—powerful states and institutions—serves not only as a constraint on human-rights abuses and war crimes but also sometimes as an enabler. Courts play less of a role than expected in the process of socialization and internalization of norms. The chapter concludes with reflections on the methodological challenges facing scholars who seek to assess the impact of international humanit...
Human Rights Quarterly, 2016
Journal of Cold War Studies, 2009
... historical reasons. ✣ ✣ ✣ 121 Book Reviews Page 6. Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, an... more ... historical reasons. ✣ ✣ ✣ 121 Book Reviews Page 6. Anna M. Cienciala, Natalia S. Lebedeva, and Wojciech Materski, eds., Katyn: A Crime without Punishment. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 561 pp. Reviewed by ...
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 1987
Perspectives on Politics, 2016
Journal of Cold War Studies, 2000
... of Salvador Allende and ordered the torture and “disappearance” of thou-sands of Chilean citi... more ... of Salvador Allende and ordered the torture and “disappearance” of thou-sands of Chilean citizens, Kissinger traveled to Santiago to reassure ... who was first West German foreign minister and then federal chancellor, forms one of the main themes of Dana Allin's engagingly writ ...
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Papers by Matthew Evangelista