Reconstructing the Cold War
Principal Investigator: Theodore Hopf
In Reconstructing the Cold War: Identities, Institutions
and Interests in Moscow’s Foreign Policy Since 1945,
Theodore Hopf is undertaking an ambitious project: a social
constructivist account of the Cold War.
In writing this book, Hopf has several objectives. First,
he wants to take advantage of Russian archives that have
been opened to Western scholars over the past 15 years.
This includes the work of Russian scholars, who have been
writing about the Cold War since it began but whose work
has not been previously available to scholars in the West.
Second, Hopf wants to write a social constructivist account
of the Cold War that foregrounds the identity politics
between the Soviet Union and others it dealt with in world
politics, including the United States, Europe, China and
the decolonizing world.
To do this, Hopf plans to recover the Soviet Union’s
prevailing domestic identities from written sources such
as novels, textbooks, and newspapers. He will then see
whether these identities affect Soviet policy choices
made in relation to other states.
Finally, Hopf hopes that his book contributes to debates
on American foreign policy after the Cold War. Although
history’s victors rarely examine their own strategies,
Hopf hopes to perform just such a re-examination to identify
such lessons for the United States.
Hopf will work on Reconstructing the Cold War in 2006-07
as a Senior Research Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian
and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University.
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