Book Launch: Ukraine, Russia and the West: When Value Promotion Met Hard Power

The book presents a harsh reckoning with decades of self-serving Western policies of value promotion, seeking in vain to transform fundamental institutional arrangements in foreign countries. It covers the failures of third world foreign assistance to achieve a sustained reduction in the development gap between north and south, the failures of policies of shock therapy and systemic change to transform defunct centrally planned economies into rules-based market economies, and the failure of policies to support a variety of color revolutions to result in consolidated liberal democracies. Most importantly, it aims scathing critique at how an obsession with value promotion was translated into being totally unprepared when Russia resorted to a display of serious hard power.

Stefan Hedlund is Professor of Soviet and East European Studies at Uppsala University. He has been researching Soviet and Russian affairs since the final days of Leonid Brezhnev, and has published extensively on related developments – including 25 books and several hundred articles of various shapes and form. His current project is titled “Russia Reverts to Muscovy.”