Speaker: Artemy M. Kalinovsky,
Professor of Russian, Soviet, and Post Soviet Studies
Temple University
The rapid fall of Kabul in August 2021 shocked the world. Why did US involvement end so disastrously after two decades of war and state-building? How does the Soviet occupation and withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989 shed light on the tricky nature of occupation? In this talk I will place the US involvement and ultimate retreat in the context of the Soviet intervention and Afghanistan’s struggles over the last half century that transformed an internal conflict into a devastating forty-year civil war.
Artemy M. Kalinovsky is Professor of Russian, Soviet, and Post Soviet Studies at Temple University and the Principal Investigator of the ERC-funded project Building a Better Tomorrow: Development Knowledge and Practice in Central Asia and Beyond at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of A Long Goodbye: The Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan (Harvard, 2011) and Laboratory of Socialist Modernity: Cold War Politics and Decolonization in Soviet Tajikistan (Cornell, 2018).
This lecture is part of NELC’s Spring 2022 Series on Afghanistan
Find Parking by entering Page Hall, Columbus, OH 43210, USA on the Campus Parc map.
Sponsors: Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures (NELC); Department of History; Center for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Middle East Studies Center.
