Timothy W. Luke’s Shards and Specters of the New World Order: Casting Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies as Critique is now available for purchase at the Telos Press website. Save 20% when you use the coupon code BOOKS20 during checkout.

From ideological dynamics in revolutionary Russia, cultural stagnation in the USSR, and ineffective Soviet governance in the 1980s to the USSR’s institutional collapse in 1991, the emergence of the Russian Federation under Boris Yeltsin, and Vladimir Putin’s wars in Ukraine since 2014, Timothy Luke investigates how the geopolitical clout of the United States has worked to contain, but at other times sustain, the Soviet Union and later the Russian Federation. Luke’s critical studies also examine how Moscow’s strategies provoked radical Islamic resistance movements in Afghanistan and aided anti-Western client states, like Iraq and Syria, that threatened the New World Order envisioned in Washington after 1991.

Praise for Timothy W. Luke’s Shards and Specters of the New World Order

“Building on decades of work through major history-defining events, Timothy Luke outlines a compelling critique of Soviet and post-Soviet change. Luke reminds us how familiar entanglements between East and West, which seemed long gone, have returned resiliently in full force. This book is an invaluable resource in the current geopolitical moment.”
—Vera Smirnova, Department of Geography and Department of Political Science, Kansas State University

“Intellectually rich, thoughtful, and thought-provoking, Shards and Specters of the New World Order traces the trajectory of the Cold War and its aftermath in geopolitics, from the Soviet Union to the ‘War on Terror’ to Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Across six decades, Timothy Luke has been one of the sharpest scholars and analysts of global order, world politics, and critical theory. Luke’s perceptive insight, his acumen, his wry wit, and his deep knowledge of history are amply on display in this book.”
—Samuel Garrett Zeitlin, University College London

Telos Press Books by Timothy W. Luke