Perestroika

The Lasting Impacts of the Cold War After WWII, the United States and the Soviet Union emerged as the two world superpowers. The two nations held great influence, “restructuring the international system into a bipolar world” (Kaufman, 2010, #77). The United States offered democracy and capitalism, while the Soviet Union represented the new economic system of communism. The two conflicting ideologies represented different international world orders. The United States and the Soviet Union’s…

The relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union was established upon political and ideological factors. In each and everyway these countries battled to show the world who’s the dominating world power. Both of them fight for the spread of their idea, and a lot of moves with countries using them as puppets to show how complete their belief of perfect Government is. Ronald Reagan and Mikhil Gorbachev both were trying to contain the others belief spread, Their race in a lot of major…

In this paper I will attempt to examine the root causes of the Aral Sea disaster that implicate in ecological, societal, economic, and cultural environments throughout the time and space. This paper will challenge the traditional view of the Aral Sea disaster as of “natural”, but rather “crescive” and “constructed”. I will analyze the Aral sea disaster through the following lenses, first is political - harsh Soviet politics and transition to the market economy that had subsequently resulted in…

Systemic change is when there is a change or shift of the dominant power/powers in an international system. It can be characterized by when hegemony moves from the main hegemonic power to another rising power, or to several other rising powers in the system. Challenges to hegemonic powers that would lead their powers to the hands of others include but are not limited to other powers becoming more economically and technologically advanced the costs of remaining a hegemonic power tend to grow…

territory which can be explained by the realist theory of the balance of power. Nearer the end of the Cold War, the communist ideology of the USSR was proven to be a weakness when Mikhail Gorbachev came into power and introduced two important policies: perestroika and glasnost. These allowed the citizens of the USSR to view the ‘outside world’ which in turn caused the downfall of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s following the collapse of the Berlin Wall. Russia was then economically…

The Webster definition of self-identification is “the act of identifying yourself as a particular kind of person”. For some people discovering themselves, moreover labeling themselves in alleged self identification, is a fear they cannot face. This fear often cripples them to the point where it affects the relationships they have with friends, family and loved ones. Along with the fear of self identification, some would rather live a life in denial, than to act in the lives of what they know is…

The new Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, did not reinstate the terror of the Stalin years; however, he sought to strengthen the role of the party bureaucracy and the KGB and encouraged the further clampdown on reform in the satellite states. In 1968, disaffection with this step backward led to the emergence of a reform movement in Czechoslovakia. The main goal of this “Prague Spring” was to bring about a more humanistic socialism within certain limits, such as keeping the nation within the Soviet…

During the mid-1940 's the United States and Russia were in superpower positions after World War II had ended and left Europe in a pile of rubble. Continuous tension between the United States and Russia led to the beginning of the Cold War. The conflict was simply constant disagreements of political, military, and economic morals and ideas. Russia and the United States both had a strong military but never had an actual war between each other. In 1947, the United States started the Marshall…

The constructivist turn in IR marks a shift from the material determinants of international politics to ideational factors, such as beliefs, ideas, and norms. The two dominant theoretical schools in IR, neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism (NLI), share several key assumptions regarding the anarchic nature of the international system, states are self-interested, rational actors, driven by material interests in power/survival (neorealists) or security (NLI). In addition, neorealism and NLI…

World Affairs COLD WAR, DETENTE AND THE RENEWAL OF TENSION The emergence of a Bipolar World: Before the smoke had even settled down shortly after the World War II, there was a new war of ideologies gathering into force. The Soviet Union and the United States had collaborated in defeating the fascist empires of Japan, Italy and Germany. Nonetheless, as it approached the culmination of 1945, the wartime coalition crumbled. The United States, anchoring the Capitalist World, and the Soviet Union,…