Evangelista specializes in international and comparative politics and is the author of several books on a wide range of topics. These include—to name just a few—Innovation and the Arms Race: How the United States and the Soviet Union Develop New Military Technologies published in 1989 by Cornell University Press, Unarmed Forces: The Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (also by Cornell in 1999), a book on Chechnya titled The Chechen Wars: Will Russia Go the Way of the Soviet Union? (published in 2004), and most recently Gender, Nationalism, and War: Conflict on the Movie Screen published in 2011 with Cambridge.
Interview Themes
Professors and others at Harvard who had an impact on Evangelista's intellectual trajectory (3:20)
The connection between Evangelista's interest in languages and literature and his current intellectual interests (6:15)
Evangelista's first visit to the USSR in 1979 (7:40)
On terminological slippages (between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, or foreign policy intentions versus foreign policy capacity) that inform attitudes and policy decisions (12:47)
On studying the Soviet Union as offering a way of seeing how power works in international relations (16:30)
The importance of the immediate post-WWII period and the 1980s in Evangelista's work (22:20)
The origins and nature of the Peace Studies Program at Cornell and changes in the Cornell Department of Government since Evangelista was a grad student the 1980s (27:27)
How we are still living with the legacy of the Cold War (34:00)
Evangelista's thoughts at the time on the Soviet Union's disarmament (38:48)
Gorbachev and the road to Putin (43:13)
To what extent should we try to move beyond the Cold War? (48:17)
On nationalism as an ideological alternative emerging out of the Cold War? (52:43)
The importance of ideology vs. institutions to Evangelista's understanding of Soviet military policy or Gorbachev's reforms (55:36)
Moments or events Evangelista has lived through that have proved significant for him intellectually (1:00:28)
Why Cold War studies is preoccupied with the matter of timing (1:03:18)
Are there different reasons why historians vs. political scientists look to history? And an explanation of "process tracing" (1:09:20)
How Evangelista's intellectual trajectory was influenced by area studies and what he thinks should be retained about area studies (1:18:52)
In training graduate students, what is it they most need? (1:22:23)
The origins of Evangelista's book on Gender, Nationalism, and War (1:24:04)
Evangelista's work on Chechnya and his sense of the scholar's role in weighing in on matters of contemporary political significance (1:28:18)
Should we only ever ask questions about where real power is because nothing else matters? (1:33:20)
Evangelista's current intellectual interests on bombing, among other things (1:37:30)
To access interview, click here: http://hdl.handle.net/1813/33684
