Cultural Politics in International Relations

Paul Sheeran, Dr, School of Social Sciences, University of Winchester, UK

• Contents: Stranger in a strange land; Contested claims: the uncertainty of certainty; Cultural genocide: the dialectic of struggle; The system and the damage done; Alternative/counter-culture: coded change; The meaning of dissent: from grumble to revolution; Emancipation and coded (dis)chord; The intelligentsia; A weak utopia; The politics of unreason; Bibliography; Index.

’This book is an interesting read that breaks some new ground in its appreciation of the reasons for the end of Communism in the USSR. Sheeran has made good use of interview material and it has placed that material in its historical and political context well. The effect of culture, high or low, on politics is notoriously difficult to measure, which is why it is sometimes claimed that there are few links between the two. So this as a brave and worthwhile attempt to try and demonstrate what is an intuitively demonstrable link. Sheeran makes the point (at some length and with some sophistication) that applied to the Soviet reality it was even more the case that culture could affect politics and was rightly speaking, in a book about rock music, a brick in the wall of Soviet collapse there are some flights of real poetry in his prose.’ Professor Andrew J. Williams, Director of Research, University of Kent at Canterbury, UK ’Sheeran...has presented a clear picture of the role of ideas in the late Soviet system. By doing so, he has helped others in international relations analysis to be aware of the subtle trends in popular culture.’ International Journal on World Peace