2024 Recipient

Louis Howard Porter

Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination

The Marshall D. Shulman Book Prize, established in 1987 and sponsored by the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, is awarded annually for an outstanding monograph dealing with the international relations, foreign policy, or foreign-policy decision-making of any of the states of the former Soviet Union or Eastern Europe published in the previous calendar year.  

Winner: Louis Howard Porter, Reds in Blue: UNESCO, World Governance, and the Soviet Internationalist Imagination (Oxford University Press, 2023)

How and why did the Soviet Union go from profound suspicion of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to participation and engagement? In exploring this question, Louis Porter sees an opportunity to cast the two projects as a set of parallels in forms of internationalism. The result is an argument that highlights their shared utopian impulses but also a more intimate view of the tensions in practice. Drawing from a rich set of international archives and sources, Reds in Blue compellingly demonstrates the continued importance of institutional history, the need for a subtle understanding of planning imperatives under one-party rule, and excellent skill in capturing both ambitions and contradictions. Engagement with UNESCO, Porter argues, provided a certain class of Soviet individuals with access to an international milieu of experts, but it also presented them with the challenge of navigating “the jurisdictions of two power structures and ethical regimes” at a time when carrying a copy of Albert Camus’s The Rebel would get one arrested at the airport in Moscow. Seen from the perspective of 2024, and as references to a world government evoke conspiracies of nefarious plots, Reds in Blue raises important questions about the relationship between international organizations and illiberal regimes. 

Co-Winner: Victor Petrov

Prize Committee: Elidor Mëhilli (chair), Lorenz Luthi, and Milada Vachudova