Alessandro Iandolo

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. The prize is dedicated to the encouragement of high-quality studies of the international behavior of the countries of the former Communist Bloc.

Co-Winner: Alessandro Iandolo
Title: Arrested Development: The Soviet Union in Ghana, Guinea, and Mali, 1955-1968 (Cornell University Press)

Why did the Soviet development model fail in West Africa? Alessandro Iandolo pursues this question by brilliantly mapping a now-lively literature on socialist development and offering fresh insights built on years of dazzling research in multiple archives and languages—from Ghana and Mali to France and Russia. Moscow championed specific developmental goals in West Africa, but Iandolo argues that it failed “to bear the costs” of the modernization it sought to bring about. He reconstructs how the Soviets sought to deploy the state as the agent of this modernization, deeply attentive to the similarities and distinctions between the Soviet and other models around the world. While Moscow clearly favored state ownership and collective enterprise, the expectation was not that Ghana, Guinea, and Mali would imitate earlier Soviet planning. Still, within a few years, high hopes gave way to frustrations over resources, disappointments, failures, and mutual recriminations. Sensitive to the structural impediments of the larger Cold War conflict, Iandolo places Soviet economic activity abroad within the broader history of important substitution. His granular study of ambition, capacity, and execution adds an important dimension to the history of Second World-Third World relations. Exemplary in globalizing the history of the Soviet state, Arrested Development successfully begins to build necessary bridges across literatures and specializations.

Co-Winner: Togzhan Kassenova