Research Summary
Research Summary
Overview
Description
Professor Friedman devotes his research to the history of the Left and its struggle to end economic and social inequality. He studies how this struggle evolved, its various cultural contexts, and what paths have been tried and rejected. He has been able to gain access to archival resources, some no longer available to researchers, and to study them in their original languages.
In his first book, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, Professor Friedman examines the different approaches taken by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China in their quest for influence in newly decolonized Third World states after World War II. He is currently investigating how socialism played itself out in the political trajectories of five of these countries—Indonesia, Tanzania, Chile, Angola, and Iran—from the late 1940s to the 1980s. He explores the process by which actors in these countries, as well as in the Soviet Union and China, attempted to create a workable model of socialism for the developing world. In this environment, no one knew what “Third World Socialism” should look like, so the lessons of each attempt to build it were studied and absorbed into the next one.
In his first book, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, Professor Friedman examines the different approaches taken by the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China in their quest for influence in newly decolonized Third World states after World War II. He is currently investigating how socialism played itself out in the political trajectories of five of these countries—Indonesia, Tanzania, Chile, Angola, and Iran—from the late 1940s to the 1980s. He explores the process by which actors in these countries, as well as in the Soviet Union and China, attempted to create a workable model of socialism for the developing world. In this environment, no one knew what “Third World Socialism” should look like, so the lessons of each attempt to build it were studied and absorbed into the next one.