Jeremy S. Friedman

Jeremy S. Friedman

Marvin Bower Associate Professor

Marvin Bower Associate Professor

Business, Government and the International Economy
+1 (617) 495-6921
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Jeremy S. Friedman
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(617) 495-6921
Featured Work Publications Research Summary

Jeremy S. Friedman is an associate professor of business administration in the Business, Government, and International Economy Unit and taught the course of the same name in the MBA required curriculum over the past six years. Currently, he is teaching Business and Geopolitics in the MBA elective curriculum. Previously, he was associate director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University.

Professor Friedman studies the history of communism, socialism, and revolution in Russia, China, and the developing world. He examines how the project of socialist revolution and leftist thought more broadly evolved over the course of the twentieth century, particularly as revolutionary battlegrounds shifted from the industrialized countries to the developing world in the wake of decolonization. His work has been published in Cold War History and Modern China Studies and in media outlets including The National Interest, The Diplomat, and The Moscow Times. His first book, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, was published in 2015 and his second book Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World, was published in 2022.

Professor Friedman received his PhD in history from Princeton University and subsequently held a postdoctoral fellowship in international security studies at Yale University, where he taught courses in Russian and Cold War history.

Featured Work
Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World
A historical account of ideology in the Global South as the postwar laboratory of socialism, its legacy following the Cold War, and the continuing influence of socialist ideas worldwide.

In the first decades after World War II, many newly independent Asian and African countries and established Latin American states pursued a socialist development model. Jeremy Friedman traces the socialist experiment over forty years through the experience of five countries: Indonesia, Chile, Tanzania, Angola, and Iran.

These states sought paths to socialism without formal adherence to the Soviet bloc or the programs that Soviets, East Germans, Cubans, Chinese, and other outsiders tried to promote. Instead, they attempted to forge new models of socialist development through their own trial and error, together with the help of existing socialist countries, demonstrating the flexibility and adaptability of socialism. All five countries would become Cold War battlegrounds and regional models, as new policies in one shaped evolving conceptions of development in another. Lessons from the collapse of democracy in Indonesia were later applied in Chile, just as the challenge of political Islam in Indonesia informed the policies of the left in Iran. Efforts to build agrarian economies in West Africa influenced Tanzania’s approach to socialism, which in turn influenced the trajectory of the Angolan model.

Ripe for Revolution shows socialism as more adaptable and pragmatic than often supposed. When we view it through the prism of a Stalinist orthodoxy, we miss its real effects and legacies, both good and bad. To understand how socialism succeeds and fails, and to grasp its evolution and potential horizons, we must do more than read manifestos. We must attend to history.
Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World
The conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War has long been understood in a global context, but Jeremy Friedman's Shadow Cold War delves deeper into the era to examine the competition between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China for the leadership of the world revolution. When a world of newly independent states emerged from decolonization desperately poor and politically disorganized, Moscow and Beijing turned their focus to attracting these new entities, setting the stage for Sino-Soviet competition. 

Based on archival research from ten countries, including new materials from Russia and China, many no longer accessible to researchers, this book examines how China sought to mobilize Asia, Africa, and Latin America to seize the revolutionary mantle from the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union adapted to win it back, transforming the nature of socialist revolution in the process. This groundbreaking book is the first to explore the significance of this second Cold War that China and the Soviet Union fought in the shadow of the capitalist-communist clash.
Books
Journal Articles
Book Chapters
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Reddest Place North of Havana: The Tricontinental and the Struggle to Lead the 'Third World’." Chap. 7 in The Tricontinental Revolution: Third World Radicalism and the Cold War, edited by R. Joseph Parrott and Mark Atwood Lawrence. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2022. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Soviet Policy in the Developing World and the Chinese Challenge in the 1960s." In Fragile Alliance: The Cold War and Sino-Soviet Relations, edited by Shen Zhihua and Douglas Stiffler. Beijing, China: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2010. View Details
Cases and Teaching Materials
Presentations
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Constructing Socialism in the Third World: The Case of Tanzania." Yale University, New Haven, CT, November 29, 2016. View Details
  • Friedman, Jeremy. "Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World." National History Center, Washington, DC, December 5, 2016. View Details
Other Publications and Materials
Research Summary
Overview
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.
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