David Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, Graduate Center, and the Director of Research, Center for Place, Culture and Politics, writes about the end of the post-Cold War world order.

“What we are witnessing in the Ukraine conflict is in many respects a product of the processes that dissolved the power of actually existing communism and of the Soviet Regime. With the end of the Cold War, Russians were promised a rosy future as the benefits of capitalist dynamism and a free market economy would supposedly spread by trickle down across the country. Boris Kagarlitsky described the reality this way: with the end of the cold war, Russians believed they were headed on a jet plane to Paris only to be told in mid-flight ‘welcome to Burkino Faso.’”

https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/5282-remarks-on-recent-events-in-ukraine-a-provisional-statement

This Verso blog entry is taken from a talk given on February 27 at the 2022 Annual Meetings of the Association of American Geographers.