The presentation summarizes preliminary findings of my research project on Allied policy towards resistance groups during World War II and its impact on post-war political and ideological divisions.

The research is linked with a multiplicity of historical problems: the western Allies’ balance of political and military considerations during World War II; the Anglo-American cooperation and competition in the field of intelligence; the use of special operations as an instrument of foreign policy, especially in regard to countries where the development of resistance movements had a strong impact on post-war settlement (e.g. Yugoslavia, Greece and Poland); the politics of communist movements between war and revolution in Central and Eastern Europe; the relationship between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union and the Allies’ perception of the latter.

The particular contribution of the project is to bring together aspects which are usually addressed separately: the different national scenarios, whose connections and mutual influence will be investigated; the two Western intelligence agencies, which have been researched mostly in separate ways by scholars of the corresponding nationalities; the Soviet and Western allies’ policies.

Tommaso Piffer is a Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard and at the University of Cambridge. Among his publications is a biography of Alfredo Pizzoni, the political chief of the Italian Resistance (Il Banchiere della Resistenza, 2005), an account of the relationship between the Allies and the Italian Resistance during World War II (Gli Alleati e la Resistenza Italiana, 2010) as well as several essays. He also edited a book in memory of Victor Zaslavsky on Totalitarian societies and democratic transition (Società totalitarie e transizione alla democrazia, 2011, with Vladislav Zubok) and the collection of essays on the political mass murder of Porzus (Porzus. Violenza e resistenza sul confine orientale, 2012). He is an affiliate at the Harvard Center for European Studies and a contributor to the cultural insert of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera.

Open to Stanford affiliates

Sponsored by the Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies and co-sponsored by The Europe Center

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Abstract:

Scholars of state development have paid insufficient attention to the question of regionalism; too often modeling state-building as the extension of the authority of a 'center' over peripheral territories, and too often linking regionalism to cultural or ethnic heterogeneity. A purely spatial account of the challenges to central control shows that even in the absence of cultural fractionalization, the presence of economically powerful and politically salient regions undermines political development. Three analytically distinct mechanisms - divergent public good preferences, economic self-sufficiency, and institutional design - underlie this relationship. I explore these issues through a region-wide analysis of Latin America, and case studies of the United States, Ecuador, Colombia, and early modern Poland.

Speaker Bio:

Hillel David Soifer earned his PhD in the Government Department at Harvard, and is currently Assistant Professor of Political Science at Temple University. His research has been centered in Latin America, with a focus on political development and state capacity, and has been published in journals including Latin American Research Review and Comparative Political Studies. He is currently completing a book on the long-term divergence in state capacity in Latin America which contrasts the cases of Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru.