1954–
A scholar who reread war after withdrawal
"The regime of President Najibullah, however, survived until April 1992, over three years after the Soviet withdrawal," he wrote, against predictions that it would fall within months of the Soviet departure.
Mark N. Katz is an American scholar of international politics whose research covers Russian politics and foreign policy, revolution, and the war on terror. At George Mason University, he taught and wrote on Soviet and Russian policy in the Third World and the international dimensions of revolutionary movements. In a 2011 analysis of the Afghanistan withdrawal, he argued that Soviet military and economic aid sustained Najibullah's regime for more than three years after the troops left, challenging the assumption that withdrawal necessarily meant imminent collapse.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1976B.A. in international relations, University of California, Riverside
- 1978M.A. in international relations, Johns Hopkins SAIS
- 1982Ph.D. in political science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
- 1982Soviet Affairs Analyst, U.S. Department of State
- 1988Assistant Professor of Government and Politics, George Mason University
- 1998Professor of Government and Politics, George Mason University
- 2011Published “Lessons of the Soviet Withdrawal from Afghanistan”
- 2024Retired from George Mason University as professor emeritus
Related historical events
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionScholar who analysed the Russian RevolutionIn his 1997 book, he analysed the 1917 Russian revolution as culminating in the Bolshevik coup.
- 1979–1989The Soviet-Afghan WarAnalyst of withdrawal lessonsAnalyzed how Najibullah's regime survived over three years after the withdrawal through continued Soviet aid, challenging Western assumptions of inevitable collapse.
The typology and waves of revolution
From studying Soviet policy in the Third World, Katz shifted the axis of his research toward the comparative study of revolution itself. In his 1997 book Revolutions and Revolutionary Waves, he divided revolutions into six forms: rural revolution, urban revolution, coup d'état, revolution from above, revolution from without, and revolution by osmosis. These categories are not mutually exclusive: the Russian revolution of 1917 began as an urban revolution that deposed the tsar, continued as a rural revolution, and ended in the Bolshevik coup. He added a second axis, the relations among revolutions, distinguishing the central revolution of a great power that leads a revolutionary wave, aspiring revolutions that follow it, subordinate or puppet revolutions, and rival revolutions that compete with the centre. The military support that Marxist regimes such as the USSR, Cuba, Angola, Ethiopia and Nicaragua gave one another in the 1970s and 1980s is explained as a relation between central and subordinate revolutions. He further sorted revolutions by what they opposed (anti-monarchy, anti-dictatorial, anti-capitalist, anti-communist, anti-democratic) and by what they favoured (pro-fascist, pro-liberal, pro-communist, pro-nationalist).
This framework raises the problem of periodising a wave. Katz dated the Marxist-Leninist wave from 1917 to 1991 and the fascist wave from 1922 to 1945, but confined an anti-communist wave to 1989-1991. In the same book he suggested that Buddhism and Confucianism might supply the ideology of future revolutionary waves, and that nationalisms such as Pan-Turanianism and Pan-Slavism could also form waves. He revisited the question in Reflections on Revolutions (1999) and continued the line of inquiry in his George Mason courses on revolution and international politics. The distinguishing feature of this work is that it treats revolution not as an isolated event but as a network of diffusion, solidarity and rivalry.