Book Launch: Nicaragua Must Survive. Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War

The CWRN is proud to announce that it will co-sponsor, together with  the Center for Latin American Research and Documentation and the Modern History Research Group, the book launch of Dr Eline van Ommen Nicaragua Must Survive. Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War (University of California Press, December 2023).

Dr van Ommen’s book tells the story of the Sandinistas’ innovative diplomatic campaign, which captured the imaginations of people around the globe and transformed Nicaraguan history at the tail end of the Cold War. The Sandinistas’ diplomacy went far beyond elite politics, as thousands of musicians, politicians, teachers, activists, priests, feminists, and journalists flocked to the country to experience the revolution firsthand. Drawing on extensive archival research and interviews, Eline van Ommen reveals the role that Western Europe played in Nicaragua’s revolutionary diplomacy. Blending grassroots organizing and formal foreign policy, pragmatic guerrillas, creative diplomats, and ambitious activists from Europe and the Americas were able to create an international environment in which the Sandinista Revolution could survive despite the odds. Dr van Ommen argues that this diplomacy was remarkably effective, propelling Nicaragua into the global limelight and allowing the revolutionaries to successfully challenge the United States’ role in Central America.

Eline van Ommen is a Lecturer in Contemporary History at the University of Leeds, specializing in revolutions, transnational activism, and the Cold War in Latin America. She published her first book, Nicaragua Must Survive: Sandinista Revolutionary Diplomacy in the Global Cold War with the University of California Press in 2024. She is the co-editor of a special issue on the international dimensions of the Nicaraguan Revolution for the journal The Americas, published in 2021. Eline completed her PhD at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2020, and her thesis was awarded the BIHG Michael Dockrill International History Thesis prize.