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Condemned to Repetition?: The Rise, Fall, and Reprise of Soviet-Russian Military Interventionism, 1973-1996. By Andrew Bennett. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999. 387p. $35.00 cloth, $17.50 paper.
Philip S. Gillette, Old Dominion University
In this rich, dense book Andrew Bennett develops learning theory (LT) and uses it to explain Soviet and Russian military interventions from 1973 to 1996. In advancing LT, Bennett joins other scholars who emphasize ideational rather than material factors in foreign policy (e.g., Jack Levy, "Learning and Foreign Policy: Sweeping a Conceptual Minefield," International Organization 48 [Spring 1994]: 279-312). Indeed, the ideational concept "military interventionalism" (defined as the propensity of an actor to use force in varying contexts) is crucial to Bennett's argument that the USSR/ Russia learned from intervention (and nonintervention) experiences (e.g., from successes and failures) in the form of raised or lowered interventionalism, which in turn shaped subsequent interventions and noninterventions (p. 14).
The major contribution of Condemned to Repetition? appears to be an outline of a comprehensive LT. Learning is defined as "change in cognitive structures as the result of experience or study"-on the individual, organizational, governmental, and international levels (p. 81). Bennett summarizes key dynamics of learning on each level of analysis and employs the first three levels to explain intervention. In showing how individual belief systems change, Bennett dwells on attribution biases, mechanisms of causal inference, processes of change in interrelated beliefs, and sources of variations in individual learning. Organizations, in contrast, learn when inferences from history are encoded into "routines that guide behavior" (pp. 98-9). Moreover, Bennett points out how organizational learning models differ significantly from bureaucratic process models. Finally, governmental learning involves...