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

Highlighting the importance of non-state actors in foreign relations, Eline van Ommen sheds light on the international and transnational dimensions of the Nicaraguan Revolution. The innovative revolutionary diplomacy of the Sandinistas, she argues, created an international environment that was beneficial to the Nicaraguan Revolution and challenged the United States’ role in Central America. The role of Western Europe was crucial in this regard, shifting the inter-American balance of power – at least for the time being – in the Nicaraguan revolutionaries’ favor.

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 is the co-editor of a special issue on the international dimensions of the Nicaraguan Revolution for the peer-reviewed journal The Americas in 2021. Her article “The Nicaraguan Revolution's Challenge to the Monroe Doctrine: Sandinistas and Western Europe, 1979–1990,” traces the FSLN’s outreach to Western Europe in the 1980s. Van Ommen also wrote a chapter on the international campaign against Somoza in the late 1970s for the edited volume Latin America and the Global Cold War (UNC Press) in 2020. Eline van Ommen completed her PhD in International History at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in 2019. Her thesis was awarded the BIHG Michael Dockrill International History Thesis prize in 2021.

The Washington History Seminar is co-chaired by Eric Arnesen (George Washington University) and Christian Ostermann (Woodrow Wilson Center) and is organized jointly by the American Historical Association and the Woodrow Wilson Center's History and Public Policy Program. It meets weekly during the academic year. The seminar thanks its anonymous individual donors and institutional partner (the George Washington University History Department) for their continued support.