As China’s power and influence continue to grow in Asia and beyond, many analysts look to Chinese history to understand how a strong China will behave and view the world in the future. Many of these attempts to apply an historical lens engage in gross simplifications and misreadings of the relevance and meaning of hundreds […]
Historians have long battled to get into Hitler’s mind to figure out why he did what he did, but there are no answers. Perhaps, there never will either. Read Here – Financial Times
Whatever the reasons for observed differences in social adaptive capacities, it follows that some societies will be roiled more and others less when significant change and associated accelerated pluralization occur on a planetary scale, as is occurring today. Some societies are thus bound to be seen as causing or “owning” the sources of change while […]
The new 48 episode series, which began airing on August 8, is the first officially-sanctioned dramatization of Deng’s rise to the position of paramount leader from 1976 to 1984 during one of the most tumultuous periods in contemporary Chinese politics. Befitting its subject matter, the series appears to have buy-in at the highest levels: It […]
A muscular, Hindu-dominant India is re-creating its Gods in its attempt to show the new, raw power that many Indians would want to associate with the new government that in it own way espouses a different set of social paradigm. Read Here
Why would China fear a nation it could traumatize tomorrow by dumping its debt or shifting its iron ore, coal and copper orders elsewhere? That’s a good question for the United States to ask itself. Read Here – Bloomberg
Iraq is really three separate geographical regions, now contested by Kurds and Arabs ethnically, Arabic and Kurdish speakers linguistically, and Sunni and Shiite Muslims religiously. Ethnically Iraqis are approximately 75 percent Arabs, 20 percent Kurds, and 5 percent Turkmen and Assyrians. Religiously they are 65 percent Shiite Muslims, 30 percent Sunni Muslims, and 5 percent […]
What’s in a name? Place names often change, and those changes stem from a tangle of politics and language. A fun tool from Google, the Ngram Viewer, lets us watch those changes play out across history. The Ngram Viewer charts how often a particular word appears in some five million books digitized as part of the […]
Ferghana is the hotspot of Central Asia. It is an ethnic soup with hundreds of thousands of Kyrgyz and Tajik living in Uzbek Ferghana and vice-versa. Ethnic tensions, sporadic violence and in 2010 the region erupted in violence when hundreds were killed. Read Here – The Hindu
“The water in Afghanistan,” General Zia-ul-Haq had told his spymaster in December 1979, “must boil at the right temperature.” India still has time to learn from the lessons of the war that was lost 25 years ago, and work to make sure the pot doesn’t boil over, writes Praveen Swami Read Here – The Hindu
looking beyond borders 