History

“There is no justice under occupation and this court is illegal”

Muslim Troops Helped Entente Win WW I, Shaped European Security

(Informed Comment) – As the world is marking the end of the First World War first centenary and remembering its millions of military and civilian victims, in this article I’m going to focus only on one victim of the Great War and that’s the truth. There are millions of forgotten Arab and Muslim soldiers who […]

Colonialism

Human Zoos in the Age of Trump

Ariel Dorfman

Current policies echo an era when millions of Europeans and Americans considered it perfectly natural to treat fellow humans as beasts

Archaeology

How Horse-Riding in Eurasia advantaged Huns, Mongols over Farmers

Mariette Le Roux

Migrations brought Pastoralists and Plague

Ottoman Empire

Turkish Youth, WW I’s Gallipoli Battle, and the Secular-Religious Divide

contributors

The Secular Legacy of Kemal Ataturk is increasingly embattled in Erdogan’s Turkey

History

‘These are the keys of this paradise’: how 700 years of Muslim rule in Spain came to an end

contributors

By Elizabeth Drayson | (The Conversation) | – – It was the moment which set Spain on a course to become the greatest power in early modern Europe. On January 2, 1492 Abdallah Muhammad bin Ali, or Muhammad XII, known as Boabdil, the last Moorish sultan of Granada and head of the Nasrid dynasty, surrendered […]

Colonialism

British Empire’s hidden workings in India and Iran revealed in remarkable new film footage

contributors

By Jonathan Westaway | The Conversation | – – In a basement office at the Royal Geographical Society in London’s South Kensington, grainy 16mm film footage flickers silently across the screen, one of over a hundred expeditionary and travel films digitised recently by the society and the British Film Institute. They are now free to […]

Africa

What Africa taught the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – In 1957 Martin Luther King and his wife Coretta went to Ghana in connection with its independence from Britain. The British had grabbed the fabled West African Gold Coast in the nineteenth century in order to profit from its gold and other resources (after having profited […]

Authoritarianism

Putin’s Medieval Romanticism and Russia’s Lurch Right

contributors

Dina Khapaeva | (Project Syndicate) | – – As much of the world makes amends for social and political injustices of the past, Russia is lionizing its despots, raising statues to the worst of them. Behind this phenomenon is an ultra-nationalist brand of conservatism that seeks to take Russian politics back to the Middle Ages. […]