Reflection Of Mahbubani

When the world famous liberal thinker Francis Fukuyama in his masterpiece declared that we were witnessing the end of the history, he was greeting the new political structure and also the new international environment, which is peaceful[1]. However, developments that occurred after the collapse of the Soviet Union showed us that the dissolution of the Soviets was unexpected. The international society was not ready for peace and Fukuyama’s optimistic assumptions were far from becoming real. Moreover, the international society currently started to realise that the tension and the potential of mass destructive war during the Cold War era had provided a

Gouch, C., LeGuin, C., & Walton, L. (1998). Chapter 14. In the Balance: Themes in Global History). [PDF]. Retrieved from http://www.learner.org/courses/worldhistory/support/reading 20 1.PDF

Samuel Huntington’s controversial article “The Clash of Civilizations?” was first published in Foreign Affairs in 1993 and was subsequently turned into a book in 1996 titled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. As this paper will show Huntington’s work can be seen as a product of the post-Cold War context it was written in. Huntington’s article takes a new perspective on the new world order and outlines a different way a thinking about how future world conflicts will unfold. Since the initial journal article was published in 1993 there has been a great deal of response from academics and also from Huntington himself. A majority of the responses come in the form of critiques, with the authors offering their own insight into how the post-Cold War World will operate. Although the validity of Huntington’s arguments have been questioned, it did create a great deal of controversy in the academic world. As Huntington explained in the preface of his 1996 book, the original article published in Foreign Affairs created more discussion in three years than any other article published in the journal since the 1940s.

I enjoyed reading this book a lot due to the fact that it influenced me in many ways. The first way this book influenced me was how strong hope is. We underestimate many times how strong hope is. We usually complain and complain and never even think about hope. We just get down on ourselves because of the things that we don’t like. Let’s face it, we are lazy. If Ishmael Beah would have been lazy when he was going through his journey than he wouldn’t have achieved what he has so far. He stated “My eyes widened, a smile forming on my face. Even in the middle of the madness there remained that true and natural beauty, and it took my mind away from my current situation as I marveled at this sight.” This shows that Ishmael Beah was able to find beauty but how? It was through hope. He always reminded himself of his childhood and he had hope that it would be the same as it was before by finding his family. We need to start to incorporate hope into our lives. Hope will allow us to survive the hard times that we are going through. Hope allowed Ishmael Beah to survive so why can’t it help us survive something that is not even close to the level of what he went through. A great example for students where they could use more hope is testing especially AP tests. How? How will this even produce positive effects? How will this even help the student? Hope will definitely allow you to get a better score. When you have hope in yourself then you feel better about yourself instantly. This

“East meets West in my work, but I haven’t made an attempt to merge the two worlds. They exist in opposition” (Morimura 1990).

Brian Levack, Edward Muir, Micheal Maas, Meredith Veldman. The West: Encounters and Transformations, Consise Edition. Pearson: Upper Saddle River, 2009. Print

This direct linkage between modernization and westernization is, in fact, historically inaccurate. The history of technology development has actually indicated that the ideology or culture doesn’t really influence the modernization. When adopting modernisation, countries, including Saudi Arabia, Israel, doesn’t necessarily need to change its own culture. While most Muslim-majority countries are still undeveloped countries, the driving force is not their culture, but instead the clash of civilization itself. The fault line wars characterised by Huntington in fact have majorly taken place in the Middle East, including the war on terror and the Arab–Israeli War. This clash of civilisation characterised by fault line wars, in fact, leads to the chaos and poverty there. The appearance of this pre-modern image of those Muslim Countries is not the justification for the westernisation but the result of the clash of civilizations. Therefore, the inverted causality is inaccurate, and shall be corrected, as the clash of civilization can, in fact, hardly help those

In the book Guns, Germs and Steels, Jared Diamond illuminates how and why the human societies of different continents followed widely divergent pathways of development over the past 13,000 years. In the preface of the article, Diamond mainly demonstrates the problem about what cause the huge disparities between Euraisa and the rest of the world. Among the various answers to this complicated question, the easiest one is to attribute these differences, mainly of human technology and culture, to the inherent differences in the minds and bodies of the various peoples. However, Diamond refutes this point of view, and, instead, he puts forward that the roots of inequality in modern world lie in differences among peoples’ environments. To support

“The Holocaust was the systematic, bureaucratic, state -sponsored persecution and murder of six million Jews by the Nazi regime and its collaborators.”( www.ushmm.org)When the Holocaust happened the Germans focused on Jews more than they focused on any other racial group. While several millions of people were killed , many survived the Holocaust to tell their story . Some like Elie Wiesel, wrote their story from personal experience.Others like Vladek Spiegelman told told their story with the help of relatives. In Elie Wiesel’s story , he talks about how his life was before and during the Holocaust. In Vladek's story , by his son, Art, Spiegelman, was told through a series of interviews and a graphic novel. The authors of Night and

The craft of writing is a complex one, filled with characters,setting,plot and surprises. A book will take you on a journey through many different lands real or fake, this journey is filled with twists and turns stopping at the end of the road. Ishmael Beah is a writer who took readers on this journey twice.

In trying to summarize this piece of writing, I have tried to talk about what stood out to me, all quotations used for emphasis are from The myth of the continents: A critique of metageography (University of California Press: 1997).

For more than 50 years, the cold war grabbed the attention of many of the world’s nations. This happened due to the evident rising powers of the United States and the Soviet Union. Both of them wanted an upper hand on the power influence and hence half the century was spent under conflict and unsettled disputes. Later the Soviet Union broke down and divided into separate republics, giving freedom to the West. But this liberation led to uncertainties for the West’s future leadership. Many issues arose questioning whether the change will decrease the danger or will the West be able to maintain the position in world’s affairs during the millennium? Will the twenty-first century be more peaceful and have productive outcomes than the twentieth

Stuart Hall’s The West and the Rest and Edward Said’s Orientalism both explore notions of power and discourse with regard to the dynamics of the Western world and the non-Western world. The works engage with the concept of a worldwide binary of two unequal sides, and how certain discourses, namely that of “the West and the Rest”, and Orientalism, have both stemmed from this idea and worked to maintain it. While Hall engages with the idea of “the West and the Rest” – the Western world and how it has been defined in opposition to the non-Western – Said analyses the relationship between “the Orient and the Occident” (2). Said’s work reflects in a more concrete way what Hall proposes in his, using the example of “the Orient” as part of “the Rest” against which the Western world positions itself. Both pieces convey significant ideas about how power informs perceptions of difference between societies, and in turn how discourse forms and maintains global hegemonic power.

From this book Zakaria has taught me and all of of his other readers that big changes are coming. That history as we know it is slowly being rewritten as we know it. That what was seen as impossible even 10 years ago is a reality and we are living through it, how exciting! The United States won’t be the main superpower of the world, countries we would never expect to rise economically are rising the superpower penthouse is growing. Zaharia believes this Post-American world will

Samuel Huntington sees an emerging world organized on the basis of "civilizations". Societies that share cultural affinities cooperate with each other and the efforts to force a society into another civilization will fail; countries gather around the leading States of their civilization. This description of the process of new structures of international relations that Huntington sees developing, leads him to consider that the greatest risks of violence and confrontation lie in the Westerns’ claims to universality, which are leading them to increasingly get into conflict with other civilizations, particularly Islam and China; local conflicts, especially between Muslims and non-Muslims, generate new alliances and lead to an escalation of violence, which will usually lead the dominant states to make an attempt to stop them.