Beyond Barrages and Boundaries

Author(s):  
Cheryl Colopy

A low dam girdles the Ganga about sixty miles beyond Bhagalpur. More than a mile and a half across, the structure is the longest barrage in the world. It has 109 gates, almost twice as many as the Koshi barrage I traveled over near the Nepal-India border. Its name, Farakka, is anathema to people throughout Bangladesh. In India mainly fishermen on the Ganga know much about it. The barrage, which sits just eleven miles from the international border that separates the tiny nation from its big neighbor, has poisoned relations between the two governments for forty years. The story of Farakka is one of the thorniest river disputes on the subcontinent. Whole books have been written about it on both sides of the border as well as by international commentators, not to mention the technical treatises it has engendered. The barrage did not accomplish the task for which it was built and has harmed people in both India and Bangladesh. Farakka offers a warning about how not to handle transboundary rivers to prevent complex subcontinental watersharing problems from becoming crises in the future. Borders fragment the river system in the Ganges basin, creating unique transboundary water management challenges. To visualize the Indian subcontinent’s river-sharing problems, imagine a slice of pizza. Take a bite out of the middle of the bumpy top crust. That’s Nepal. Then take a small bite out of the right, or eastern edge, just below the crust. That’s Bangladesh. The rest of the slice is India. These three nations share the greater Ganges basin. The river spills into the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh after flowing across the wide top part of India. Many of the river’s major tributaries come from Nepal. The smaller slice of pizza to the west would include Pakistan and the Indus River, but that’s another complicated story. Now move the piece of pizza to North America and pretend the United States is the majority of the slice.

Author(s):  
Paul J. Bolt ◽  
Sharyl N. Cross

The Conclusion reviews the volume’s major themes. Russia and China have common interests that cement their partnership, and are key players in shaping the international order. Both seek better relations with the West, but on the basis of “mutual respect” and “equality.” While the relationship has grown deeper, particularly since 2014, China and Russia are partners but not allies. Thus, their relationship is marked by burgeoning cooperation, but still areas of potential competition and friction. Russia in particular must deal with China’s growing relative power at the same time that it is isolated from the West. While the Russian–Chinese relationship creates challenges for the United States and Europe and a return of major power rivalry, there is also room for cooperation in the strategic triangle comprising China, Russia, and the West. Looking ahead, the world is in a period of dramatic transition.


2021 ◽  
pp. 932-950
Author(s):  
Vladislav Vyacheslavovich Emelyanov

Every few decades, the world order changes due to various geopolitical, economic and other circumstances. For example, as a result of globalization, the world order has undergone significant changes in the last forty years. Globalization has led to the destruction of the postwar world order, as well as to world leadership by the United States and the West. However, in recent decades, as a result of globalization, the U.S. and the West began to cede their leadership to developing countries, so there is now a change in the economic structure of relations in the world system. Today the center of economic growth is in the East, namely in Asia. There are no new superpowers in the world at the moment, but the unipolar world will cease to exist due to the weakening of the U. S. leadership, which will lead to a change in the world order. A new leader, which may replace the U. S., will not have as wide range of advantages as the USA has. Most likely, the essence of the new order will be to unite the largest countries and alliances into blocks, for example, the USA together with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the EU, etc. The article outlines forecasts of GDP growth rates as well as the global energy outlook; analyzes the LNG market as well as the impact of the pandemic on the global oil and gas market; and lists the characteristics of U. S. geopolitics.


2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (3) ◽  
pp. 5-23
Author(s):  
Grzegorz W. Kolodko ◽  

The huge leap made by the Chinese economy over the past four decades as a result of market reforms and openness to the world is causing fear in some and anxiety in others. Questions arise as to whether China’s economic success is solid and whether economic growth will be followed by political expansion. China makes extensive use of globalization and is therefore interested in continuing it. At the same time, China wants to give it new features and specific Chinese characteristics. This is met with reluctance by the current global hegemon, the United States, all the more so as there are fears that China may promote its original political and economic system, "cynicism", abroad. However, the world is still big enough to accommodate us all. Potentially, not necessarily. For this to happen, we need the right policies, which in the future must also include better coordination at the supranational level.


2021 ◽  
pp. 0192513X2110544
Author(s):  
Jeffrey A. Miles ◽  
Stefanie E. Naumann

College students’ parenting intentions have received increased attention by scholars around the world in recent years, but little is known about potential demographic differences affecting the decision, such as gender and sexual orientation. The study proposed and empirically examined a model of the relationships between gender, sexual orientation, social self-concept, and parenting intentions in a large sample of university students on the west coast of the United States. The study found that social self-concept mediated the relationship between gender and parenting intentions for heterosexual students, but not for non-heterosexual students.


There has been a neglect on the part of Western governments with focus on the U.S. to take seriously the internet campaign that ISIS has been waging since 2014 and the affective response that still draws citizens from across the world into their promise of a civilized, united nation for Muslims. It is possible that the West, even with a severely increased commitment to fighting the Islamic State, may be too late. This chapter will explore responses by Western governments including the United States to fight internet-enabled terrorism.


Author(s):  
François Grosjean

The author discovered American Sign Language (ASL) and the world of the deaf whilst in the United States. He helped set up a research program in the psycholinguistics of ASL and describes a few studies he did. He also edited, with Harlan Lane, a special issue of Langages on sign language, for French colleagues. The author then worked on the bilingualism and biculturalism of the deaf, and authored a text on the right of the deaf child to become bilingual. It has been translated into 30 different languages and is known the world over.


Author(s):  
David Abulafia

The Allied victory over Germany in the Second World War, like that in the First, left the Mediterranean unsettled. After Greece emerged from its civil war with a pro-western government, there were ever louder rumbles in Cyprus, where the movement calling for enôsis, union with Greece, was gathering pace again. Precisely because the Greeks sided with the West, and because Turkey had kept out of the war, during the late 1940s the United States began to see the Mediterranean as an advance position in the new struggle against the expanding power of the Soviet Union. The explicit theme was the defence of democracy against Communist tyranny. Stalin’s realism had prevented him from supporting Communist insurgency in Greece, but he was keen to find ways of gaining free access to the Mediterranean through the Dardanelles. In London and Washington, the fear that Soviet allies would establish themselves on the shores of the Mediterranean remained real, since the partisan leader in Yugoslavia, Tito, had played the right cards during the last stages of the war, even winning support from the British. Moreover, the Italians had lost Zadar along with the naval base at Kotor and chunks of Dalmatia they had greedily acquired during the war, while Albania, after an agonizing period of first Italian and then German occupation, had recovered its independence under the Paris-educated Communist leader Enver Hoxha, whose uncompromising stance was to bring his country into ever-greater isolation. When he took power, Hoxha imagined that his country would form part of a brotherly band of socialist nations, alongside Tito’s renascent Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. Close ties with the Yugoslavs were sealed by economic pacts which reveal Tito’s hope of drawing Albania into the Yugoslav federation. Hoxha had other aspirations, and in his view Albania’s right to defend every square inch of the national territory extended into the waters off the Albanian coast: the Corfu Channel, long used as a waterway linking Greece to the Adriatic, was mined to prevent foreign incursions. Britain decided to send warships through the channel, asserting its right to police the Mediterranean on behalf of the nations of the world.


Author(s):  
Rodney A. Smolla

This chapter begins with an account of Anna Anderson, an immigrant to the United States who claimed to be the Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia that was exposed to be fake after a DNA test. It discusses the collusive connections between Russia and the American radical alt-right. It also identifies several figures that were prominent in the Unite the Right events in Charlottesville in 2017 and strongly supported the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump. The chapter highlights how alt-right groups idolize Russia's leader Vladimir Putin, seeing him as the sort of strong-willed authoritarian dedicated to “traditional values” that the world needs. It discloses how Russia has been the hospitable home and host of American right-wing extremists, such as David Duke who moved to Russia in 1999.


Author(s):  
S. Nazrul Islam

Chapter 4 provides a few case studies of rivers to illustrate the consequences of the Commercial approach. These rivers are: the Colorado River of the United States; the Murray-Darling river system of Australia; the Amu Darya and Syr Darya of the former Soviet Union; the Nile River of Africa; and the Indus River of South Asia. It shows that in each case, the application of the Commercial approach has led to river fragmentation and excessive withdrawal of water, leading to exhaustion of rivers, which in turn led to salinity intrusion and erosion, subsidence, and desiccation of the deltas. The ecology of the river basins has been damaged, including loss of aquatic and terrestrial biodiversity. In case of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya Rivers, this damage includes the destruction of the Aral Sea, once considered the second-largest inland waterbody of the world. In each case, the Commercial approach has led to conflicts among co-riparian countries.


2020 ◽  
pp. 234-264
Author(s):  
Waldemar Heckel

The campaign in the Punjab saw Alexander, supported by his Indian ally Taxiles, attack Porus, who lived beyond the Hydaspes River. The battle, at the beginning of the monsoon season, involved a division of the Macedonian forces. One part faced Porus at the river crossing, where the current and the elephants in the Indian army made a direct attack virtually impossible. Alexander took a portion of his army and marched upstream. Once across the river, he drew Porus away from his defensive position and defeated the Indian ruler in a battle fought primarily by cavalry, although the Macedonian pikemen inflicted injuries on the elephants, which became a danger to their own troops. After the Hydaspes victory, Alexander advanced to the Hyphasis (Beas), where the army refused to cross in order to march to the Ganges. The whole episode was contrived, since Alexander clearly had no intention of going farther east. His failure to reach the eastern end of the world was thus attributed to the timidity and war-weariness of his soldiers. During the descent of the Indus river system, Alexander received a near-fatal wound at the hands of the Mallians. Once he recovered, Alexander conducted a series of bloody massacres as he sailed to the mouth of the Indus and accomplished his goal of sailing out into the ocean. Although the Indian campaign was by far the bloodiest of the expedition, there was little long-term gain from the conquest.


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