Thinking East

As previously announced, Schwartz and I had been planning to launch a project beyond this rather personal weblog. Things got sorted out within the last two weeks, and we are proud to give birth to Thinking East, a nonprofit e-publishing platform. Our preliminary mission statement:

Israel, Turkey, the Caucasus, the Arabs, Iran and the ‘Stans –- these peoples and places comprise the eternal frontier of human history. Welcome to the Wild East!

The earliest migrations of homo sapiens out of Africa arrived here before anywhere else. The epic struggles of the Bible and Qur’an unfolded here. Across this tumultuous landscape stretched the Silk Road, the great caravan route of precious metals, spices and fabrics, for the mastery of which warred the empires of the Classical Age.

Today, scholars, journalists and leaders are once again recognizing the region as the linchpin of civilization. The collapse of the Soviet Union left a vacuum which has changed and charged the geopolitical composition. Local and world powers now vie to control a new Silk Road, a great transit route of oil and natural gas, radical religious ideologies, and drug and human smuggling.
Yet, the conceptual frameworks of the global intelligentsia are too deeply rooted in the fossilized thinking of the Cold War to truly understand just what it is that is happening in this multifarious region. Innovative visions are badly needed.

Thinking-East.Net is a nonprofit e-publishing platform for young academics daring enough to physically and intellectually trek across the manifold thematic borderlands posed to the human mind by the Wild East. The network specifically seeks individuals under the age of 25 who are not professional journalists but seek to thoughtfully cover and reflect upon Asian issues.

Thanks to Ollie from Berlin-based creative design manufacture Graco, we will be able to use an innovative content-management-system, allowing us to enable people from the concerned countries to directly publish and share their ideas with interested readers.

More is yet to come as the ideas will take shape within the next weeks.