Thinking East #2

Schwartz and I will take some energy away from this blog - putting it into a new project called 'Thinking East'. We will start looking for other contributors, soon. Our new statement follows:

Ours is a time of new frontiers in religion, science, politics, economics and morality. The boundaries of human civilization are reaching once unimaginable new heights, with results both glorious and grotesque... and all of these frontiers are violently converging upon one terrain: North Africa, Israel and the Arab States, Turkey, the Caucasus, Iran and Central Asia – the spine of the Earth – the East.

The earliest migrations of homo sapiens out of Africa arrived in the regions of the East 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 has 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 desperately needed.

Thinking-East.Net is a nonprofit e-publishing platform, started by two young academics for other young academics who believe they can develop innovative thinking about current events in North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia; who are daring enough to physically and intellectually trek across the manifold thematic borderlands posed to the human mind by the modern “Wild East.” The network specifically seeks individuals under the age of 25, wherever they may be in Asia, whatever their expertise (preferably politics, social sciences, etc.), whatever their race, gender and religion, who are not professional journalists but seek to thoughtfully cover and reflect upon Asian issues.

For more information, please don't hesitate to contact us.