ፍትህ ለሁሉም / Justice for All
In November 1917, Britain’s Balfour Declaration opened the door to the founding of Israel 30 years later. And it has had a major impact on the Middle East. The British government issued a public statement that contained a letter from Foreign Minister Arthur Balfour to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a leader of the British Jewish …
Britain in Palestine 1917-1948 investigates the contradictory promises and actions which defined British Mandatory rule in Palestine and laid the groundwork for the Nakba (the catastrophe) and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The roots of the contemporary social, political, economic, and environmental landscape of Palestine and Israel can be traced back …
The attack on Israel by the militant Islamist group Hamas that started on 7 October 2023 adds a new dimension to the Middle East conflict: From the Gaza strip, fighters of the Palestinian terrorist organisation were able to cross into Israeli territory, take Israeli hostages, and kill hundreds of soldiers and civilians. Israel responded by …
There is barely a country in Europe that cannot look back on Germanic roots. The term ‘Germanic’ actually refers to a number of tribes and clans that lived in Central and Northern Europe from the 6th century BC. Gaius Julius Caesar is said to have used the word when talking about the Gallic war. However, …
The eruption of the Mount Toba supervolcano in the Indonesian island of Sumatra 74,000 years ago brought about an era of severe environmental degradation that decimated populations of Neanderthals and modern humans. Archaeological evidence suggests that modern humans survived this era by creating cooperative intergroup social networks and behaving like tribes. Neanderthals, on the other …
Of all species on the face of the earth, humans are the most disperse, in that they occupy the most diverse eco-systems present on all large land masses and most large islands. In recent time, much work has been done using maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA, and non-recombinant Y (NRY) chromosome markers to map human migration …
For more than three hundred years during the Late Bronze Age, from about 1500 BC until just after 1200 BC, the Mediterranean region played host to a complex international world in which Egyptians, Mycenaeans, Minoans, Hittites, Assyrians, Babylonians, Cypriots, Trojans, and Canaanites all interacted. They created a cosmopolitan world-system, with flourishing cities such as Mycenae, …
The collapse of complex societies of the past can inform the present on the risks of collapse. Dr. Joseph Tainter, author of the book The Collapse of Complex societies, and featured in Leonardo Dicaprio’s film The Eleventh Hour, details the factors that led to the collapse of past civilizations including the Roman Empire. Watch the …
Peter Turchin is a social scientist at the University of Connecticut who studies the math of social integration and disintegration. Peter created the field of Cliodynamics and delves into how he predicts the trajectory of social cohesion based on historical data from 200 societies, why elite overproduction is bad, and how we can avoid disaster …
What are the key differences between complicated and complex? How can we better understand energy and society through these key distinctions? Tainter explains our current predicament based on decades of research and offers pathways for our collective future. Joe Tainter has been a professor at Utah State University in the Environment and Society Department since …