Oxford University Press's
Academic Insights for the Thinking World
By Alia Brahimi
“The air freight bomb plot should be understood as part of al-Qaeda’s pervasive weakness rather than its strength. The intended targets, either a synagogue in Chicago and/or a UPS plane which would explode over a western city, were chosen as part of the attempt to re-focus al-Qaeda’s violence back towards western targets and pull the jihad away from the brink.”
Amanda H. Podany is Professor of History at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. Her new book, Brotherhood of Kings: How International Relations Shaped the Ancient Near East, is a vivid tour of a thousand years of ancient Near Eastern history, from 2300 to 1300 BCE. She focuses on the establishment of international diplomacy, how the great kings of the day devised diplomacy and trade. In the excerpt below we learn about a marriage contract between two kings, one of the ways countries sealed alliances.
Timothy H. Parsons is Professor of African History at Washington University. His new book, The Rule of Empires: Those Who Built Them, Those Who Endured Them, and Why They Always Fail, illuminates the features common to all empires and lays bare the rationalization of imperialists and their apologists and exposes the true goals, and limits, of hard power. In the excerpt below, from the beginning of a chapter on Muslim Spain, we learn about the conquest of Spain.
An excerpt from Guardians of the Revolution: Iran and the World in the Age o Ayatollahs.