Afghanistan has experienced more than four decades of severe disruption, ever since the communist coup of April 1978 plunged the country into a state of disorder that was then severely aggravated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979. Despite the high hopes that accompanied the overthrow of the Taliban regime in 2001, Afghanistan's path in the first two decades of the 21st century has proved to be anything but smooth, and this article highlights a confluence of challenges - political, diplomatic, and societal - that Afghanistan presently faces, challenges that in large measure account for the profound uncertainty that clouds its future. The article is divided into four sections. The first provides some context for the discussion of these three challenges. The remaining sections investigate the particular challenges - intra-elite rivalries, a fragile and defective peace process, and the underreported but grave threat to life and limb in Afghanistan resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic - in more detail. Together, these challenges highlight the dangers of wishful thinking about harsh realities.

This essay, based on an oral presentation, provides the non-specialist, with an evaluation of the Mongols' influence and China and, to a lesser extent, on Russia and the Middle East. Starting in the 1980s, specialists challenged the conventional wisdom about the Mongol Empire's almost entirely destructive influence on global history. They asserted that Mongols promoted vital economic, social, and cultural exchanges among civilizations. Chinggis Khan, Khubilai Khan, and other rulers supported trade, adopted policies of toleration toward foreign religions, and served as patrons of the arts, architecture, and the theater. Eurasian history starts with the Mongols. Exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art confirmed that the Mongol era witnessed extraordinary developments in painting, ceramics, manuscript illustration, and textiles. To be sure, specialists did not ignore the destruction and killings that the Mongols engendered.
This reevaluation has prompted both sophisticated analyses of the Mongols' legacy in Eurasian history. The Ming dynasty, the Mongols' successor in China, adopted some of the principles of Mongol military organization and tactics and were exposed to Tibetan Buddhism and Persian astronomy and medicine. The Mongols introduced agricultural techniques, porcelain, and artistic motifs to the Middle East, and supported the writing of histories. They also promoted Sufism in the Islamic world and influenced Russian government, trade, and art, among other impacts. Europeans became aware, via Marco Polo who traveled through the Mongols' domains, of Asian products, as well as technological, scientific, and philosophical innovations in the East and were motivated to find sea routes to South and East Asia.

The city of Sumqayit in Azerbaijan was famous in the USSR for its chemical plants, which supplied the whole country with plastics, detergents, and fertilizers. While production increased in the post- WWII period, young people from remote Caucasian villages were attracted as workers to the industrial settlement on the shore of the Caspian Sea and worked together with specialists from all over the USSR. Migration did not stop when the USSR collapsed. To the contrary, mobility increased as Azerbaijani refugees from Armenia and IDPs from Karabakh fled to Sumqayit, which grew to become the second-largest city of Azerbaijan. Although a generation has passed since the ceasefire, IDPs still are separately administered. In the last 20 years, more and more internal migrants have chosen the Greater Baku Region as their destination, mostly finding jobs in the informal labor market. In the post-independence transformative period, informal housing has offered migrants a place to stay in the city. Sumqayit can be regarded as an arrival city, an established urban platform for migrants who prefer internal over transnational migration.

This paper traces the trajectory of a variety of complicated economic and political developments between China and India - the world's most ancient civilizations connected by rich history. These recent developments, which are heavily acrimonious and include military clashes involving loss of lives, have greatly damaged bilateral relations. The paper examines the reasons behind the bilateral relations dipping to new lows. Aside from specific bilateral disputes like outstanding border problems, China-India relations have been affected by global and regional developments. The paper identifies rising tensions between the U.S. and China, the evolution of the Belt and Road Initiative, and the growth of the Indo-Pacific construct, as the reasons that have expanded distance and mistrust between the two countries. Both China and India are now part of country coalitions aiming to marginalize each other's strategic influences. The paper argues that such efforts by them are going to impact countries in their neighbourhood - such as in Central Asia - by forcing them to make complex choices in the areas of trade engagement and technological development.

This paper focuses on the emerging patterns of educational mobility and unskilled labor migration from Uzbekistan to Japan and South Korea. Labor migration and educational mobility are becoming the next “horizon” in the expanded relationship between East and Central Asia, powered by several factors, including the efforts by Japan and South Korea to build “original” people-oriented policy engagements with the region and the demand from Central Asian states, such as Uzbekistan, to provide more labor opportunities to their young and growing populations. This paper presents the initial findings of a pilot survey that explores and occasionally compares the experiences of Uzbek migrants to Japan and South Korea, using datasets of face-to-face interviews related to various aspects of life in Japan and South Korea. The interviews were conducted face to face and online (Telegram, Skype, etc.) with 66 migrants and Japanese language school students (whom this paper treats as labor migrants masquerading as students) in Japan from November 2019 to January 2020 as well as online with 30 laborers and students in South Korea from August to September 2020.

The article closely considers an important aspect of the operation of nomadic charisma that has not yet been sufficiently addressed by historians. To do so, it examines the dynamics of nomadic power relations and the nomads' ensuing sense of properly balanced relations of power that found its manifestation when their rulers were required to share power in an effective way, one that would satisfy all parties involved. This was translated into the requirement to comply with established norms of social reciprocity toward one's kinsfolk that became crystallized into certain patterns of behavior. I argue that adherence to these patterns constituted the essential attributes of the nomads' psychological and cultural expectations that shaped their perception of a charismatic style of ruling.