The two sides came to a patrolling agreement in October 2024 for Depsang and Demchok areas in Ladakh. As per the Indian External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar, ‘(India and China) reached an agreement on patrolling, and with that we have gone back to where the situation was in 2020 and we can say … the disengagement process with China has been completed.’
This is one of the motifs they use to comment on the decay and failure of Western approaches to the business of war-fighting and peace making. The book also finds that 21st century wars take place in already unstable geopolitical conditions. The backdrop of global disorder, evolving multipolarity, Western decline, and diminishing reliability of alliances have several negative—and some potentially advantageous—ramifications.
Towards the 1980s, Gaza emerged as the fulcrum of Palestinian resistance and in 1987, the first Palestinian Intifada started here. In 1994, the Palestinian Authority (PA) established its first headquarters in the Strip. From the beginning of the 21st century, Gaza’s politics of resilience underwent a fathomable transformation with the advent of political Islam which later overpowered Arab and Palestinian nationalisms
After conquering South Asia in the 19th century, the British decided to retain precolonial personnel, like qazis, while designing structures to meet their requirements. In 1864, however, Act XI abolished the position of qazi, as they were considered superfluous. This led to operational difficulties in Muslim legal practices and the British were forced to re-establish this position a decade later.
This was the case in many of the newly independent countries of that time, including India, but it became a bigger issue in Pakistan. Of the six major nationalities within Pakistan during its initial phase—the Pashtun, Punjabi, Baloch, Sindhi, Bengali and Mohajir, all others except one (the Punjabi) have raised questions over the national identity (Pakistani) vis-à-vis their linguistic and ethnic identities during the last seven decades. While the Bengali identity assertion resulted in the partition of Pakistan in 1971, the Sindhis
Hamid, however, has a tough time explaining away continued American military, diplomatic support and arms supplies to Israel which have resulted in the current bombing of Gaza and indiscriminate killing of women and children. Israel’s bombing of Gaza has led to over 67,000 deaths of which more than 20,000 were children and close to 170,000 injuries. To his credit, he does anticipate that the American support to Israel in the Gaza war ‘will stand as the strongest objection to the arguments in this book’. When Hamid argues that America