The period of masonic internationalism in the last third of the 19th and first third of the 20th centuries saw the most visible – and controversial – attempts to organisationally model the “cosmopolitan imperative” of freemasonry. The various freemasonries in Europe saw themselves as links in a world-spanning “chain of brothers” forged by the…[Read more]

Lynn Margulis’s writing about symbiosis has profoundly influenced contemporary evolutionary theory, as well as continental and analytic philosophy of science, the materialist turn, and new materialism. Nonetheless, her work, and all symbiosis or evolution, is founded on a paradox: symbiosis fictionalizes customary accounts of the origin and e…[Read more]

This article examines the political role of illness in Émile Zola’s ‘La Faute de l’abbé Mouret’ (‘The Sin of Father Mouret’, 1875) in articulating the difference between a religious and a secular body. Published in the early French Third Republic (1870–1940), this novel shows the Zolian body as the nexus upon which religious and republi…[Read more]

Several documents from Egypt and Ḫatti (especially the Amarna letters and the Egyptian-Hittite correspondence) mention envoys and messengers in charge of diplomatic contacts between the two countries. Cuneiform and hieroglyphic transcriptions of Egyptian names at Ugarit hint at an actual presence (in Ugarit and Karkemish) of officials coming f…[Read more]

Based on a discussion of the theoretical contributions of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Clastres, this article explores social relationships as more than a human dimension. Though strongly analysed by both anthropologists, these relationships appear to involve indigenous societies’ whole ecological and cosmological system. In this sense, re…[Read more]

With US economic sanctions against Russia in recent years, the Nord Stream Gas Pipeline project in Europe that links Russia and Germany via the Baltic Sea came under considerable global attention. Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine has only increased uncertainties around the Project, arguably one of the world’s most consequential submarine pip…[Read more]

The scope of the traditions related to Mahishasur is vast. There is a memorial of him in Bundelkhand, preserved by the Archaelogical Survey of India. Khajuraho’s world-famous temples also have carvings of Mahishasur.

On 9 October 2014, the police had raided the office of Forward Press. Some people associated with Hindu organizations had a c…[Read more]

The freedom of transit in international trade law originally involved the movement of goods across borders without any arbitrary or unnecessary hindrance. In this era of network-bound energy systems requiring the permanent establishment of fixed installations such as gas pipelines and high voltage power transmission grids to facilitate access to…[Read more]

How do people make sense of works of art? And how do they write to make others see the same way? There are many guides to looking at art, histories of art history and art criticism, and accounts of various ‘theories’ and ‘methods’, but this book offers something very unlike the normal search for difference and division: it examines the general…[Read more]

Freemasons often referred to an ideal of “humanité” (Humanität, umanità, humanity) in order to bridge all differences separating mankind. In doing so, they rendered these differences all the more visible, especially in the international arenas. This was definitely the case when freemasons tried to deduce from this ideal “universal” standards…[Read more]

The article outlines how comprehensive works on the history of Europe conceptually deal with religion – with regard to the relationship between religion, society and culture, the handling of the theory of secularisation and the significance of religion for the construction of Europe.

Der Beitrag skizziert, wie Gesamtdarstellungen zur Geschichte…[Read more]

This paper seeks to identify and understand the legal framework and models that undergird the regional gas pipeline networks being established in our times, against the backdrop of the evolving legal norms and business practices. It further seeks to examine the ways in which the competing rights and interests of different stakeholders in the…[Read more]

The concept of return is an intoxicating analytic for scholars, for several reasons. The idea that migrants return home creates opportunities to reclaim them from the hegemony of the bordered nation-state. For diaspora theorists, return works as a rebuttal to the field’s preoccupations with exile and loss. Migrants return home all the time, t…[Read more]

Government of India: Ministry of Education,
National Mission on Education through ICT, e-Pathshala PG Programme, Course on International Human Rights Law,
Module on Rights of the Child under International Law
July 2015

Persian literature used to be visibly worldly when Persian was a lingua franca in a vast space from Balkan to China. With the British colonialism in the India and the rise of nation states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Persian lost its status and became more national in various contexts. In Iran it only got worsened with sanctions,…[Read more]

This chapter analyses Global Byzantium by situating the medieval empire of New Rome in the history of statehood’s generalisation worldwide. Arguing that statehood remains the implicit mental furniture of History at a macro-civilizational scale, and so more or less at the micro too, the chapter proposes the dual concepts of hegemony and c…[Read more]

यह लेख उत्तर-मानववाद से संबंधित विमर्श से हिंदी पाठकों को परिचित करवाने के उद्देश्य से लिखा गया है।

इस लेख में कहा गया है कि विकास केवल भौतिक-प्राकृतिक जगत में ही नहीं, विचारों के क्षेत्र में भी होता है। दुनिया लगातार बदल रही है, विकसित हो रही है। आज न हम कार्ल मार्क्स के ज़माने में हैं, न गांधी-आम्बेडकर-लोहिया के ज़माने में। आर्थिक-साम…[Read more]

What was the significance of ancestors in the Hebrew Bible? The question is spurred by Kerry Sonia’s Caring for the Dead, which argues that the cult of dead kin was an accepted practice in the culture of the biblical writers. In building this thesis, Sonia resists an idea popular in scholarship that the Hebrew Bible promotes a negative view of r…[Read more]

What was the significance of ancestors in the Hebrew Bible? The question is spurred by Kerry Sonia’s Caring for the Dead, which argues that the cult of dead kin was an accepted practice in the culture of the biblical writers. In building this thesis, Sonia resists an idea popular in scholarship that the Hebrew Bible promotes a negative view of r…[Read more]