Shahid Bolsen continues a new series on geopolitical fundamentals by laying out the framework behind his analysis: why lands and peoples have baselines they always return to, why the forces that try to straighten them never last, and why one force in history has proven the exception. He offers five tests for identifying a permanently important land and applies them to Bilad ash-Sham, Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, drawing on the Qur’an, the Sunnah and the record of the empires that tried to hold them. Along the way he asks who Greece and Rome really belonged to, and the episode closes with an addendum on a country that, he argues, took itself out of the game for fifty years.
Continuing his series on geopolitical fundamentals, Shahid Bolsen moves from the centre of the world through its African door. Starting with the conference where a continent was carved up without a single African in the room, he runs Africa’s four leading countries of this century through his five tests, and arrives at a distinction the series has not needed until now: some lands are permanently important as powers, and others as prizes. Along the way, a gate between two seas, a container built by a British administrator, and a tree that left West Africa and built an empire somewhere else.
In the final part of his look at Africa, Shahid Bolsen turns to the lands history marked as anchors but the present has pushed aside: the bend of a great river, a coast that faced India, a star with five points. He names the sticks that broke them, asks who in the Sahel is really carrying the land back to what it was, and then places each of Africa's leading countries inside the larger land it belongs to. The episode closes on what he believes is being built from the centre of the world outward, and why it may end up better than what came before.
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