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The “new Silk Road” has emerged as the signature foreign policy initiative of Xi Jinping’s presidency and the main channel through which China is adapting its grand strategy to address daunting economic, environmental, and strategic challenges. In elite discourse, China’s “period of strategic opportunity” (zhànlüè jī yùqī 战略机遇期) is no longer defined mainly by other powers’ relatively benign postures. In this context, the new Silk Road offers unique insight into descriptions of Chinese foreign policy as becoming more fènfā yǒu wéi 奋发有为 (proactive, or self-achieving): China can increasingly leverage its own capabilities to enhance Chinese influence and secure Chinese interests by proactively encouraging greater regional and global multipolarity. While the West has long-term interests that would be well served by the new Silk Road’s success, this would also appreciably augment China’s strategic autonomy, ultimately compelling substantial adaptation in American grand strategy.

Both the religious left and right make calls for followers to put faith into action. Priorities for action are affected by social and political realities. This paper examines themes conveyed by two distinct religious publications before and after the 2016 election. Both publications are published by organizations that wish to put faith into action. The method relies on the content analysis of one thousand nine hundred forty-three articles from Sojourners and Evangelicals during the Obama and Trump presidencies. While the results show differing emphases for each publication, emphases for each shifted after the 2016 election. Articles in Sojourners, a left-leaning publication with an interfaith readership, directly responded to presidential policy. Criticism of President Trump became a common theme. Articles in Evangelicals, a right leaning publication with diverse evangelical readership, in contrast, avoided controversial current events and did not directly discuss presidents, presidential policy, nor governments during either presidency; instead focusing on the challenge of pastoral work and civility after the 2016 election. Moreover, in both magazines, articles during the presidential administration conflicting more with the organization’s values, resulted in a wider range of themes, suggesting that opposition provides more opportunity to clarify and emphasize values and priorities.

Nigeria is a country consistently tilting towards one violent situation or another. Since its independence in 1960, Nigeria has witnessed numerous ethnoreligious conflicts that have threatened its corporate existence. For example, age-long feelings of relative deprivation by certain sections of the country, have given rise to the continuous reference to a need to address the national question: a phenomenon that describes the aggregation of concerns by the different nationalities on how they can or should cohabit in the same federation. However, elections, and the entire electoral process, often serve as precipitates of ethnoreligious conflicts in Nigeria. Aside from the tensions that always sprout about who becomes what, there is a more prominent challenge of where the candidate comes from. Thus, elections in Nigeria often get reduced to geographical linings of candidates, rather than their competence or political ideology. This is often festered by the need to provide opportunities for all geographical sections of the country to produce the President, thus giving rise to the idea of a rotational presidency as a negotiated approach. The article examined the rotational presidency, vis-à-vis its implication for inclusiveness, peace, the national question, and development in Nigeria. The study utilised historical materials, elite theory, and the consociational model of power sharing to explore how the political activities towards elections have shifted the attention of the populace away from the pedigree and the leadership potentials of the aspirants/candidates to their ethnic and religious backgrounds. The study suggests how good leaders can emerge without jettisoning inclusiveness.

The US economy has performed better when the president of the United States is a Democrat rather than a Republican, almost regardless of how one measures performance. For many measures, including real GDP growth (our focus), the performance gap is large and significant This paper asks why. The answer is not found in technical time series matters nor in systematically more expansionary monetary or fiscal policy under Democrats. Rather, it appears that the Democratic edge stems mainly from more benign oil shocks, superior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations about the near-term future.

When thinking of India, it is hard not to think of caste. In academic and common parlance alike, caste has become a central symbol for India, marking it as fundamentally different from other places while expressing its essence. Nicholas Dirks argues that caste is, in fact, neither an unchanged survival of ancient India nor a single system that reflects a core cultural value. Rather than a basic expression of Indian tradition, caste is a modern phenomenon--the product of a concrete historical encounter between India and British colonial rule. Dirks does not contend that caste was invented by the British. But under British domination caste did become a single term capable of naming and above all subsuming India's diverse forms of social identity and organization. Dirks traces the career of caste from the medieval kingdoms of southern India to the textual traces of early colonial archives; from the commentaries of an eighteenth-century Jesuit to the enumerative obsessions of the late-nineteenth-century census; from the ethnographic writings of colonial administrators to those of twentieth-century Indian scholars seeking to rescue ethnography from its colonial legacy. The book also surveys the rise of caste politics in the twentieth century, focusing in particular on the emergence of caste-based movements that have threatened nationalist consensus. Castes of Mind is an ambitious book, written by an accomplished scholar with a rare mastery of centuries of Indian history and anthropology. It uses the idea of caste as the basis for a magisterial history of modern India. And in making a powerful case that the colonial past continues to haunt the Indian present, it makes an important contribution to current postcolonial theory and scholarship on contemporary Indian politics.

The formal institutional constraints that Congress and the courts impose on presidential unilateral action are feeble. As a result, recent scholarship suggests that public opinion may be the strongest check against executive overreach. However, little is known about how the public assesses unilateral action. Through a series of five survey experiments embedded in nationally representative surveys, we examine the extent to which Americans evaluate unilateral action based on constitutional, partisan, and policy concerns. We find that Americans do not instinctively reject unilateral action as a threat to our system of checks and balances, but instead evaluate unilateral action in terms of whether it accords or conflicts with their partisan and policy preference priors. Our results suggest that the public constraint on presidential unilateral action is far from automatic. Rather, the strength and scope of this check are variable products of political contestation in the public sphere.