Arif Maftuhin

Why does supposedly violation against an aspect of religious belief trigger international row, violent demonstrations, and economic boycott; while evidently violation against humanity seemingly does not bother Muslims? Darfur crisis now, depicted as the first genocide in the 21st century, is in the front page of American media. Darfur-related “dot org” is easily searchable in Google; and the very word Darfur reached more than 29.000.000 links — obviously more than the words “Muhammad Cartoon”, which are less than 3.500.000 links. In addition, this weeks, there will be massive rallies for Darfur in main cities like Washington DC and Seattle. Then why does Darfur crisis yield no significant reaction from Muslims? Do Muslims care more on literally religious teachings than the universal message of religion for humanity (rahmatan lil alamin)? Are they angry only for religious blasphemy but not for human right violation? First of all, it is a matter of information. Unlike in the US, news abo...

Reading The Case for Goliath after two previous books, I find the book is much more similar to the Huntley’s Pax Democratica. Both writers hold that the end of the Cold War marked an important change in the international order and relation. Huntley optimistically views the end of the Cold War as the end of the bloody history of humankind and celebrates it as the end of the dark night and the dawn of the hopeful future (Huntley, 1998: 13). Similarly, Mandelbaum begins his work with associating the end of the Cold War as the end of political, military, economic, and ideological conflict. Neglecting the fact that the number of bloody conflict remains as high as during the Cold War,[1] they believe that the world has been going better afterward. Mandelbaum is a liberal who build his theory on the idealism. In the previous book, The Ideas that Conquer the World: Peace, Democracy, and Free Market in the Twentieth Century (2002), Mandelbaum argues for the triumphant of this triad in the 21st ...

War and war. It seems that the world has never gone a day without a war or violence. From the great war of Mahabharat in as early as 3102 BC till today’s war in Iraq, human beings witness and engage in the both condemned and glorified wars. Never has a decade or century gone without war. Robert Huntly calls the 20th century as a terrible century in which not less than 170,000,000 human beings lost their lives. The 21st century just begins, and we have already witnessed thousands have lost their lives in places like Afghanistan and Iraq. Why do we engage in a war? Is it the case that “warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death” as Sun Tzu puts it? Or should we view war as a misfortune of life that we have to eliminate? Our reading on the books of Mearsheimer and of Huntley is just a good example how the long debates about the morality of war are translated into perspectives to understanding the international order and affairs. The Tragedy of Great Power Politic...