Since the beginning of the new era, China’s policy of fostering amity, sincerity, mutual benefit, and inclusiveness in neighborhood diplomacy has significantly advanced its relations with neighboring countries. China has reached a
As democracies around the world face mounting challenges and pressures, discussions about autocracy often focus on personalities and ideologies or tend to link governance practices to differences among specific cultural traditions. Yet
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In a March 2026 paper published in the journal Science Advances, which focused on variability in governance along the autocratic-democratic axis, my coauthors and I found that one of the strongest associations for the 40
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Political debates about democracy often focus on culture, leadership, or polarization. But history points to a more prosaic—and more powerful—driver of political outcomes: how governments raise revenue. Across thousands of years of
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When we think of premodern governance, we often default to an image of concentrated authority: imposing rulers presiding over intricately layered hierarchies—pharaohs, emperors, and kings whose power seemed inseparable from the territorial
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The long American century is over. Across the world, affiliations and institutions staked in blood and soil, faith-based (as opposed to empirically based) ways of knowing, and personalized, autocratic power are all
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Without archaeology, there is no way to truly examine economic inequality, its causes, and its consequences over very long time spans on a global scale. Until recently, most grand narratives that purported
More![Fallen Empire [Juan Carlos Barquet - Art ]](https://slguardian.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/fallen-empire-480x384.jpg)
Our investigation of the disastrous society-wide collapses of four premodern polities, China’s Ming Dynasty, the South Asian Mughal Empire, the High Roman Empire, and Renaissance Venice led to the discovery of an
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Flush with my newly minted university degree, I sat down for breakfast with my entrepreneurial grandfather who met me with the question, “So you want to study to be an archaeologist, go
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Western society is largely in the grips of an entrenched mythology that premodern non-Western states and empires were organized despotically, markedly different from how humans govern themselves in the contemporary West. There’s
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The modes of communication that a society uses can tell us a lot about its political structure. A research study we published in 2022 revealed distinct modes of communication and administrative recordkeeping in autocratic
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