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Anja Mihr, Empires of Eurasia: how imperial legacies shape international security; The neighborhood effect: the imperial roots of regional fracture in Eurasia, International Affairs, Volume 99, Issue 6, November 2023, Pages 2538–2540, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiad274
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The persistence of former empires of Eurasia is ‘built into the very nature’ of modern China, Iran, Turkey and Russia, and their respective ambitions to shape the regional and even world order (p. 275). This is Jeffrey Mankoff's main argument. Their imperial legacies date back to antiquity. Cyrus the Great of Persia and China's Qing Dynasty have respectively shaped Iran's and China's revisionist, anti-western, anti-democratic and anti-liberal foreign and domestic policies in the present. After the end of the Cold War, their claims derived from longstanding historical, cultural, linguistic and religious ties to their peripheries that have led to violent rivalries between the former empires across the continent. Ideological and territorial conflicts between China and Russia over security in central Asia, and the interventions and confrontations in Syria, Ukraine and the Caucasus, are best seen through this prism of old imperial claims.
Outstandingly thorough and detailed, Mankoff's book combines an analysis of historical and modern-day politics to explain economic, religious and security paradigms in Eurasia. Despite constitutional reforms, the former empires have governments that do not allow for inclusive participation; they claim to control and govern their Chinese, Persian, Turkish or Russian ‘civilizations’ from the centre in Beijing, Tehran, Ankara or Moscow. While the Ottoman Empire once stretched from northern Africa to the Balkans, the Persian ‘Empire of the Mind’ went as far as the Indian subcontinent. Russia's claims stretch from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and China aspires to control the borders of the former Qing Dynasty, from central Asia to south-east Asia. Looking at these four states, Mankoff draws a direct line from the imperial thinking and ideologies of the past to today's regional policies. Today, they protect and guide their cultural or territorial peripheries, justifying (military) intervention and regional policies in the Caucasus, Balkans, Mediterranean and central Asia. These have targeted specific countries like Afghanistan, Syria and Ukraine.
