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1

The New Game for Energy: Geopolitics of Central Asia

100%

Lakatos A.

Prague Papers on the History of International Relations

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2014

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issue 1

140-154

EN

This paper is dealing with a complex issue of current geopolitics, the revival of the Great Game in Central Asia. For our analysis, we used some of the latest published sources concerning actions and strategies of all of the world’s current great powers and regional powers having strategic interests in states of Central Asia. The analysis is centered on two directions, first on strategic‑political dimension, especially in the mirror of conflicts within the Islam world and America’s war on terror. The second direction of research is focusing on economic problems, and is focused especially on the pipeline projects.

2

The ghosts of Changlimithang: a brief Anglo-Bhutanese negotiation during the British Expedition to Tibet of 1903–1904

100%

Miele M.

Prague Papers on the History of International Relations

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2022

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issue 2

53-63

EN

The British Expedition to Tibet of 1903–1904 represented the last major military operation of the Great Game, the broad cultural confrontation between the British and the Russians that contested the geopolitical space of central and high Asia for almost the entire nineteenth century, up until the St. Petersburg entente of 1907. The role assumed by the then Tongsa Penlop, Ugyen Wangchuck, as a mediator between the British and Tibetans during the Expedition, was critical. Among the Bhutanese nobles, Ugyen Wangchuck had emerged victorious from the Battle of Changlimithang in 1885 and in 1907 he was crowned as the first king of Bhutan. In the period between the military victory and his accession to the throne, the power of Ugyen Wangchuck had to be consolidated definitively in a country that was simultaneously involved in the geopolitical space of the Raj, to which it was linked by the Treaty of Sinchula of 1865, and in the cultural sphere of Tibet, its most profound and ancient spiritual heritage. This paper reconstructs through British archival documents an attempt carried out by the Bhutanese with the British — in anticipation of Anglo-Tibetan negotiations — to try to resolve the last internal tensions of Bhutan. Although strongly downsized, some ancient rivalries, like underground rivers, continued to run across the balances of power and the international role of the small Himalayan country at the beginning of the twentieth century

3

Hamlet in Kashgar: British Diplomacy and the 1920 Afghan Attempt to Establish Relations with the Republic of China

84%

Miele M.

Prague Papers on the History of International Relations

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2019

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issue 1

54-64

EN

The paper analyses the position of the British institutions, of the embassy in Peking and of the consulate general in Kashgar, before the attempt of the Afghan ruler Amānallāh to establish diplomatic relations with the Chinese Republic in 1920. Amānallāh, who ascended the throne of the emirate in 1919, rejected the British protectorate over Afghanistan and his victory in the Third Anglo-Afghan War certified the country’s full independence. The provisional nature of the 1919 Treaty of Rawalpindi, followed by the Anglo-Afghan Treaty of 1921, left many doubts still open about the international status of Afghanistan. Moreover, the proximity between Afghanistan and the Russian Bolsheviks introduced a further ideological element of difficulty in the geopolitical picture of Central Asia after the First World War. Central to the diplomatic dialectic was also the status of Afghan subjects in China, particularly in Hsin-chiang, and to whom their possible consular protection should be entrusted. The last part of the paper is dedicated precisely to the analysis of a specific case, the arrest of a man considered an Afghan by the Chinese, but subject of the princely state of Chitral according to the British. The case helped to better define the boundaries of the matter. The paper is essentially based on British archival sources.

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3 Prague Papers on the History of International Relations

2 Miele M.

1 Lakatos A.

1 2022

1 2019

1 2014

The New Game for Energy: Geopolitics of Central Asia

The ghosts of Changlimithang: a brief Anglo-Bhutanese negotiation during the British Expedition to Tibet of 1903–1904

Hamlet in Kashgar: British Diplomacy and the 1920 Afghan Attempt to Establish Relations with the Republic of China