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The author provides us here with a rare and original testimony about the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, from the trips he was able to make there and the many contacts he had there. He focuses the readers’ attention more particularly on his interpretation of Juche’s thinking, the principles of which contribute to find the development strategy of this country. The emphasis is primarily on the imperative of autonomy for the economy and the society.

The Bandung Conference played a constructive role in mobilizing a movement against the bipolar hegemony of the post World War II period. This period, from Yalta (1945) to Malta (1989), can be characterized as an international neo-colonial regime in a post-colonial world. Despite political, economical and cultural differences, the Third World states represented at Bandung called for a counter hegemonic alliance based on the principles of peaceful coexistence (The Pancha Sila).¹ These principles enabled cooperation among the states and peoples of Asia and Africa. The Latin American states later joined this non-aligned movement. The principles of peaceful coexistence, which were first proclaimed by India and China, represented an imaginative reformulation of the modern Western framework of international systems established initially by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This new framework, which based cooperation among the recently independent states on the Western principles of national sovereignty, stressed mutual respect and benefit in place of the Westphalia premise of international anarchy.

Rafis Abazov is an adjunct lecturer at the Harriman Institute at Columbia University, New York. He is the author of The Formation of Post-Soviet International Politics in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan (1999), the Freedom House Report on Kyrgyzstan (2002 and 2003), the Historical Dictionary of Kyrgyzstan (2004), and Historical Dictionary of Turkmenistan, as well as numerous articles on economic and political development in Central Asia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Turkmenistan. He has contributed articles to the Encyclopedia of Modern Asia, and the Encyclopedia of National Economies.

In the literature on peace and security, we identify at least two different uses of the term Eurasia. One stakes a rather narrow geographic boundary while the second includes a much broader region. If we adopt the narrower view, Eurasia incorporates the fifteen republics of the former Soviet Union and possibly their security zones in Eastern Europe. Choosing to see Eurasia more broadly means defining it as the huge land-mass that comprises the continents of Europe and Asia. We may call the narrower definition Eurasia Minor and the broader one Eurasia Major.