Parag Khanna: All Related Content

The South China Sea has returned to the geopolitical spotlight, eclipsing the Taiwan Straits as the region's most volatile flashpoint.

But quite unlike the Taiwan or the associated Quemoy/Matsu dispute, the South China Sea's claimant nations are at least as interested in developing the region's economic potential as they are in asserting sovereignty and building military bases.

This opens a window to resolving the dispute in a way that looks beyond the traditional frame of sovereignty and towards a win-win economic benefit.

The age of hybrid governance is already upon us. China today is a hybrid of 19th-century communist ideology and 21st-century capitalist practice, yet it stands on the cusp of becoming the world’s largest economy. Asian state capitalism is actually a centuries-old European practice dating back at least to the government of Victorian Britain, which gradually brought the British East India Company under its direct supervision and control over the course of the 19th-century, absorbing all of its colonies and wealth.

At some point in the next 200 million years, according to Yale University scientists, the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates will collide at the North Pole. When they are eventually joined by Africa, the singular super-continent will re-emerge, reminiscent of the Pangea that existed hundreds of millions of years ago.

There's never been a better time to visit North Korea. The specter of U.S.-South Korean military exercises, a potential nuclear test, assassinations of defectors in South Korea, and general saber-rattling haven't prevented a record 4,000 tourists from arriving in Pyongyang this year. There's even a hopeful air among diplomats that the two Koreas, as well as China and Japan, might find the right balance of words and gestures to smooth out their emotional grievances that fuel regular nationalist flare-ups.

Parag Khanna, who hosted the annual TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, last month, is a senior research fellow at the New America Foundation and is the author of two best-sellers, "The Second World" and "How to Run the World." Ayesha ...

Every era comes with a vision of global peace, usually named for the reigning hegemon of the time. Pax Romana during the Roman era, Pax Mongolica when the Mongols ruled so much of the world, Pax Brittannica for many years, and Pax Americana today. None of these were particularly peaceful periods, of course. The great power enforced their dominance through, among other things, advances in military technology, which intimidated its enemies but spurred arms races and competition.

The word “technology” combines the Greektekhne and logos, symbolizing that technology, like language, is as intrinsic to the human condition as speech. Language, though, does not stand alone; it is part of a larger cultural system. Hence the German word Technik, which denotes not only technologies themselves, but also the skills and processes surrounding them. A century ago, leading Western philosophers appreciated the promise and peril of mass industrialization technologies.