HOW THE QOR'AN LED TO THE DOWNFALL OF MOSSADEGH

Apparently, in 1953 the World Bank put forward a compromise proposal to break the impasse between Mossadegh and the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. Mossadegh asked Hassibi, a devout Muslim, to advise him whether he should accept the proposal. Hassibi consulted Abbas Parkhideh, a member of the oil company board, another devout man. As the story goes, the two men decided to resort to Estekhareh, the Persian practice of using the Qor'an to help with a difficult decision. On the basis of the ensuing consultation of the Qor'an, Habibi advised Mossdegh to reject the Bank's proposal. He did so. The coup that overthrew him occurred within a month.     

Intelligence,diplomacy and the Japanese threat to British interests, 1914–41

This contribution looks at the ways in which the intelligence releases in the 1990s have helped to illuminate previously unknown or misunderstood aspects of the Anglo-Japanese relationship from 1914 to 1941. Although attention in the media has been focused on the release of the Security Service's records, these are of limited use in this area of study. Much more significant are the diplomatic intercepts that were collected by the Government Code and Cipher School, which not only add new angles to old questions, but also reveal British suspicions of Japan in areas not previously studied, such as Japanese pan-Asianism.     

‘A conference now': Lloyd George and peacemaking, 1939: Sidelights from the unpublished letters of A.J. Sylvester

Lloyd George's latest infatuation [with Hitler, after his visit to Germany in 1936] was something more than the momentary lapse of a failing dotard. To sup with the devil was completely in character for the man who, at the summit of affairs in 1919, had been drawn to power like a moth to a candle, who had come to worship success for its own sake and on its own terms and to make it the first and last determinant oi his actions; and who, for his final appearance on the world stage, a few years after the Berchtesgaden visit, aspired to a role that would reconcile power with practical politics ‐ that of a British counterpart to Marshal Petain; in which capacity, let it be said, he would doubtless have pulled off a better “deal” than most. (A. Lentin, Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson and the Guilt of Germany. An Essay in the Pre‐history of Appeasement, 1984, p. 154.)     

Wiki and the Agora: ‘It's organising,Jim, but not as we know it’

This article argues that those keen to characterise and harness the empowering potential of Information and Communications Technology [ICT] for development projects must understand that the very existence of this technology opens up alternative models of co-operation and collaboration. These models themselves necessitate breaking away from ‘traditional’ command-and-control models of management. One alternative is to persuade participants, or potential participants, to co-ordinate their efforts along the lines exemplified by the open-source software movement and the contributors to Wikipedia: models of co-ordination that ought not to work but appear to do so. The article offers a summary of this argument, and then suggests ways in which NGOs in particular might try to incorporate these insights into their strategies. This is particularly critical for organisations that rely on increasingly pressurised funding opportunities, and which also seek to develop and engender participation and determination from within and among specific target groupings.