This article, issued after Asia Center and ASEF's international conference on coal issues in China (26th and 27th of June 2014 in Beijing), tackles the challenges the country is facing in restructuring its coal industry, in a context of severe and recurrent air, soil and water pollution outbursts.

Methodological debates about the stages of growth and the way in which a country goes through political modernization are long-established and manifold. 

Historically, states have indebted themselves to finance military campaigns. They do so nowadays for other reasons such as financing productive investment.

According to the traditional notion of the just war, an armed conflict should lead to conditions of durable peace.

The term “strategy” goes back to Greek antiquity and its meaning has evolved over time. Although today the term is bandied about and employed in all contexts, in the past, attempts to define it have been made by the greatest military thinkers.

The Catholic Church in China is divided into two branches: one is encompassed within the Communist Party and is largely independent of Rome; the other comes under the Pope’s authority and is tormented by Beijing’s government, which entirely rejects its authority.

While the peace process between the PKK (Kurdistan Workers’ Party) and the Turkish government is at a standstill, the latter is attempting to circumvent Turkey’s Kurdish actors by aligning itself with the KDP (Kurdistan Democratic Party), which dominates the Kurdish regional government in Iraq.