Since 1991, recent enough to be contested — the post-Cold War order, 9/11, China's rise, 2008, and the internet's arrival.
10 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
The 9/11 Commission Report
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States · 2004
The official bipartisan reconstruction of the attacks and the intelligence failures that preceded them, recommending the institutional reforms…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
The End of History?
Francis Fukuyama · 1989
Argues that the collapse of Communism marked not just the end of the Cold War but the end point of humanity's ideological evolution, with liberal…
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Prosecutor v. Radislav Krstić: Judgement
International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia · 2001
The first legal ruling that the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica constituted genocide, establishing the evidentiary standard international courts now use…
+2 more at this level
10 works
National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States
The official bipartisan reconstruction of the attacks and the intelligence failures that preceded them, recommending the institutional reforms enacted in the years that followed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Francis Fukuyama
Argues that the collapse of Communism marked not just the end of the Cold War but the end point of humanity's ideological evolution, with liberal democracy as the final form of government.
link checked 17 Sept 2026International Monetary Fund
The IMF's own account of why capital and trade flows accelerated after 1980 argues the gains were real but badly distributed, and that this, not globalisation itself, explains the backlash against it.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Yochai Benkler
Argues the falling cost of the tools of information production let commons-based peer production — Wikipedia, free software — compete with market and firm-based production for the first time, and that this shift is more a threat to concentrated power than a business model.
link checked 17 Sept 2026World Bank & Development Research Center of the State Council, P.R. China
A joint World Bank–Chinese government report argues that the growth model that took China from poverty to middle income — state-directed investment and cheap exports — would not by itself carry it to high income.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Timothy Snyder (YaleCourses)
Traces Ukrainian statehood from medieval Rus to the present, arguing that a nation is made by contested political history rather than discovered in ethnicity or language.
link checked 17 Sept 2026North Atlantic Treaty Organization
NATO's own reassessment of its founding assumptions names Russia as the most significant and direct threat to allied security for the first time since the Cold War, and China as a systemic challenge.
link checked 17 Sept 2026International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia
The first legal ruling that the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica constituted genocide, establishing the evidentiary standard international courts now use to prove genocidal intent.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Carmen M. Reinhart & Kenneth S. Rogoff
Sets the US subprime crisis against eighteen post-war banking crises in industrial countries and finds the American run-up followed the standard pattern almost exactly — rising house and equity prices, a widening current-account deficit, mounting public debt and slowing growth — arguing the episode was far less exceptional than contemporaries believed.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Neil M. Ferguson et al.
The modelling report that projected hundreds of thousands of UK deaths without intervention, and directly shaped the decision to impose the first national lockdown.
link checked 17 Sept 2026