China Russia

The United States of America has been the most powerful country in the world for more than 70 years, but recently the US National Security Strategy declared that the return of great power competition with Russia and China is the greatest threat to US national security. Further, many analysts predict that America's autocratic rivals will have at least some success in disrupting - and, in the longer term, possibly even displacing - US global leadership. Brilliant and engagingly written, The Return of Great Power Rivalry argues that this conventional wisdom is wrong.

In the spring of 2009, Simon Pridmore and his wife Sofie travelled for 15,000 kilometres overland through Russia, Mongolia, and China. A trip that started off as an adventure ended up being an education. Everywhere they stopped, they found people and cultures on the cusp of change. This was a watershed period for many nations that found themselves having to deal with the challenges of a new century, while still recovering from the consequences of the tumultuous events of the previous one.

The modern world has been marked by a series of immense social revolutions that have transformed the states where they happened. In 1979, American sociologist Theda Skocpol published States and Social Revolutions and examined three of these uprisings: in France at the end of the 18th century, then in Russia and in China in the first half of the 20th century. She pinpointed a number of common factors that affected each of these countries at the time revolution happened.