Word: feudal
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...Feudal and remote, Afghanistan has long defended its independence by playing off ambitious foreign powers against one another. Now it is more deviously threatened as the Soviet Union attempts to become the dominant political force by offering increased trade and aid to its weak southern neighbor. The opportunity arose after April's bloody coup replaced the nepotistic regime of President Mohammed Daoud with the shakily neutralist Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. If Soviet influence succeeds in vaulting the towering Hindu Kush mountains, Afghanistan would provide the Russians with windows south to troubled Iran and Pakistan, and beyond. TIME New Delhi Bureau...
...author traces the tumult of the period by following the career of a great feudal lord, Enguerrand de Coucy VII, the seigneur of some 150 towns and villages in Picardy. He was born in 1340, and he died in captivity in 1397, having been made a prisoner by the Turks. Coucy was the best of his kind, an able diplomat, a shrewd military leader and a man of good luck. His campaigns took him to England (where he married King Edward's daughter), Tunisia, Italy, Switzerland and Hungary. He died at century's end, appropriately for Tuchman...
Even by Central American standards, El Salvador is a vastly overpopulated, poverty-ridden feudal society. The elite 1.9% of the population, which owns 57.5% of the land, sells cash crops abroad while at home hunger and malnutrition are endemic. The oligarchy's prosperity depends upon plentiful cheap labor from landless, job-hungry campesinos, and, fearing bloody rebellion, it will do almost anything to prevent the peasantry from organizing. To eliminate political dissent, a sweeping new law decrees prison for anyone who perturbs the "tranquillity or security of the country" or "the stability of public values...
After 25 years of autocratic and often oppressive rule, during which he sought to make his feudal nation a modern society, Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi began taking tentative steps toward political liberalization in 1976. He reined in Iran's notorious security police agency, SAVAK, eased censorship, and encouraged more open political debate. The reforms stilled some criticism by the country's intellectuals and student dissidents. But the changes also gave new life to opponents of the regime who now pose one of the gravest threats to the Shah's rule in the past 15 years. This year...
Saudi Arabia is a feudal monarchy, but at least one institution of the country gives it the flavor of a desert democracy. That is the majlis (Arabic for a "sitting," although the word can also mean "council," or even "parliament"). According to Arab custom, reinforced by a 1952 decree of King Abdul Aziz, every subject has the right of access to his ruler, whether the ruler is a tribal sheik, a governor or the monarch himself, to present petitions of complaint or pleas for help. Even the poorest Saudi can approach his sovereign to plead a cause; functionaries...