The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) InfoGuide on The Taliban examines the two Talibans, in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and the consequences for the region. CFR InfoGuides are a multimedia series to promote understanding of complex foreign policy issues.

This course centers on mechanisms of civilian control of the military. Relying on the influential texts of Lasswell, Huntington, and Finer, the first classes clarify the basic tensions between the military and civilians. A wide-ranging series of case studies follows. These cases are chosen to create a field of variation that includes states with stable civilian rule, states with stable military influence, and states exhibiting fluctuations between military and civilian control. The final three weeks of the course are devoted to the broader relationship between military and society.

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Pamela Constable of the Washington Post for a discussion of changes in Afghanistan and Pakistan Since 911. She analyzes the 2008 Pakistan election and its implications for U.S. Pakistan relations and describes the renewal of the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan. (56 minutes)

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Pakistani Journalist Ahmed Rashid for a discussion of United States foreign policy and the failure of nation building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. (59 minutes)

In 1999, the University of Chicago began the Digital Dictionaries of South Asia (DDSA) to make electronic dictionaries of South Asian languages available to the public for free. It includes languages from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, the Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. Gary Tubb, Professor and Chair of the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations (SALC), and James Nye, former University of Chicago Library Southern Asia bibliographer and COSAS Emeritus, were awarded a grant from the U.S. Department of Education that allows them to expand these digital dictionaries to include Kashmiri, Panjabi, Persian, Sindhi, Sinhala, Telugu, and Urdu languages. James Nye is a CAORC Multi-Country Research Fellowship alum, who traveled to Sri Lanka, Maldives, Nepal, and India on the fellowship.

How do we, as youth, respond to gun violence in our communities? The Gun Violence webcast explores gun violence in Pakistan, Somalia, and the United States.

Survey of Indian civilization from 2500 BC to present-day. Traces major political events as well as economic, social, ecological, and cultural developments. Primary and secondary readings enhance understanding of this unique civilization, and shape and improve understanding in analyzing and interpreting historical data. Examines major thematic debates in Indian history through class discussion.

This lesson focuses on the story of Malala Yousafzai, a 14-year-old Pakistani girl whose public stance in favor of the education of girls made her the target of a Taliban assassination attempt in October 2012. The lesson has students learn a little about Pakistan, and read and discuss Malala's blog. Because the context of the story is important and complex, background information is provided.

Healing Souls is designed to help young women living in the conflicted areas of Pakistan to cope out of depression. The resources will aware as well as empower them with skills on mental health for their well-being.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"Montmorillonite clay is an abundant and versatile natural nanomaterial. Formed of aluminum oxide sheets sandwiched between layers of silica, montmorillonite is prized for its tremendous absorption and antimicrobial properties, including by those in the pharmaceutical, cosmetics, and water purification industries. Some scientists even believe that the mineral was crucial to catalyzing the primordial reactions that gave rise to the first life forms on earth. Now, a recent study suggests that the same mineral could help breathe life into the economy of rural parts of Pakistan. Montmorillonite deposits are found all over the world, most notably in the Himalayan, Caucasus, and Andes mountains. But an abundant supply of raw clay also exists in the largely untouched mountains found in South Punjab in Pakistan. Here, heavy reliance on agriculture and low levels of industrialization have contributed to higher levels of poverty and unemployment compared with the rest of Punjab..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This course will expose students to tools and methods of analysis for use in assessing the challenges and dangers associated with nuclear weapons in international politics. The first two weeks of the course will look at the technology and design of nuclear weapons and their means of production. The next five weeks will look at the role they played in the Cold War, the organizations that managed them, the technologies that were developed to deliver them, and the methods used to analyze nuclear force structures and model nuclear exchanges. The last six weeks of the course will look at theories and cases of nuclear decision making beyond the original five weapon states, and will look particularly at why states pursue or forego nuclear weapons, the role that individuals and institutions play, and the potential for both new sources of proliferation and new consequences.

This course, organized as a series of lectures, aims to provide an interdisciplinary view of the history and current climate of nuclear weapons and non-proliferation policy. The first lecture begins the series by discusses nuclear developments in one of the world’s most likely nuclear flash points, and the second lecture presents a broad discussion of the dangers of current nuclear weapons policies as well as evaluations of current situations and an outlook for future nuclear weapons reductions.

This subject aims to provide an overview of contemporary texts in regional languages in South Asian Literature and Cinema. We will cover major authors and film makers, writing from Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Within India, we will look at authors and directors working in different regional languages and as we examine their different socio-cultural, political and historical contexts we will attempt to understand what it means to study them under the all-unifying category of “South Asian Literature and Culture”. Some of the major issues we shall explore include caste, gender, globalization and social change. We will end with exploring some of the newer, younger writers and directors and try to analyze some of the thematic and formal shifts in their work. Authors include Ashapurna Devi, Manto, Vijayan, Premchand, Mohanty, and Nasreen and film makers will include Adoor Gopalakrishnan, Satyajit Ray, Shyam Benegal, Aparna Sen and Rituporno Ghosh.

This grammar provides a grammatical description of Palula, an Indo-Aryan language of the Shina group. The language is spoken by about 10,000 people in the Chitral district in Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province. This is the first extensive description of the formerly little-documented Palula language, and is one of only a few in-depth studies available for languages in the extremely multilingual Hindukush-Karakoram region. The grammar is based on original fieldwork data, collected over the course of about ten years, commencing in 1998. It is primarily in the form of recorded, mainly narrative, texts, but supplemented by targeted elicitation as well as notes of observed language use. All fieldwork was conducted in close collaboration with the Palula-speaking community, and a number of native speakers took active part in the process of data gathering, annotation and data management. The main areas covered are phonology, morphology and syntax, illustrated with a large number of example items and utterances, but also a few selected lexical topics of some prominence have received a more detailed treatment as part of the morphosyntactic structure. Suggestions for further research that should be undertaken are given throughout the grammar. The approach is theory-informed rather than theory-driven, but an underlying functional-typological framework is assumed. Diachronic development is taken into account, particularly in the area of morphology, and comparisons with other languages and references to areal phenomena are included insofar as they are motivated and available. The description also provides a brief introduction to the speaker community and their immediate environment.