The territories of her writing

At the centre of The Brzezinski Paradox is the author’s argument that the unipolar moment of the 1990s has given way to a multipolar order: regional alliances, parallel financial structures and middle powers that refuse to choose sides. She reads this shift through the assumptions of The Grand Chessboard, asking which of them still hold, and which have become, in her words, a “fatal cognitive bias”.

“The name ‘Afghanistan’ is young, but the soil is ancient,” the author writes. Her work follows this geography from Aryana and Khorasan through the Great Game, the Cold War and two Taliban eras, arguing that the country’s fate has repeatedly been shaped by outside powers that treated it as a buffer or a chessboard rather than a civilisation.

For Sedika, Persian is not only a mother tongue but a civilisational inheritance. She examines how the language was renamed and pushed to the margins of public life, and she draws attention to a detail of its grammar: Persian has a single pronoun, او, for every human being, with no “he” or “she”. In her reading, the language itself carries an old idea of equality.

The Persian word dad means justice and rightful order; its opposite, bidad, names tyranny and structural injustice. Sedika traces this idea from ancient myth and Zarathustra’s asha to the constitutional work of her father’s generation, and uses it as the moral measure of her analysis. Raised by a jurist, she treats law not as an abstraction but as a promise owed to every citizen.

Both books return to the Eurasian landmass: Russia’s pivot east, China’s Belt and Road, Central Asian corridors and Afghanistan’s untapped resources. The author presents a vision of Afghanistan not as a “geopolitical dead space” but as a potential land bridge, and asks what it would take for the region’s riches to serve its own people.

Memory is both subject and method in Sedika’s writing. Family records, the Persian poetry of her childhood home and the names of old Kabul quarters sit beside diplomatic dispatches and archival sources. Together they make up a counter-history: the effort to keep a civilisation’s memory alive when signs, schoolbooks and borders are rewritten.

The author challenges the image of an “eternally backward” Afghanistan by recalling a history of women in universities and parliament, and of a culture that produced its own poets and thinkers. She is equally critical of rescue narratives that, in her view, imposed templates from outside, and she calls the exclusion of girls and women today a crime against the future of an entire generation.

“Wishful thinking is the greatest enemy of diplomacy,” the author writes in The Brzezinski Paradox. Addressed directly to diplomats, the handbook argues for negotiation on equal footing, for pragmatic multi-alignment instead of “with us or against us”, and for a realism that avoids both Western wishful thinking and Eastern triumphalism.