"This website is designed as a forum of public comment and critique on how to adequately interpret, conceptualise and evaluate selected topics in contemporary international affairs from a historical and comparative perspective. As shown in the four sample contributions available until now, we hope to develop this site into a platform where historians, political scientists and other academics take issue with misleading use of established historical concepts, and with inadequate cross-cultural or diachronic comparisons. In general, an argumentation employing historical analogies, and, by itself, the travelling of generic concepts across civilizations or historic periods, in both political publicism and scholarly analysis, are to be welcomed. However, sometimes the heuristic value of cross-cultural comparison and historic-analogical thinking is diminished when, for instance, reasonably well-defined concepts are extensively stretched in order to (mis)fit substantively different cases, or in order to (mis)interpret essentially dissimilar situations. Often, this happens when the writer has not only a cognitive interest in the subject she or he is dealing with."