Abstract This paper explores Iranian intellectual contributions to international thought through their engagement with the geopolitical implications of the Dungan Revolt (1864–1877) and the rise and fall of Ya’qub Beg’s Kashgar-based emirate. Focusing on articles published in Akhtar, a Persian language newspaper in Istanbul (1876–1896), the study highlights how Iranian intellectuals conceptualised the Great Game, British and Russian imperialism, and China’s role in global politics. Utilising the framework of subaltern geopolitics, it examines how these intellectuals navigated their position between Ottoman, Persian, Russian, and British imperial contexts by drawing on colonial knowledge, pan-Islamic thought, and Islamic historiography. Although not always explicitly anti-imperial, they constructed an alternative geopolitical imagination that framed China and Turkestan within a broader discourse of Muslim unity and imperial rivalry during the Great Game. This study contributes to the historiography of international relations by incorporating Persian perspectives, challenging Eurocentric narratives and illustrating the transnational, co-constructed dimensions of geopolitical and international thought in the 19th century. The intellectual debates in Akhtar not only reflected anxieties about imperialism in Europe and the Ottoman Empire, but also shaped enduring narratives about China, Islam, and global politics that persist in contemporary discourse.
William Figueroa (Tue,) studied this question.