find out why, by trying to find the true origins of political order, by tracing the histories of China, India, Europe and some Muslim countries from the point of view of three components. Aims and the Analytical Framework Since the aim of the book is to understand how institutions and states develop in different countries, it is also a book on comparative historical research. It is an extension of Samuel P. Huntington's Political Order in Changing Societies and similar in scope to Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. Fukuyama admits that while developing foreword to a reprint edition of Samuel P. Huntington's classic he felt the need for serious updating of the content given that the world had witnessed momentous development from the collapse of Soviet Union and the communism as an ideology to the rise of East Asia. While developing the foreword to Huntington's work, Fukuyama considered it necessary to go back in history and look at the origins of political development and decay. Taking forward Samuel P. Huntington's framework for analysis of political order in societies and applying it to the problems of democracy, Fukuyama asked two questions; firstly, why certain societies had adopted democratic route and reached stable political order while some could not go beyond a certain stage in their march towards democracy and got stuck in autocracy? The second strand of the framework focused on the question as to whether democracy could respond and adapt to the new threats and challenges it is confronted with. Fukuyama also confessed that he did not have the insights of an anthropologists, economist or biologist but his broader landscape covering history of multiple countries across time and space revealed political patterns which might not be available to the experts in the fields mentioned above. The task that he had set for himself was too broad a landscape to cover in one volume particularly when civilisations like the Chinese, Indians or Muslims were involved. These societies had intricate power structures that drove strength from cultural and social values developed over centuries. The Guardian was quite critical in its review stating that "Fukuyama borrows a phrase from contemporary social science to explain what he's really interested in: how to get to Denmark (ie a stable, prosperous, dynamic society, and one that now even has the world's best restaurant). But the history he offers here doesn't provide the answer. On its own,