For Chinese audiences, the extras mown down in a screen war that never ends are a powerful reminder of Japan’s brutal 14-year occupation, the climax of more than a century of humiliation at the hands of foreign powers. Japanese foreign-policy scholars say more than 200 anti-Japanese films were made last year. This well-nursed grudge is now a […]
Islam appears to hold a strange fascination for white British women who are converting to it in large numbers. Of an estimated 50,000 or so white Britons who convert to Islam every year, some two-thirds are thought to be women. Most of them are independent career women — bankers, doctors, broadcasters — who know what […]
Modern history is the story of how liberal democracy, originating in the U.K. and America, spread around the world. This may sound like an absurd fantasy. In actuality, this Whiggish narrative of progress underpins most newspaper editorials, political commentary and speeches in the West, and frames larger views of political developments in the non-West. Read […]
Numbers are important in explaining political issues and interpreting election results but they are rarely used to identify a person’s political affiliation, much less a person’s religion. In Southeast Asia, however, where numerology has retained its appeal among the masses, numbers are increasingly being used by politicians and religious leaders in support of a particular […]
The world looks to Asia to be the engine driving the global economy. This would be impossible without the two powerhouses of China and India. Our two countries need to work hand in hand if Asia is to become the anchor of world peace. An Asian century that people expect would not come if China […]
VLADIMIR PUTIN came to power on May 7th 2000 under the banner of economic reform, modernisation and anti- corruption. In a bow to Russian history he ordered that “The Gulag Archipelago”, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1973 book about Stalin’s Soviet forced-labour camp system, be made a set text for Russian schoolchildren, a radical move as the book […]
China is in the midst of an urban revolution, with hundreds of millions of migrants moving into cities every year. Since 2011, for the first time in history, more than half of China’s 1.3 billion citizens (690 million people) are living in cities. Another 300-400 million are expected to be added to China’s cities in […]
Even if most Saudis recognised the significant progress recorded under the leadership of King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz, few appreciated the epochal reform decisions that provided and ensured a high standard of living, which also transformed and continue to change Saudi Arabia into the key Arab pivot in world affairs. For eight continuous years after […]
The Arab Spring, once heralded by many as the beginning of something beautiful and promising, is now a dark nightmare; legions of reactionary interpreters of Islam take hold in North Africa, Syria today is set to become like Yugoslavia in the 1990s, voices of racial and sectarian intolerance abound from Gulf to ocean (as pan-Arabists […]
Agreeing on the combination of these issues – statehood, nationhood, sovereignty and governance – comprises the classic definition of national self-determination. Arab citizens have never had the opportunity to undergo the thrills of national self-determination. This is because Arab countries and governing systems have always been defined either by foreign powers or by very small […]
looking beyond borders 