(The change in Sri Lanka) marks the third big Asian election in the last 12 months in which voters have installed a new leader: first in India, where Prime Minister Narendra Modi thumped the incumbent Congress Party; then Indonesia, where Joko Widodo, an outsider, won over voters with his record of competence as governor of […]
The recent midterm elections in the United States saw a record number of Chinese-Americans being elected to the U.S. House of Representatives. How this will impact America’s future ties with China is anybody’s guess. See Here – Global Times
Much of the globe sees India as a relatively non-violent, tolerant and pluralistic democracy with a benign international influence. Its values are seen as largely positive. Read Here – The Diplomat
With the passing of the bipolar international order and India’s own shift toward market economics, it was assumed that the traditional commonality of democratic values, complemented by an increasingly robust set of inter-societal ties, would accentuate a dramatic convergence of national interests between the two countries. Read Here – The National Interest
In the 1930s travellers returned from Mussolini’s Italy, Stalin’s Russia, and Hitler’s Germany praising the hearty sense of common purpose they saw there, compared to which their own democracies seemed weak, inefficient, and pusillanimous. Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and despondency. Authoritarian competitors are aglow with arrogant confidence. […]
There is none of the passion, none of the moral sense that inspired foreign policy in the time of former British premier Margaret Thatcher and former US president Ronald Reagan. Read Here – Gulf News
The huge coming out party in Myanmar since 2012 has officially veered into hangover territory. That’s the gist of this Asia Sentinel feature that cites recent World Bank and U.S. State Department warnings about everything from the difficulty of doing business to unproductive investments to infrastructure-related bottlenecks, writes William Pesak Read Here – Bloomberg
For months now, protestors have gathered in the capitals of many developing nations—Turkey, Ukraine, Thailand, Venezuela, Malaysia, and Cambodia, among others—in demonstrations united by some key features. Read Here – Businessweek
A new and different kind of global power is on the rise – one that is informal and citizen-based. Attitude surveys indicate that citizens in rich as well as poor countries – aided by dramatically falling costs of communication, participation, and coordination – are aware of the risks a hyper-connected global market system creates, and […]
India is too strategically powerful and too close a neighbour to play a partisan role in favouring any political party over another in Bangladesh Read Here – The Hindu
looking beyond borders 