Booming cities are driving global economic growth in many parts of the world. We live in an age of extraordinarily rapid urbanization: The number of people living in cities is predicted to grow by more than 2.5 billion over the next 40 years — mostly in emerging countries such as China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Nigeria, […]
March 10th, the anniversary of the uprising that led to the Dalai Lama’s flight from Tibet in 1959, has come and gone. While it is not as infamous in the West as the Ides of March, it is a day of great symbolic import in Tibet and has become a focal point for the expression […]
One of the more remarkable (though largely unremarked) developments in recent Indian politics has been the startling shift in the country’s discourse about capitalism. As in many developing countries, “self-reliance” and economic self-sufficiency were India’s national mantras after independence – and, in India’s case, remained so for more than four decades. Whereas most Westerners axiomatically […]
Would Turkey be a moderating influence on political Islam, in particular on the Muslim Brotherhood parties now dominant in much of the new Middle East? Will Erdogan make the country a unique Islamic liberal democracy that will reconcile the Muslim world to the West? Read Here – World Affairs
Pakistan‘s Punjab province selects well known journalist Najam Sethi as caretaker chief minister, as the country prepares for a fresh round of elections. Read Here – The Dawn
This week, 5,000 delegates from developing nations have gathered in the coastal city of Durban for the fifth annual BRICS summit, and the first to be held in South Africa, which joined the association of emerging national economies in 2010, formally becoming the “S” in the BRIC wall. But the location of this year’s summit underscores […]
As the U.S. and coalition forces prepare to withdraw their troops from Afghanistan, with all combat forces out by the end of 2014, the governments of Central Asia are bracing for a possible spillover of instability from their south. Ostensibly to help Central Asian countries protect themselves against the Islamist radicals that may gain strength in […]
On a table in the office of a senior Indian diplomat sits an unusual piece of memorabilia: a baseball bat. It is signed not by members of the official’s favourite baseball team, but by the U.S. officials who participated in the inaugural session of the now well-established consultations between India and the United States on […]
Is China having a first lady moment? It would certainly seem so. Peng Liyuan, a.k.a. Mrs. Xi Jinping, the wife of China’s new president, has emerged swiftly and seemingly decisively, into an overtly more prominent first-lady role than we’ve seen for some time in China. To be fair she has the track record to be […]
President Xi Jinping is expected to hold his first meeting as China’s new leader with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh this week, along the sidelines of the March 26 BRICS Summit in South Africa. The talks — they are expected to be a brief event according to officials in Beijing, who cited the limitations of Mr. […]
looking beyond borders 