The ailing former president has been squarely on South Africa’s mind the last few months. At 94, he is frail and fading fast. Housebound and bedridden in his Johannesburg estate, he is rumored to be senile; some claim he no longer speaks at all. One especially devastating newspaper report, quoting his former wife, said that his “sparkle was fading.” Read […]
If this week’s BRICS summit in Durban, South Africa, passed you by, we don’t blame you. The leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa met, as they do once a year, to advance their common interests. They found, as they do once a year, that they don’t have many, so not much happened. […]
Put simply, then, China won the battle by choosing not to fight it. But this isn’t quite the whole story. In addition to avoiding the grave costs of the war, China capitalized by offering developing countries an attractive alternative to the United States: ideologically-blind economic engagement. And, as a result, Beijing was able to expand […]
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 […]
