Nov. 9 marks the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. There will be no lack of commemoration — but there will also be very little celebration. Today the country is once again divided along East-West lines, and growing more so. As it does, the historical narrative of what really happened in the […]
The notion of the Taliban insurgency as a fractured entity, rife with internal strife, has lingered in much of the commentary and analysis on the Afghan conflict. This is in spite of the last five years, which have witnessed the Taliban pull out of its bloodiest internal crisis and achieve its strongest position since 2001. Long after the United States quietly […]
As a student of the classical world, UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson must be aware that the model of the upper-class demagogue gaining power by stirring up the passions of aggrieved plebeians goes back to the late Roman Republic. If he manages to suspend Parliament and push through a hard Brexit, Britain may well face […]
When the growth debate kicked off in the 1970s, most of the public still didn’t know anything about climate change. The Club of Rome researched resource consumption, overpopulation and pollution in a very broad sense. However, now that climate change has become an important political issue, we can learn a lot from that time. Most […]
Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan have been singled out by Chinese President Xi Jinping as major risks and challenges that Communist Party members must “struggle against”. In a speech to officials on Tuesday, Xi listed a number of challenges facing the country, even putting this specific category ahead of “foreign affairs” despite the global economic […]
Hong Kongers have long had an uneasy relationship with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) because of the party’s attitude toward the city, which has been to extract as many economic benefits from it as possible, with little or no concern for those who live there. Read Here – The Atlantic
Undeterred, Ali Milani carries on his mission. Which is convincing voters in this Uxbridge and South Ruislip constituency to vote for him and boot out their current Member of Parliament — who also happens to be Boris Johnson. If Milani pulls it off, it would be one of the biggest earthquakes in British political history. Never […]
As Hong Kong’s streets were choked with tear gas, petrol bombs and water cannons in a dramatic escalation of clashes over the weekend, just an hour’s ferry ride away in Macau all was going to Beijing’s plan. On Sunday, 400 members of the gambling hub’s pro-Beijing elite went ahead as expected and “elected” former legislature […]
To present and future Chinese leaders, managing economic change while maintaining social stability is much more important than figuring out how to respond to the social media rumblings of a sitting US president. For an economy as much as an individual, too much of a good thing can be detrimental. In the run-up to the […]
Has Indian nationalism turned utterly exclusivist? What would one of the icons of nationalism, Swami Vivekananda, have to say about this shift? Nationalism, after all, is a battle for the myths that create a nation. Read Here – The Hindu
looking beyond borders 