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The RSAA blog publishes new posts every week, covering the whole range of Asian current affairs, culture, travel, exploration and recent history from the Levant to East Asia. Browse our recent posts!
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Places Forgotten by Maps: Myanmar’s Rohingya Refugees Face Starvation
Dr Rónán Lee is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow at Loughborough University and the author of Myanmar’s Rohingya Genocide: Identity, History and Hate Speech “Places forgotten by maps” is how Rohim Ullah describes the sprawling complex of refugee camps where he lives alongside more than one million of his fellow Rohingya. It is a…
When Songs Carry History: Bhojpuri Folk Music and Migration
Simit Bhagat Is an award-winning Filmmaker, Journalist, musician and cultural archivist based in Mubai, India Some histories survive not in official archives, but in songs. In the Bhojpuri-speaking regions of eastern Uttar Pradesh and Bihar in northern India, folk music has long carried an emotional record of departure, labour, longing, and return. These songs were…
Inside the Taliban State: Control, Constraint, and the Limits of Resilience
Dr Hassan Abbas is a US-based scholar and author of The Return of the Taliban: Afghanistan After the Americans Left (Yale University Press, 2024). More than four and a half years after their return to power, Afghanistan’s Taliban rulers appear more consolidated than many of their critics expected. Predictions of imminent fragmentation, a dramatic elite split, or the…
Indonesia’s Indirect Election Proposal: Party Bossism and the Risk of Illiberal Democracy
Muhammad Aqshadigrama is a postgraduate student at the Indonesian International Islamic University and a researcher at the Think First Institute in Indonesia Indonesia may soon reconsider one of the key reforms of its post-authoritarian democratic system: the direct election of regional leaders. A proposal gaining traction in parliament would return the power to elect governors,…
Women’s Rights are Human Rights
Lovejit Dhaliwal is a foreign policy analyst, former documentary maker and an award-winning journalist Last week, I had the privilege of attending a screening of the documentary The Last Ambassador, which chronicles the life and work of Manizha Bakhtari, Afghanistan’s current ambassador to Austria. Watching the documentary, I was struck by an uncomfortable realisation. Despite…
Easy Prey: Iran’s Targeting of the United Arab Emirates in a Time of War
Charles J Sullivan, PhD is a political scientist and the author of “The Bear, the Eagle, and the Falcon: Russia, America, and the United Arab Emirates in a Time of Great Power Rivalry” in Asian Affairs (2024). The Islamic Republic of Iran’s targeting of the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere in the Gulf is part…
How Nepal’s Gen Z Movement Sparked an Historic Election
Suprina Thapa is an early-career journalist focusing on Nepal and South Asia Nepal has just witnessed one of the most extraordinary political transformations in its modern history. For the first time, a single party has secured more than 5 million votes in the proportional representation category, surpassing every record previously held by the traditional political…
Iran’s new leader is a dark horse
James M Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies The jury is out on Mojtaba Khamenei, Iran’s newly appointed supreme leader. Judged by his track record, his appointment does not bode well for Iran or for a quick end to the war. His rise signals defiance, resilience, regime…
Supporting Iran’s minorities risks playing with fire
James M Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies Iran may have played into Israel and the United States’s hands by firing drones and missiles at Azerbaijan and Turkey. Beyond risking drawing these countries into the conflict, the attacks could inadvertently fuel ethnic unrest inside Iran, even though…
Hope in Hard Times: Education and Resistance in Myanmar
Dr Joanna Barnard is CEO of Prospect Burma, an NGO providing pathways to higher education for Myanmar’s marginalised young people In Myanmar’s dark and protracted tragedy, there are many points of light. Since the coup of 2021, the military junta has failed to consolidate the power it thought to claim. More than half the country…
Escaping the Great Game
Joe Luc Barnes is a British writer and journalist based in Kazakhstan When English-speaking visitors are introduced to Uzbekistan, the story of Charles Stoddart and Arthur Conolly is never slow to raise its head. The fate of these two British officers, executed in the town square of Bukhara in 1842, has long served as shorthand…
Let My Country Awake: Indian Revolutionaries in America and the Fight to Overthrow the British Raj
Scott Miller is a former journalist and author of Let My Country Awake India’s struggle for independence has been widely chronicled, from the early years of the East India Company to Mahatma Gandhi’s campaign of non-violent resistance. Yet one heroic chapter has been largely overlooked: the audacious Ghadar movement and its California-based revolutionaries. America’s relationship…
Korean Cinema between Global Fame and Social Reality
Santosh Kumar Ranjan is an Assistant Professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University and Aman Tripathi is an Independent researcher and former Korea Foundation research scholar What pops into your mind when you hear the word Hallyu, or the Korean Wave? Perhaps the beautiful glowing faces, the glittering lights of bustling streets, lofty skyscrapers, a couple walking…
Permafrost Politics: How Thawing Ground Is Rewriting Asia’s Strategic Map
Saranya Chattopadhyay is a student of political science based in india The Arctic is thawing far from Asia’s gaze, yet its silent transformations are already redrawing the contours of power across the continent’s highest mountain systems. What appears to be a remote environmental shift is, in reality, a slow strategic checkmate, where melting permafrost, fragile…
Timeless Mumbai – in the words of its creators
Although I have lived in Mumbai all my life, I must confess that I had not, until recently, thought of Mumbai as a city worth exploring from an architectural perspective. My vocation as a real estate developer meant that I was always thinking about the ‘new’ – new trends, designs and modern structures – rather…
Rule Breakers: A true story about Technology, Gender, and the Politics of Defiance in Afghanistan
KOVA International Rule Breakers tells the true story of Roya Mahboob, an Afghan entrepreneur whose work in technology and education has challenged deeply embedded structures of exclusion. Yet the film is not simply a celebration of individual achievement. It is a meditation on resistance under constraint, examining how gender, power, and access to knowledge intersect…
Türkiye’s Strategic Entrenchment in the Middle East
Buğrahan Demir is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Drill & Defense Before 2011, Türkiye had a limited but predictable impact on the Middle East. Relations with the region were mainly conducted through diplomatic channels, trade, and energy transit, while military involvement was generally seen as an exception. This picture began to change markedly after 2011….
American Turbanismo in Afghanistan: How a Centuries-old Colonial Fantasy Keeps Reinventing Itself
Zohra Saed is an Afghan American Academic and Poet In popular Anglo-American imagination, Afghanistan has long been a site where masculinity, danger, and imperial desire converge. From the nineteenth century onward, Western travel writing about the region relied heavily on a repertoire of images: turbans, rifles, barren land, and “tribal warriors” that transformed Afghan men…