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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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Shanghai: Turbulent Past and Herald of China’s Future?
Professor Michael Dillon is a historian and biographer specialising in the history, politics and society of China Shanghai has had an extraordinary history. The squalor and sleaze of the early twentieth century have more or less disappeared although pockets of sub-standard housing in the midst of ultra-modern high-rise buildings reflect newer manifestations of inequality. Treaty…
Succession and Secrecy: Intelligence on Mao Zedong and Kim Il-sung
Dr Nick Miller is a Professor of Intelligence Studies at the Citadel Military College of South Carolina My doctoral research was shaped by my experience working within the US Department of Defense, where I managed portfolios related to China and North Korea. Across both cases, I encountered a persistent problem: the quality of intelligence collection…
Beneath the Gold: The Hidden Costs for Women in Batang Toru
Jonathan Manullang is a postgraduate student at the University of Edinburgh and a member of the Basic Income Earth Network The Martabe Gold Mine in North Sumatra, operated by PT Agincourt Resources, is frequently presented as a flagship of extractive-led development in Indonesia. Yet, when examined through a gendered lens, its impacts appear far more…
The Sinking Ship at the Heart of Conflict in the South China Sea
Bianka Tibayan Venkataramani is a Coordinator of the Global Governance and Security Centre at Chatham House War today is defined by advanced capabilities – from cruise missiles and stealth submarines, to drone warfare and the weaponisation of artificial intelligence. It is therefore hard to imagine that one of the most strategically significant naval bases in…
Rethinking Development in Central Asia
Dr Kuat Akizhanov is Deputy Director of the CAREC Institute and a Visiting Lecturer at the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan Over the past three decades, Central Asia has undergone a profound transformation. Emerging from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan were rapidly integrated into a global economic system…
What Next for Nepal?
Sumit Sharma Sameer is an author, producer and host of Ink & Insights, and Dr Pankaj Adhikari is a political scientist and policy advisor based in Melbourne, Australia. Fresh from being named on the TIME100 list of the most influential people of 2026 by Time magazine, Prime Minister Balendra Shah has stepped onto the global…
Born to Ride: Horses and Heritage in Mongolia’s Altai Mountains
Claire Thomas is an award-winning photojournalist, fine art photographer, and writer Nine-year-old Dastan, the son of a Kazakh eagle hunter, rode his pony beside me, cantering effortlessly without a saddle. He laughed at my attempts to pat my pony’s neck – a gesture the animal was clearly unaccustomed to. For Dastan, horses are not objects…
Japanese Wisdom for Export
Michael Neale was born in Kashmir, India and worked for Reuters in Asia and Africa This piece offers a reflective exploration of Wabi Sabi: The Wisdom in Imperfection by Nobuo Suzuki and Wabi Sabi: The Japanese Art of Impermanence by Andrew Juniper, drawing out their shared vision of wabi sabi as both philosophy and way…
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…