Blog
The blog echoes the remit of the RSAA, covering current affairs, culture, travel, exploration and recent history from the Levant to East Asia.
Opinions expressed in posts are those of the contributor, not of the RSAA.
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Hope in Hard Times: Education and Resistance in Myanmar
Prospect Burma is an NGO working with marginalised young people in Myanmar 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 lies outside of its control, and across a…
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…
Leadership and Governance are only half the electoral pie
Soumyadeep Chowdhury is Assistant Professor in Political Science at Adamas University, Kolkata and Allen David Simon is a postgraduate student at the University of Calcutta Were Indian electoral politics governed by Yashwant Deshmukh’s set axiom that ‘half a decent leader who can ensure half a decent job tends to be re-elected,’ the Narendra Modi led…
Robert Fortune and the Great Tea Heist
Sean Paterson is a member of the RSAA living in Guangzhou There has been much hand-wringing in the press about how Brits, especially those under thirty, are abandoning tea for coffee. The usual suspects blame Americanisation, but what many don’t realise is that the public are simply switching one Asian drink for another. Coffee is…
Majoritarianism in India: Roots and Consequences
Javed Gaya is a lawyer from Mumbai, specialising in commercial arbitration law Majoritarianism in India: Roots and Consequences traces the origins of the strident nationalism that has captured the Indian narrative associated with the rise of Narendra Modi. But it seeks to explore how the building blocks of this nationalism were carefully put into place by successive…
Unpicking Uzbekistan
Joanna Lillis is a Kazakhstan-based journalist and the author of Silk Mirage: Through the Looking Glass in Uzbekistan and Dark Shadows: Inside the Secret World of Kazakhstan One overcast morning in late 2016, I sat beside a flower-strewn grave on the terrace of a mosque in Samarkand, as mourners bowed their heads reverentially while a…
Red Sands: Reportage and Recipes from Central Asia
Caroline Eden is a writer and literary critic and author of the weekly newsletter Journey beyond borders Earlier this year, Green Mountains: Walking the Caucasus with Recipes, was published concluding my ‘colour trilogy’ set of books covering the food, history and culture of the Black Sea region, the South Caucasus and Central Asia. Encompassing ten years…
Persepolis, Armenia, and Iran’s Balancing Act
Jack Roush is a PhD candidate affiliated with the London School of Economics Iranian History Initiative In early September, Iran hosted the Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra for a concert at Persepolis, the 2,500-year-old remains of the Achaemenid Empire’s ceremonial capital. According to media affiliated with the Islamic Republic, the concert “gates of civilization” was intended to…
Tianjin: China’s ‘port of heaven’
Sean Paterson is a member of the RSAA living in Guangzhou The best French meal I have ever had was, perhaps unsurprisingly, in a small bistro in the 3e arrondissement, but the runner-up was somewhere rather different: Tianjin, a port city in northeastern China. But this is not as unexpected as it might be at…
How Mongolia’s Foreign Policy Navigates Its Renewable Energy Ambition
Bolor Lkhaajav is an international relations researcher and writer The phaseout of coal-fired power has been progressing in many countries and for a country like Mongolia – a major coal exporter and consumer – this means only one thing, a transition to clean energy must be pursued. Mongolia’s plan to reduce its overdependence on coal, in…
The Tiramisu Mountains: When Seas Vanish and Landscapes Are Born
Daniel Kordan is an internationally renowned photographer who runs photography workshops, tours and expeditions around the world Around four billion years ago, Earth’s oceans formed – born from frozen water delivered by cosmic bodies and from condensed steam that fell as endless rain. From that moment, nothing on this planet has stood still. Today, oceans…