Rupert Stone comments on the impact of Covid-19 in Pakistan While much of Europe and the US remains in varying degrees of lockdown as fatalities from the novel coronavirus continue to rise, Pakistan could be on the verge of a far more devastating crisis. With its huge population of around 220 million (the world’s fifth…
Articles are invited for a special issue of the Asian Affairs Journal on the subject of “The Environment and Social Justice in Asia”, to be published in November 2020. Articles covering any field or issue under this heading, including mining, water issues, forestry, manual scavenging, climate change, pollution, wildlife issues, or any other related matter…
Martin Purbrick (@mtpurbrick), the RSAA’s honorary local secretary in Hong Kong, continues his commentary on life with Covid-19. Martin is a regular contributor to Asian Affairs 20 April 2020 The Coronavirus in Hong Kong has led to a new normal lifestyle for us all. Bars, pubs, karaoke lounges, massage establishments, bathhouses, mahjong parlours,…
Coronavirus may be keeping us at home, but the RSAA is lucky to have members who can give us views from across Asia. This contribution is from Martin Purbrick (@mtpurbrick), honorary local secretary in Hong Kong. Martin is a regular contributor to Asian Affairs 4 April 2020 The Coronavirus affecting us now is not…
Sir David Akers-Jones, local honorary secretary of the RSAA in Hong Kong, died on 30 September. Martin Purbrick, a regular contributor to Asian Affairs, remembers his life. Â Sir David Akers-Jones, who has died aged 92, lived in interesting times on the south coast of China and was part of some of the key moments in…
Hardly anyone ‘goes to Batumi’. It appears in travel accounts as the gateway to the Caucasus, the last place where you can have the advantages of a port city before you hit the mountains, the last place where you can think twice before you set off for winding roads and precipices. I would have followed…
Paul Cheeseright is a former FT correspondent, and also is a member of the Asian Affairs Editorial Board. Maurice de Cazenove was in his early 20s when he arrived at Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) as a young career officer of Marshal Leclerc’s Expeditionary Corps aiming to reclaim French control of Indochina. He was…
Nagihan Haliloglu is an assistant professor at the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and a resident of Istanbul. In his introduction to Mehmet Emin Efendi’s 1877 travelogue on Turkestan, Ahmet Mithat Efendi says that anyone interested in Ottoman history and culture ought to visit Central Asia ‘to appreciate how much a tribe that is originally…
Dr Carl Hunter formerly served as an officer with the Green Jackets, and is now the managing director of Coltraco Ultrasonics. He travels extensively in Asia, and is a member of the RSAA. Here, he writes a letter on a business trip to Japan. I smoked a cigarette on an immaculate sidewalk in Tokyo. A well-dressed…
Robin Lamb was formerly British Ambassador to Bahrain and now the executive director of LBBC. He is also a member of the Council of the RSAA. Proposition Political Islam[1] has dominated political doctrine in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) for the last forty years. But jihadi[2] violence has contaminated its image (but not…
