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…
Sophia Nina Burna-Asefi is an undergraduate in Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen. Born in London, she lived in Uzbekistan for 6 years and has been travelling extensively in Afghanistan for the past 9 years. She is a member of the RSAA. The absence of General Abdul Rashid Dostum, first vice president…
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. Politics used to dominate Bangladesh. Politics and corruption, or politics, corruption and poverty, or was it politics, corruption, poverty and indentured labour?
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. Here, he looks at the background to the current dispute between Qatar and its neighbouring Arab states. On 5 June 2017, Bahrain, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE broke off diplomatic…
Jonathan Hibbert-Hingston and his wife Beth work for Operation Mercy in Khorog, Tajikistan. Jonathan will be giving a lunch-time lecture for the RSAA about some of their experiences in September. It was a slightly hazy afternoon when Nemat and I left our village on the outskirts of Khorog to go and look for his cows….
Hang Nguyen is a Ph.D. candidate at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology University in Australia. Here she considers the reasons for promoting Vietnam-Australia trade relations. Vietnam and Australia officially established diplomatic relations in February 1973 and have sought to foster their relationship since then. In 2009, Vietnam and Australia elevated their bilateral relations to…
Michael Noel-Clarke, who studied as an undergraduate in Esfahan and later served in the British Embassy in Tehran (1970-74), has recently translated the memoires of Prince Arfa, a prominent member of the Persian establishment at the end of the 19th century. The book has been published by Gingko Library as Memories of a Bygone Age: Qajar Persia and Imperial Russia…
