Sean Paterson is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society living in Guangzhou Many of us in the UK are familiar with the trope of a old man taking his grandson for a walk and saying, ‘all this was fields when I was a boy’. In many parts of China, it could do with a…
Most recently a Director of VanEck in New York, Tom Butcher has travelled extensively, particularly in South and Southeast Asia. Fortunately, at a little after four in the morning during a severe thunderstorm, the sole policeman at an empty Zero Point in Islamabad flagged down one of the very few vehicles on the road and…
Sung-Yoon Lee is a Korea expert and board member of The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea. Beyond platitudes like reaffirmation of the rule of law, what the ouster of Yoon Suk Yeol – South Korea’s conservative president impeached for declaring martial law last December – illustrates is that in politics it pays to…
Trevor Mostyn is a Lecturer in Middle East History at the University of Oxford teaching a course on “Islam in the Modern World” Writing a book on the United Arab Emirates (UAE), I introduced myself to the town councillors of Fujairah in my best classical Arabic. Delighted, they promptly closed down their offices and produced…
Jelle J P Wouters, Erik de Maaker, Chencho Dorji, Suraj Bhattarai, & Nithil Dennis Heritage studies and projects in Asia have overwhelmingly focused on sedentary populations, valley civilisations, ancient cities, and monumental religious and political sites. These have been affirmed as historical bearers of material and cultural order, progress, enlightenment, and civilisation, and therefore worthy…
Charles J Sullivan, PhD is a scholar on Central Asia and the author of Leaders of the Nation: Kazakhstan during the Twilight of the Nazarbayev Era and the Russo-Ukrainian War Kazakhstan is a developing country with substantial promise. It is a major oil exporter and its territory holds important rare earth deposits. Kazakhstan’s population of…
Professor Aries A Arugay is Coordinator of the Philippine Studies Programme at ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute and Chair of the Department of Political Science at the University of the Philippines-Diliman. Michael T Tiu Jr is Assistant Professor at the latter specialising in international criminal and human rights law The International Criminal Court’s warrant of…
Most recently a Director of VanEck in New York, Tom Butcher has travelled extensively, particularly in South and Southeast Asia. As it is now, back in the mid ‘80s, the Isan region of Thailand’s northeast was poor. But I loved it not only for the access it offered to the Mekong, but also for the…
Richard Walker is Professor of Tectonics at the Department of Earth Sciences, University of Oxford. He leads the Active Tectonics and Earthquakes Research Group, and is the Oxford lead of the UK Centre for Observation and Modelling of Earthquakes, Volcanoes and Tectonics. The desert town of Tabas-e-Golshan, eastern Iran, offers welcome respite from the heat…
William H. Wiley is the Executive Director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability. Â Prior to the establishment of the CIJA, he served with the Canadian war crimes programme, the United Nations tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, the International Criminal Court, and at the Iraqi High Tribunal during the trials of Saddam…
