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…
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….
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
