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The RSAA blog publishes new posts every week, covering the whole range of Asian current affairs, culture, travel, exploration and recent history from the Levant to East Asia. Browse our recent posts!
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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…
The Golden Melons of Samarkand
Anna Ansari is an Iranian-American cook and writer focusing on the intersection of food, family, and history The following is an edited excerpt from Silk Roads – A Flavor Odyssey with Recipes from Baku to Beijing (DK, 2025). It all started with a melon. The melon in question was an attempted souvenir from a three-week,…
Reassessing the Security Implications of Pakistan’s ICBM Programme
Marcus Andreopolous is a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Foundation, and an expert with NATO’s Global Threats Advisory Group Towards the end of June, Lindsay Ford, a former Biden Administration advisor on South Asia, warned of an emerging nuclear threat to the US from Pakistan. Ford argued that growing paranoia in Islamabad, triggered by…
The Literary Traditions of Brunei Darussalam
Kathrina Mohd Daud and Ampuan Brahim bin Ampuan Tengah When Brunei Darussalam appears in global media, it is usually within the context of one of three points of emphasis: the perceived extravagance of the monarchy, the implementation of Shariah law in 2013, and dismissal as a somewhat unknown and perhaps exotic jungle island. It is…
K-pop’s Rise: Asia and the Globalised World
Adonis Li is a Lecturer in East Asian History at the School of Humanities and Heritage, University of Lincoln and a recent recipient of an RSAA Travel Award Korean popular music, often referred to simply as K-pop, is truly a global phenomenon. Earlier this month (August 2025), the song ‘Golden’ from the soundtrack of Netflix…