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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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Pakistan – An Era Past
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…
South Korea’s Martial Law Peripeteia
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…
Islam in the Modern World
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…
More-Than-Human Heritages of the Bhutanese Highlands
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…
Kazakhstan’s New “Middle Power” Myth
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…
Rodrigo Duterte’s Trial Before the International Criminal Court: Unprecedented
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…
Laos – An Era Past
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…
Earthquake Hazard in Asia: A Growing Problem
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…
A Criminal Justice Response to Assad Regime Criminality
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…
Mekong at Risk: The Devastating Toll of Hydroelectric Dams
Eve Register is a Research Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Foundation and member of NATO Defence Education Enhancement Programme’s Global Threats Advisory Group Hydropower is currently the world’s largest renewable energy source and accounts for over half of renewable electricity production globally. Dam construction skyrocketed in the late 1970s, driven by the reliability and cost-effectiveness of these…
Nadia’s Initiative
Nadia’s Initiative is a nonprofit organisation founded in 2018 by Nadia Murad that advocates for survivors of sexual violence and aims to rebuild communities in crisis. In August 2014, ISIS surrounded the quiet Yazidi farming village of Kocho in Sinjar as part of an effort to ethnically cleanse Yazidis from Iraq. In the week leading…
Energy and Diplomacy: How Oman is Adapting to a Multipolar World
Jonathan Fenton-Harvey is an analyst and journalist, particularly focused on geopolitical and economic issues in the Gulf region, Middle East and North Africa Oman often flies under the radar as an understated actor in the Middle East, especially compared to its fellow Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) neighbours such as Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and…
The Sublime Post
Choon Hwee Koh is assistant professor of Ottoman history at the University of California In the 1840s information traveled at roughly the same speed as it had in 840 BCE. Before the telegraph and the steamship, relay postal systems were the premier technology for long-distance communication. Powered by horses, these overland relays were more reliable than…
Faxian and China’s Efforts to Court Sri Lanka
Marcus Andreopoulos is a Senior Research Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Foundation and a Subject Matter Expert with the Global Threats Advisory Group at NATO’s Defence Education Enhancement Programme Having elected a new president and government at the end of last year, Sri Lanka looks set to chart a new course in its approach to foreign policy. Since…
South Yemen: Gateway to the World?
Karen Dabrowska is a journalist and writer focused on the Middle East South Yemen could be the Hong Kong of the Middle East. Centred on the strategic port of Aden located on the southern tip of Arabia there is tremendous potential for the development of a free trade zone or a special economic zone, a…
Kazakh-Afghan Relations: The Competition for Trade and Connectivity in Central Asia
Eldaniz Gusseinov is a Non-Resident Research Fellow at the Haydar Aliyev Center for Eurasian Studies and a Columnist for Daryo In recent years, the relationship between Kazakhstan and Afghanistan has been changing significantly, driven by stronger economic and diplomatic ties. A major turning point came in December 2023 when Kazakhstan decided to remove the Taliban from…
ASEAN in 2025: Malaysia’s Narrative in the South China Sea
Fikry A Rahman is Head of Foreign Affairs at Bait Al Amanah and Vasey Fellow at the Pacific Forum and Karisma Putera Abd Rahman is Senior Analyst for Foreign Affairs at Bait Al Amanah Malaysia has always taken a non-confrontational approach to managing incursions, encroachment, and provocations in the South China Sea. While this stance has…
The Invention of Everything: Joseph Needham and the Rediscovery of Chinese Science
Sean Paterson is a Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society living in Guangzhou In 1620, the great polymath Francis Bacon published his magnum opus, the Novum Organum. Among an early draft of the scientific method, he considered three inventions that had, in his own lifetime, turned the world upside down. ‘It is well to observe…