August 2018

By: Elenoire Laudieri The best way forward to tackle Afghanistan’s never-ending plight Until the Soviet invasion in 1979, Afghanistan was little known outside Asia. In the West, it mainly attracted the interest of scholars of history and archaeologists as a landlocked country roughly coinciding with the ancient region of Central Asia called Bactria, which was invaded by Alexander the Great …

How to deal with our myriad challenges? A little more than a year ago, while addressing at the opening ceremony of the Belt and Road Forum for International Cooperation, Chinese President Xi Jinping termed Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) as the ‘Project of the Century’.  “Over 2,000 years ago,” observed President Xi, in an attempt to provide blueprints for the …

Why is Pakistan running dry and how to manage the situation? Pakistan is approaching the scarcity threshold for water. What is even more disturbing is that groundwater supplies — the last resort of water supply — are being rapidly depleted.  And worst of all is that the authorities have given no indication that they plan to do anything about any …

We’ve all benefitted from globalization, in many ways, but it also is a double-edged sword, because people seem to have lost their identity, and a feeling of belonging. An Introduction Madeleine Albright is a Czech-born American public official who has the honour of being the first woman to hold the cabinet post of US Secretary of State (1997–2001). She has …

By: António Guterres  Terrorism is a persistent and evolving global menace. No country is immune. Social media, encrypted communications and the dark web are being used to spread propaganda, radicalize new recruits and plan atrocities. The threat ranges from the crude tactics of lone actors to sophisticated coordinated attacks and the horrific prospect of terrorists using chemical, biological or radioactive …

In Donald Trump’s parallel universe On July 11-12, the leaders of 29 member states of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) met for a summit in Brussels, the capital of Belgium. During the plenary session of the summit, President Donald Trump suddenly called on fellow alliance members to spend 4 percent of GDP on defence, rather than the agreed-upon 2 percent. …

By: Anatol Lieven  The Duty of Afghanistan’s Region In the short term, the war in Afghanistan will be chiefly not a military struggle but a test of American political stamina and of the capacity of the Afghan elites to maintain a minimally consensual state in Kabul. In the long term, it will be chiefly a test of the regional great …

Few global issues have taken on more current importance than the future of the postwar, rules-based international order. The roots of the order run back to the mid-1940s, when US leaders decided that the United States should work to shape the postwar settlement in more structured, collaborative and rules-bound ways. They conceived of global organizations to promote collective problem-solving, avert …

The quest for a rules-based world order or containment of China? Facing its ‘most dynamic and formidable competitor in modern history’, Washington increasingly does away with hopeful thinking and seeks new approaches towards Asia. It raised the concept of the Indo-Pacific region. But what strategy is behind this buzzword? And what does it mean for Asia? Territorial disputes, trade wars, …

Conspectus The toolkit of statecraft has many an item in it; war and its related concepts are but one tool in that. Over the centuries, the international law related to war has been divided into two distinct spheres: jus ad bellum (law of war) and jus in bello (law in war). The former deals with the justifications or reasons leading …