Foreign policy of an anxious adolescent superpower

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Filipino fishermen eat a meal aboard their boat overlooking Chinese fishing vessels. Photo: Reuters/Erik De Castro

China’s extremely successful economic development brings two predicaments, one domestic and one foreign. Domestically, rapid development quickly makes the economy and society more complex. An agricultural economy with basic industries suddenly has thousands of interconnected industries, a complicated technology sector and a highly differentiated services sector. A complex economy brings with it a complex society. […]Continue Reading

Robots are performing Hindu rituals

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It isn’t just artists and teachers who are losing sleep over advances in automation and artificial intelligence. Robots are being brought into Hinduism’s holiest rituals – and not all worshippers are happy about it. In 2017, a technology firm in India introduced a robotic arm to perform “aarti,” a ritual in which a devotee offers […]Continue Reading

Reimagining India-Thailand partnerships

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Commerce, culture and connectivity are often cited as the three main pillars of India-Thailand relations. Maritime trade between the two countries has existed since 1500 BCE, paving the way for people-to-people contact and cultural interaction between the two states bordering the Bay of Bengal. Thailand was among the first nations to establish diplomatic ties with […]Continue Reading

Seattle ban takes on stubborn caste discrimination

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Seattle became the first city in the United States to outlaw caste-based discrimination against immigrants from stigmatized groups in South Asia’s traditional social hierarchy. The ordinance, adding caste to Seattle’s existing anti-discrimination policies, was proposed by Kshama Sawant, the only Indian American councilwoman in the city, which is home to an estimated 75,000 Indian Americans. […]Continue Reading

In Bangladesh, a government without a foreign policy

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Bangladesh, a country of 170 million people, is sitting on the hotbed of the geo-strategic Bay of Bengal with an economy of US$470 billion, increasingly getting traction from great powers. In recent years, the country has made headlines for its economic success, more recently also for economic debacle. But the most unprecedented attention it gets is due to Indo-Pacific geopolitical reconfiguration on […]Continue Reading

Pakistan must review its food trade profile

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The war in Ukraine continues to send shockwaves around the globe. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a disaster foretold, yet there was little action on the part of most of the trading partners of these countries. In spite of the fact that tensions had been simmering and continually escalating over the previous eight years, our […]Continue Reading