Globalization

Ban Ki-Moon’s criticism of Morocco’s 40-year “occupation” of Western Sahara during his visit to the territory on March 8, 2016 has sparked the most serious crisis in the region in decades. Morocco denounced the Secretary General’s “biased” rhetoric, and “irreversibly” expelled U.N. peacekeepers stationed in Western Sahara. The U.N. Mission for the Referendum in Western […]

“Until very recently Singapore’s past was a matter of supreme indifference for most Singaporeans simply because they believed this island never really had a history worth remembering…” – S. Rajaratnam, ‘The Uses and Abuses of the Past’, 1984. A quick Google search for “slavery in Singapore” returns references to “Modern-day Slavery”, as many have termed […]

It seems that globalisation has resulted the rise of nationalism and xenophobia. We see it in the rise of UKIP in UK, New Dawn in Greece, Donald Trump in the US and the Swedish Democrats in Sweden. A recent Op-Ed in the Singapore Policy Journal argued that the local-foreigner divided was threatening to tear Singapore […]

Under the leadership of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), Turkey has secured its position as a major global actor. The country benefited from robust economic growth in the early 2000s and strengthened its ties with the region, the European Union, Africa, and the United States. Turkey rose to prominence with its “zero problems with […]

BY ORGA CADET This week, more than 150 heads of state will convene at the UN’s headquarters in New York for the 70th session of the General Assembly. The theme? “The United Nations at 70: the road ahead for peace, security and human rights.” One of the session’s objectives is to “draw lessons from the […]

BY YASIR GOKCE The United States has been employing preemptive self-defense as a justification for use of force as it carries out its war on terror. Preemptive use of force became a national security strategy under the Bush administration following the terrorist attacks of 9/11. As part of this strategy, there have been many instances […]

“Western rational thought is not an innate human characteristic; it is learned and is the great achievement of Western civilization.  In the villages of India, they never learned it.  They learned something else, which is in some ways just as valuable but in other ways not.  That’s the power of intuition and experiential wisdom.”  –Steve […]