“Knowing where you are going,” declared Minister for Foreign Affairs S. Rajaratnam in the 1970s, “is more important than knowing where you came from” (Tarulevicz 2009, 415). So convinced was he by this maxim that he echoed this exact sentiment a decade later in an article for The Straits Times, where he extolled the merits […]

Despite incurring heavy losses, Hezbollah stands to gain from its participation in the Syrian civil war on the side of Assad.

According to Robert Ford, former US Ambassador to Syria, there is “not much” the United States can do to shape the outcome of the conflict.

The terrorist group aims to shrink the “grayzone”: the plane of coexistence between Muslims in the West and their non-Muslim countrymen.

When it comes to IT, tech-savvy Turkey has big potential and ambitions – but could be hampered by government censorship and wary investors.

We’ve been extraordinary in economic development. We can be as good at defeating xenophobia. BY ROYCE QUEK Rome wasn’t built in a day: and it also wasn’t built by the people and riches of its own lands. Instead, its armies conquered Greece, North Africa and Asia Minor through the manpower of not just Romans, but the many Roman allies: fellow Italian cities which had been subjugated by Rome and were forced to give soldiers to the Roman war machine. With this strategy of co-opting other cities into its growing dominion, Rome swept all before it. But the Italians weren’t happy …

By Katherine Mansted Will the rise of intelligent machines spell doom for humanity? Popular movies and news reporting on artificial intelligence (AI) would certainly have us think so. In Hollywood’s imaginings, AI is dangerous and uncontrollable. AI seduces: recall Ex Machina’s calculating femmebot. AI murders: think of the homicidal HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space […]

The dangerous assumption that Iraqis are unable to govern themselves must be challenged.

Climate change has arrived. It is no longer simply a threat for the hypothetical future generations, but a problem for our generation, and particularly, our children’s generation. For the first time, 2015 saw the global average temperature hit 1°C above than the pre-industrial era, moving perilously closer to the 1.5°C limit that countries committed to […]

Relooking Cultural Integration and Cosmopolitanism in Singapore From the rash of online sentiments directed against foreigners during the 2011 General Elections through the Anton Casey, Ello Ed Munsel Bello, and Sun Xu incidents, it might appear to some observers that xenophobia has finally taken root in Singaporean society. Is the apparent level of antipathy some […]

JMEPP speaks with Gregory Aftandilian on the devastating battles for Aleppo and Mosul -and what’s next for Syria and Iraq.

BY HAIYANG ZHANG A group of textile artisans protested against the newly developed labor-replacing machinery. They were afraid that the many years they spent mastering the skills would go to waste and that the machines would eventually rob them of their jobs. The violence broke out when people started smashing the knitting machines, and eventually […]