Asia

Introduction The Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS) is a product of Iraq’s and Syria’s sectarian polarization, political dysfunction, and the alienation of the local Sunni population from the Iraqi and Syrian regimes. The US-led anti-ISIS coalition was triggered by the jihadists’ capture of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, in June 2014.[i] While dramatic, […]

President Obama’s Middle East policy record in his first six years in office was mixed and lacked significant achievements. Overall, Obama’s approach was cautious, as the United States reacted to fast-moving events. U.S. strategy predominantly focused on degrading terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda in the Arabia Peninsula (AQAP) to prevent a major attack on […]

Growing Prevalence and Influence of Arab Migration Trends In recent years, Arab emigration has been growing. Arab expatriates constitute approximately 6 percent of the local population in the countries across North Africa and the Levant, a percentage that is twice as high as the world average.[i] Notwithstanding such significant patterns of out-migration, the impact of […]

BY SHANOOR SEERVAI This essay is excerpted from the single ‘Daughters of the Red Light: Coming of Age in Mumbai’s Brothels.’ I am seated cross-legged on a brothel floor on a hot April afternoon. The door is ajar. Just beyond it, a disheveled man in a grey pinstriped shirt appears at the top of the […]

BY UZRA KHAN This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  One morning in 2014, Deepika Saran,1 a young employee at an e-commerce startup in Mumbai, got a call from The Times Group, India’s largest mass media company. “We’re interested in featuring your company in a supplemental spread on new […]

BY KHALED K. Last week, an 18-month-old baby was burned to death in an attack by Israeli settlers in Douma, a village in the West Bank that is under Israeli occupation. The settlers left graffiti that read ‘Revenge’ and ‘Long Live Messiah’. The incident made international headlines; however, it is far from unusual. Every week, […]

REVIEWED BY SAM WINTER-LEVY This piece appeared in our 2015 print journal. You can order your copy here.  In April 1897, just months after Theodor Herzl published The Jewish State and launched the Zionist movement, a steamer containing twenty-one dreamers docks in Jaffa. They are a delegation of upper-class British Jews, and they have traveled to […]

As civil strife and conflict have curtailed the reach of Baghdad and Damascus, a popular notion has emerged suggesting that the artificial colonial-era boundaries of Iraq and Syria are collapsing. The popular and mistaken refrain is that the Sykes-Picot Agreement is unravelling. This has engendered a number of misguided suggestions that the borders of the […]

A proposed plan for the development of Mumbai, India’s financial capital, misses the opportunity to create affordable housing. BY SHANOOR SEERVAI You can judge a city by how its poor live, architect Kamu Iyer writes in his recent book tracing Mumbai’s development since the 1940s. By this measure, India’s financial capital fares dismally. The price […]

The current migrant boat crisis in Southeast Asia involving Myanmar’s persecuted Rohingya minority and poor Bangladeshis has caught the world’s attention. While there have yet to be any reports of boats entering into Singapore waters, the government has pre-emptively stated that the country “is not in a position to accept any persons seeking political asylum […]

  Abstract The Persian Gulf states have positioned the Middle East as a pivotal player in global aviation. Long-haul carriers, such as Emirates, Qatar Airways, and Etihad Airways, are exploiting the region’s unique geographic location and airport hubs to capture air traffic flows between emerging markets around the world. Meanwhile, low-cost carriers, like Air Arabia […]

Will Singapore’s next General Elections be as fiercely contested as the last? During the last General Elections, the call for greater governmental transparency drove significant debate, paving the way for the leading opposition party to gain unprecedented political ground on the promise of being a ‘check’ on the ruling party. In the 2011 Presidential Elections, […]