The Rohingya are a Muslim group who live in Rakhine state (formerly Arakan state) in western Myanmar (Burma), a majority Buddhist country. According to the United Nations, they are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. They suffer routine discrimination at the hands of neighboring Buddhist Rakhine groups, but international human rights groups such as Human Rights Watch (HRW) have also accused Myanmar's authorities of being complicit in a campaign of ethnic cleansing against t...

Britain is no longer the great power it once was. Caught between an unmoored America and a fractured Europe, it confronts rising authoritarian challenges from China and Russia, while its domestic debates drift into abstract moralising. Lacking a coherent vision for the future, the country risks sliding further into managed decline, its global relevance steadily eroding.Yet such a trajectory is not inevitable. In this clear-eyed assessment of Britain's economic, ideological and stra...

More than fifteen years ago after the “War on Terror” was declared, many in the West now feel less secure than ever before. Many security experts believe global jihad is on the rise throughout the West, and yet these same experts do not know how to stop the rising tide. Military action abroad and police action at home have only attended to the symptoms of terrorism, not the cause. The root, according to Dr. Ibrahim, is actually the extreme ideology of Wahhabism—the puritanical, reactionary...

Liberal democracy has produced the most freedom and security for the most people of any form of government in human history. For a while, and especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, we believed that this would be enough. Yet, today, we face an anti-liberal backlash--and we bear much of the responsibility. Western leaders learnt the wrong lesson from the Soviets' downfall, seeing it as an ideological victory and adopting a 'total liberalism' with the same rigidity that had just b...

According to the United Nations, Myanmar's Rohingyas are one of the most persecuted minorities in the world. Only now has the media turned its attention to their plight at the hands of a country led by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Yet the signs of this genocide have been visible for years. For generations, this Muslim group has suffered routine discrimination, violence, arbitrary arrest and detention, extortion, and other abuses by the Buddhist majority. As horrifying massa...

No country in Asia in recent years has undergone so massive a political shift in so short a time as Myanmar. Until recently, the former British colony had one of the most secretive, corrupt, and repressive regimes on the planet, a country where Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi was held in continual house arrest and human rights were denied to nearly all. Yet events in Myanmar since the elections of November 2010 have profoundly altered the internal mood of the society, and have ...

In the past two decades, Burma/Myanmar has become a front-page topic in newspapers across the world. This former British colony has one of the most secretive, corrupt, and repressive regimes on the planet, yet it houses a Nobel Peace Prize winner who is and in and out of house arrest. It has an ancient civilization that is mostly unknown to Westerners, yet it was an important--and legendary--theater in World War II. A picturesque land with mountain jungles and monsoon plains, it is one of ...

UPDATEDFor more than 50 years, Burma has been ruled by a succession of military regimes which rank among the most oppressive dictatorships in the world. Accused of crimes against humanity, they have brutally mistreated their people.Yet, in the last few years, the pace of change has been breathtaking. Much is now hoped for. However, Burma is one of the most ethnically diverse nations in Southeast Asia: there are roughly seven major ethnic groups living along...

China's reform era is ending. Core factors that characterized it-political stability, ideological openness, and rapid economic growth-are unraveling. Since the 1990s, Beijing's leaders have firmly rejected any fundamental reform of their authoritarian one-party political system, and on the surface, their efforts have been a success. But as Carl Minzner shows, a closer look at China's reform era reveals a different truth. Over the past three decades, a frozen political system has fueled bot...

In this fully revised and updated third edition of China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know®, Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom and Maura Elizabeth Cunningham provide cogent answers to urgent questions regarding the world's newest superpower and offer a framework for understanding China's meteoric rise from developing country to superpower. Framing their answers through the historical legacies - Confucian thought, Western and Japanese imperialism, the Mao era, and the Tiananmen...

'Essential reading for all those interested in how India will deal with its greatest strategic challenge, an increasingly powerful China**'-SHIVSHANKAR MENON** 'Vijay Gokhale strips away the illusion that China ever shared convergent interests with India in Asia and globally. A disconcerting read, but indispensable.'-ASHLEY J. TELLIS India's relations with the People's Republic of China have captured the popular imagination ever since the 1950s but have r...

How the Chinese Communist Party maintains its power by both repressing and responding to its peopleSince 1949, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has maintained unrivaled control over the country, persisting even in the face of economic calamity, widespread social upheaval, and violence against its own people. Yet the party does not sustain dominance through repressive tactics alone—it pairs this with surprising responsiveness to the public. The Party and the Pe...