As China digests its once-in-a-decade leadership transition, the Chinese media is at a crossroads: the old semi-censorship regime is an awkward one. This status quo is being increasingly challenged by citizens and journalists longing for more pluralism in the media.
The Rule of Law may be being given away as Rule by Laws replaces a comprehensive system of democratically constituted judicial review.
How will Russia react to China’s rapid ascent as a global power? Will it develop its eastern links to spite the West, or join a USA led attempt to freeze Beijing out? Pavel Salin argues that this is a simplistic view of things and that Moscow may choose a third way.
The case of Alan Gross, an American development expert sentenced by Cuba to fifteen years in prison for “acts against the independence or the territorial integrity of the state", is the latest instalment in the tense story of Cuba-US relations. Negotiating is the only way to break the cycle.
The present crisis raises a number of crucial questions, for France, Mali, the EU and our globalised world.
As of December 2012, there were over 4,000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli custody. The year ended in frustration for many prisoners as interest in their plight has waned, both in the international media and in Palestinian society.
Did Kirchnerismo and the Argentinian opposition both betray their social ideals? An analysis of Latin American left populism (as well as the opposition movements) from a left wing perspective.
In the latest edition of Textures du temps, a historian’s eye is brought to bear on the discourse prevailing in recent British media coverage of the intervention of Algerian forces in the hostage crisis of In Amenas - the neo-orientalist concepts typically invoked when the subject of Algeria’s his
Postcolonial nationalism is a strange phenomenon. Brought up to despise everything British (as Jonathan Swift put it two centuries earlier, ‘burn everything English except their coal’), we were also imbued with a sneaking suspicion that British was somehow better.
The most dangerous fall-out of the Syrian civil war in which Turkey also played a significant role seems to be resurgence of the PKK.
Russia’s relations with China have long been governed by need and fear, even when they were supposedly linked by common ideology. Now China’s financial might means it can offer seductive loans to its cash-light neighbour. But Russia has so few specialist China-watchers to offer proper advice, says
The strategy of "reversed roles," in which the ruling party adopts a position contrary to its traditional ideological bent, thereby forcing the opposition to take the opposite stance, was used by the Justice and Development Party with regard to the American war in Iraq. Could the same tactic be us