Tag: Asia

  • Reporting the Covid Pandemic from the Global South

    This piece in The Open Notebook delves into the experiences of “journalists in India and throughout the Global South” who were covering the Covid pandemic and the challenges they faced (and overcame) “as they sought to tailor coverage of a global pandemic to their unique, regional audiences.” 

    This is how the authors of the piece frame the commonalities in these experiences: 

    “There was the language issue, of course: The world’s 8 billion people speak over 7,000 languages, yet English is the lingua franca of science and scientific research, and many other languages lack even the terminology to convey science’s more complicated technical concepts. But newsrooms also had to bridge the social and cultural divides that often separate the science world from the communities they serve. Meanwhile, they were battling an infodemic of false and misleading claims, which spread across borders, continents, countries, and into even the most remote communities almost as quickly as the virus itself.”

    The authors spoke to journalists from India, Nigeria, China, Peru, Colombia, Philipines, and Kenya for the report. 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Global History of Sugar

    This book review in the Los Angeles Review of Books discusses Ulbe Bosma’s book The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environmentover 2,000 Years.

    Earlier scholarship had established decades ago that “early modern European aristocrats […] decorated their salons with sugar sculptures” while “millions of enslaved men and women, overwhelmingly of African origin, […] were overworked so mercilessly on Caribbean plantations that they regularly lost fingers, arms, or even their lives when they collapsed on whirring mill machinery or fell asleep atop boiling vats of sugarcane juice.” 

    According to the reviewer, “Bosma breaks some new ground” by adding to previous scholarship: 

    “The World of Sugar brings Asia to the forefront, particularly India, China, and—a little later—the Indonesian island of Java. A sophisticated sugar economy existed in Bengal and North India by the time Marco Polo visited in the 13th century. It employed professional boilers and entrenched systems of monetization and wage labor within the village economy. […] Ming China became a global hub of sugar trade, with cane dominating the landscape, and with new technological innovations—perhaps introduced by Egyptians in the early Islamic era—increasing the efficiency of refining. Elsewhere, Barbarossa, fresh from crusading in the Holy Land in the mid-12th century, brought skilled Syrians to breathe new life into the sugar economy of Sicily.”

    The reviewer shares some interesting tidbits about the global history of sugar from Bosma’s research: 

    “In the late 1600s, sugar confectioneries were introduced into Siam by a Catholic woman of Japanese and Portuguese descent, Marie Guyemar de Pinha (also known as Marie Guimard in French), who married the king’s Greek prime minister. Two centuries later, a sugar planter like Leonard Wray could effortlessly move between the Malay Peninsula, Natal (in today’s South Africa), and the American South, receiving land in Algeria from Napoleon III and conducting sugar experiments under the auspices of the former governor of South Carolina.”

    Since at least the “early 20th century onward,” the problems with the sugar industry have been far from secret:

    “Sugar was only profitable when churned out in mass quantities: consequently, sugar industrialists deliberately overproduced, which artificially drove down prices (and workers’ wages). Governments, meanwhile, helped save corporate sugar from a race to the bottom. They realized that national sugar industries, increasingly financed by Wall Street and the City of London, were “too big to fail” and thus protected them behind stout tariff walls. Today, national governments spend around $50 billion a year to subsidize the global overproduction of a commodity responsible for serious health epidemics.”

    Apparently, “Bosma is hopeful that movements such as conscious capitalism and green capitalism will prod the global sugar industry into reform: he establishes a parallel with the consumer-driven activism of the abolitionist movement of the 18th and 19th centuries.” But the reviewer argues that “[f]or products of mass consumption like sugar, conscious capitalism remains a fringe movement”: “The abolitionist movement, as Bosma notes, was itself undone by consumer demand for cheaper (and thus slave-produced) sugar.”

     As Bosma’s own scholarship shows, “the abolition of slavery in the British Empire in 1834 was followed, a bit more than a decade later, by the resumption of British mass imports of slave-grown sugar from areas beyond London’s imperial control” like Brazil and Cuba. Similarly, “Saint-Domingue sugar workers might have cast away their chains during the Haitian Revolution, but French planters simply carried those chains across the Windward Passage to Cuba, where they got to work establishing a new, brutal sugar frontier powered by yet more slaves.” 

    Read the full book review here.

  • Japan's Intelligence Ambitions

    This piece in SpyTalk.co, a popular Substack where Founding Editor Jeff Stein and a “team of veteran reporters” provide “original reporting, scoops and analysis on national security topics, with an emphasis on U.S. intelligence operations, both foreign and domestic,” talks about the problems Japan is facing in strengthening its spy program: 

    “Japan’s efforts to re-arm in response to escalating threats from China and North Korea are well-known. Less understood are controversial efforts by some in Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) to reestablish world class intelligence and counterespionage capabilities.” 

    Apart from the resistance that such efforts have historically faced from the public in view of “World War Two memories” of “militarism, neighborhood informants, and other mass spying against the population,” there are geopolitical concerns: 

    “Though further efforts to consolidate and strengthen Japan’s intelligence and counterintelligence organizations might seem logical in Washington, such plans face significant opposition from those government institutions, politicians, and parts of the business community that support closer relations with Beijing.” 

    Interestingly, “[t]hose opposed to strengthening intelligence perceive China as rising and America in decline.” The author says that the “prickly challenge” ahead for Washington is “to persuade not only Japanese elites, but the country’s voters, of American resolve, reliability, and support.” 

    It is yet to be seen if a third, “more independent policy dubbed “autonomous defense,”” advocated by the late Shinzo Abe, is totally out of the window. 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Similarities Between India and China

    This piece in the Asian Labour Review compares the economic histories and current economic policies of India and China, arguing that the two countries are very much mirror images of each other. 

    Historically speaking, the author argues, the two countries have “more similarities than often acknowledged.” For instance: 

    “From inheriting largely rural, agrarian societies, to seeking similar goals for their population in terms of development and industrial modernisation or adoption of command planning strategies, there are striking patterns of convergence between India and China. 

    One prominent aspect in this comparison is the global neoliberal turn from the latter half of the 1980s and the restructuring of labour. 

    The advent of market reforms, along with the state’s retreat from an interventionist role, is predominant in labour relations for both India and China. Despite minor variations, the changing nature of the state-labour relations and the declining power of labour as a political subject is conspicuous across the spectrum.”

    The competition between the two countries is related to the larger global economic system: 

    “As transnational corporations outsourced their production, there has been tremendous competition among countries in the Global South to attract these investments. Governments in the Global South provide companies with infrastructure, resources and incentives to embed their production facilities in their territorial jurisdiction.”

    This is why we see (sometimes failed) “attempts to weaken labour protections for the sake of attracting transnational corporations” like trying “to extend working hours per day from 8 to 12.”

    The author makes this interesting observation about China: “‘Socialism with Chinese Characteristics’ may continue to hold ground as a political-ideological euphemism, but capitalism is living reality in China’s economic transformation.” Recently, “[i]n response to rising labour costs, supply chain disruption and labour unrest, Apple and Foxconn have tried to diversify their manufacturing facilities to other geographies away from heavy dependency on China.” India is very much “in the race to parallel China, if not completely eclipse it,” with Indian policymakers “increasingly looking to copy the China playbook to shape the country’s growth and development.”

    The following lines perfectly sum up the central argument of the piece:

    “The nation-state narratives about India and China, centering on their geopolitical competition and itinerant border tensions, tend to emphasize differences and divergences more than convergences and parallels. There are admittedly vast differences in their political and social systems. But recognising points of convergence allows us to more fully explore their trajectories in all their complexities.”

    Read the full article here.

  • Buying Russian Oil with Chinese Currency: Pakistan Flirts with De-dollarisation

    As widely reported, including in this report in The Cradle, “Pakistan paid for its first imports of discounted Russian crude oil in Chinese currency.”

    As the report goes on to point out, this is significant because:

    “Pakistan’s purchase takes advantage of new opportunities arising from the war between Russia and Ukraine. Due to western sanctions, Moscow lost its European markets for oil and natural gas exports and has instead redirected its sales toward other nations, notably India and China.

    Large quantities of oil paid for in non-US denominated currency and at reduced prices comes at a crucial time for Pakistan, which suffers from a balance of payments problem that risks the country defaulting on its external debt. The Pakistan central bank’s foreign exchange reserves are currently only sufficient to cover a month of controlled imports.”

    Read the full report here.

  • The Failure of the East India Company's Efforts to Pedestalise Robert Clive

    In this article for Scroll, art historian Jennifer Howes shows “how the East India Company tried to cultivate a strong, positive reputation in London by commissioning artworks” through two portraits of the colonist Robert Clive that the company commissioned, “showing him as a hero.” One of these was a neo-classical statue that depicted Clive “in Roman military costume” and the other was a painting that depicted him as a philanthropist in an effort “to heal his toxifying reputation.” The latter was commissioned after the reputation built by the former had collapsed: 

    “In the late 1760s he returned to Britain, bringing with him a staggering personal fortune that he had amassed in Bengal. Regarded as one of the richest men in Europe, he conspicuously bought properties in England and Wales, and spared no expense on rebuilding and furnishing these new residences. Clive’s spending spree coincided with reports of the Bengal Famine, a catastrophe that killed about 10 million people. The source of Clive’s fortune came under scrutiny and his character was aggressively criticised by the British public.”

    Of the failure of the East India Company’s attempts at spreading propaganda, the author says: “such manoeuvring, particularly in Georgian London’s critical atmosphere, could also backfire.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Illusion of The Self: From Eastern Philosophy to Neuroscience

    This piece for Big Think by a neuropsychologist discusses how experimental science may be coming to the same conclusion that Eastern philosophy has provided for more than 2,500 years: “that the individual self is more akin to a fictional character than a real thing.” 

    The author points out that in Western thought ““I” represents the idea of our individual self” and “[t]his I/ego is what we think of as our true selves, and this individual self is the experiencer and the controller of things like thoughts, feelings, and actions.” However, the author challenges us, “The next time there is an intrusive thought, consider the very fact that your being unable to stop it proves that there is no inner self that controls it.” 

    Eastern schools of thought like Buddhism, Taoism, and the Advaita Vedanta school of Hinduism, on the other hand, say “that this idea of “me” is a fiction, although a very convincing one” and that “the concept of the self is seen as the result of the thinking mind”: 

    “The thinking mind reinvents the self from moment to moment such that it in no way resembles the stable coherent self most believe it to be.” 

    The author points out that several studies over the years “have shown that the left side of the brain excels at creating an explanation for what’s going on, even if it isn’t correct, even in people with normal brain functioning”:

    “The truth is that your left brain has been interpreting reality for you your whole life, and if you are like most people, you have never understood the full implications of this. This is because we mistake the story of who we think we are for who we truly are.”

     Importantly, despite the progress in the field of brain mapping, the self has never been mapped as a function of the mind. The author argues: 

    “While various neuroscientists have made the claim that the self resides in this or that neural location, there is no real agreement among the scientific community about where to find it — not even whether it might be in the left or the right side of the brain. Perhaps the reason we can’t find the self in the brain is because it isn’t there.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Amnesty Releases Report on Taliban's War Crimes in Panjshir

    As this article reports, Amnesty International has published a new report that claims “[t]he Taliban have committed the war crime of collective punishment against civilians in Afghanistan’s Panjshir province.” 

    The area has a number of “members of the security forces of the former Afghan government” who “fled to Panjshir with equipment and arms, and joined the National Resistance Front (NRF).” 

    This has led to a retributive crackdown in the area by the Taliban resulting in “torture and unlawful killings,” “[m]ass arbitrary arrests and detention intended to intimidate local population,” and detainees being “subjected to extrajudicial executions.” 

    As the article states:

    “While many of the acts taken by Taliban forces individually constitute war crimes, the entirety of those acts – plus the additional arbitrary detentions and restrictions on the civilian population – also constitute the war crime of collective punishment.”

    Read the Amnesty International article covering the report here. Read the full original report here.

  • FAO Facilitates Japanese Aid to Boost Paddy Production in Sri Lanka

    According to this report, the Government of Japan, “through the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO),” is to provide $ 4.6 million “to strengthen the production capacity of smallholder paddy farmers in identified districts of the Dry and Intermediate Zones of Sri Lanka.” Reportedly, “[s]mallholder farmers are amongst the most vulnerable rural communities, predominantly cultivating rice for self-consumption.” 

    This comes in the wake of recent food shortages in Sri Lanka. According to the report: 

    “Together with its partners, FAO in Sri Lanka is addressing urgent food security needs, protecting the livelihoods of vulnerable farmers and fishers in the most affected districts while promoting agriculture, including in urban settings.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Authoritarianism and Neoliberal Education in Indonesia

    This article in Inside Indonesia discusses the “[l]egacies of Indonesia’s authoritarian past” in how “the Indonesian government continues to exert influence over how knowledge is consumed and produced within academic institutions.” 

    According to the author, “the state’s education policies have actively enforced an ideology of neoliberalism.” The author is concerned that “[a]cademics are shaping their ways of producing knowledge to conform with the expectations of a growing neoliberal authoritarian state.” This is concerning because: 

    “Knowledge that is produced within a neoliberal authoritarian environment deprives people of their economic and political rights, sustaining the state’s power. Controlling the people who produce knowledge is to control knowledge.”

    But the author draws hope from “the many examples of collective forms of education and knowledge production” and “a number of examples of collective resistance” to the Indonesian government’s authoritarian “marketisation of curriculum.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • How Dangerous is ISIS Today?

    This article published by Observer Research Foundation discusses how “[e]ven as ISIS as a group today is severely depleted, the threat perception remains constant.” 

    “[T]actically and strategically, ISIS is a mere shadow of what it was,” the author writes. After all, the terror group once “had control of the geography between Syria and Iraq, bigger than the landmass of the United Kingdom.” But “ideologically, it remains a potent force”: 

    “Pro-ISIS propaganda online remains in wide circulation, and other groups that align with it such as those in parts of Africa and Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) in Afghanistan continue to operate as local insurgencies and terror ecosystems using ISIS for its brand equity in an effort to attract attention, recruitment, and finance.” 

    The group’s ‘caliphate’ has long collapsed and “counterterror operations against ISIS in Syria, largely led by the US, have seen incredible success in the recent past.” Reportedly, “[t]he US has also moved away from an over-reliance on drone strikes as a mainstay of its counterterror thinking” and is instead using “special operations troops”: 

    “This method, while increasing risk of American fatalities on the ground exponentially, decreases the chances of civilian casualties, an issue that has repeatedly plagued and undermined US counter-terror operations in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan alike over the past two decades.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • South Asia Open Archives Now Contain More Than 1 Million Pages

    As this piece in JSTOR Daily reports, the South Asia Open Archives “now offers more than one million pages of digitized primary source material.” 

    The South Asia Open Archives (SAOA) website describes the archive as:

    “… a collaborative, open-access resource for research, teaching, and learning about South Asia. The member-driven collection includes historical and contemporary sources from and about the region in arts, humanities, social sciences, history of science, and other fields in English and other South Asian languages.”

    As the JSTOR Daily article points out, the archive was “launched in 2019 by the Center for Research Libraries (CRL)” and since then “[m]ore than two dozen institutions have contributed to this ever-growing archive.” 

    The Centerfor Research Libraries “is an international consortium of university, college, and independent research libraries” based in Chicago, Illinois. 

    Read the JSTOR Daily report on SAOA here. Browse the open-access South Asia Open Archives here.

  • The Conflict in Myanmar

    According to this report in The Diplomat, “a group of Myanmar’s neighbors, India, Thailand, Bangladesh, and Laos, seem adamant about treating the junta like a single sovereign entity and nursing it back to strength.” This is the same “military junta that attempted to seize control of Myanmar in February 2021.” 

    While the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which had “been placed by the United Nations and the wider international community in the driving seat of international Myanmar policy,” had been “inching towards a more moderate and critical position on Myanmar,” Thailand is reported to have “launched a separate track of talks aimed at undermining this approach.” 

    According to the author, an obvious flaw in this approach is that the “junta is just not able to implement its political or economic decisions across most of the country’s territory.” Some maps are said to “demonstrate just how limited the Myanmar army’s movement has become since the coup, as a result of the widespread nationwide uprising.” Having been on the ground, the author reports: “The situation varies greatly on the ground, but the maps provide an accurate bird’s eye picture.” 

    Meanwhile, the army has resorted to all sorts of violence including rape and terror attacks. “Millions of people in resistance areas live under constant remote surveillance by drones, knowing that at any moment this could be followed by a devastating air force sortie.”

    Read the full report here.

  • The Ranajit Guha Entry in The Routledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism

    In the wake of the death of Subaltern Studies pioneer Ranajit Guha, scholar Alf Gunvald Nilsen has shared an open-access version of the entry he wrote on Guha for TheRoutledge Handbook of Marxism and Post-Marxism.

    Read the full entry here.

  • Excavated Buddha Statue Seen as Proof of Trade Between Ancient Egypt and India

    As this report by English-language Egyptian news portal Ahram Online states, archaeologists from a joint “Polish-American archaeological mission” have found a statue depicting the Buddha at the site of the ancient Egyptian city of Berenike while excavating in a temple complex “dedicated to the Goddess Isis.”

    The find, along with other excavations on the site, like “an inscription in Sanskrit” and “two second-century CE coins” from a central Indian kingdom, is said to show “a connection between Egypt and India during the Roman Empire.” 

    Read the full report here.

  • Irresponsible Nuclear Posturing by Politicians in India and Pakistan

    This piece in South Asian Voices, “an online policy platform for strategic analysis on South Asia” published by the Stimson Center in Washington, D.C., argues that “irresponsible statements” about the use of nuclear weapons by politicians in Pakistan and India over the last few years “contribute to cultivating nuclear war psychology” instead of promoting a responsible “stigmatize the bomb” strategy. 

    Politicians from Pakistan and India making irresponsible remarks about nuclear weapons is said to “reinforce South Asian atomic culture”: 

    “This atomic culture has facilitated the acquisition of nuclear technology with chauvinistic pride and a symbol of supreme power for political independence. It has limited space for negotiating potential threats of nuclear exchanges and shared responsibilities of hostile SNW [strategic nuclear weapon]. For instance, New Delhi and Islamabad have not been able to build robust institutional arrangements for Nuclear Confidence Building Measures (NCBMs).” 

    Read the full article here.

  • Rising Debt Servicing Costs Eating into Government Revenues in Poorest Countries

    This piece in the Financial Times reports how studies from across the ideological spectrum, by Debt Justice campaign and the IMF, show that “[l]ow-income countries will face their biggest bills for servicing foreign debts in a quarter of a century this year, putting spending on health and education at risk.”

    The report says: “The figures — the highest since 1998 — follow a steep rise in global borrowing costs last year, when central banks sought to counter high inflation with rapid rate rises.”

    Some argue that this may call for debt relief at a large scale like when “[m]ultilateral lenders and foreign governments led by the IMF and the World Bank delivered far-reaching debt relief around the turn of the millennium.” The argument goes that this may even require “changes to laws governing bond contracts in England and the state of New York to force private creditors to take part in debt cancellation.”

    Sri Lanka, having been in the news for some time now due to its financial troubles, “faces the steepest schedule of external repayments, equal to 75 per cent of government revenues this year. The country is unlikely to meet those payments following a default on its external debts last year.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Avoiding Deliberations in Policy-making in the Name of Efficiency

    In this editorial for the Deccan Herald, policy researcher Yamini Aiyar warns against the tendency to problematise the bureaucracy only as a means to undermine democratic processes. 

    As she writes: 

    “Too often, debates on State capacity veer in the direction of setting up a false dichotomy between democracy and efficiency (conflated with State capacity). “Too much democracy”, the argument goes, with its attendant chaos caused by necessary rules of deliberation-negotiation and consensus-building, can become an impediment to State capacity. Indeed, this is the ruse that has been used to legitimise strongman leadership across the globe.” 

    Such demonising of bureaucracy in the name of “efficiency” is often used as a way to circumvent institutional mechanisms for deliberations on matters of policy, the author argues. As she concludes: “The expectation that a less democratic, low-capacity State can endow itself with the capacity to do what the State ought to do in a complex and unequal social setting is a falsity spurred by a deep desire to legitimise undemocratic political regimes.” 

    Read the full article here.

  • The Backlash Against Campaigns to Ban Caste Discrimination in North America

    In this report, Time covers the backlash to the attempt to explicitly ban caste discrimination in California, part of a growing number of such efforts across North America. As the report points out:

    “Caste is a system of social hierarchy that has been especially pervasive in South Asia. It dates back more than 3,000 years but even today is the basis of discrimination for those considered to be lower caste or falling outside the system, including Dalits, who have been ostracized as “untouchables.”

    Caste discrimination has made its way overseas to the U.S., too. A 2018 survey by Equality Labs—a nonprofit that advocates for Dalits—found that one in four Dalits in the U.S. say they faced verbal or physical assault and two out of every three reported facing discrimination at work.”

    Read the full report here.

  • Nalanda: An Ancient Indian University

    The BBC recently published a succinct introduction to Nalanda, “[f]ounded in 427 CE,” and “considered the world’s first residential university, a sort of medieval Ivy League institution home to nine million books that attracted 10,000 students from across Eastern and Central Asia. They gathered here to learn medicine, logic, mathematics and – above all – Buddhist principles from some of the era’s most revered scholars.”

    Read the full profile here.