China’s Dissident Extraordinaire The Arab Spring did not quite make it to China. There, the Jasmine Revolution met a premature end, halted at the cyberspace stage of indiscriminate calls for action. The Chinese government responded swiftly to the protests, dispatching…
Despite its status as one of the most resource-rich countries in the world, Burma is rarely acknowledged or even noticed by the international community. Pressed between China and India and boasting sizeable reserves of gold, rubies, teak, rice and beaches…
The Israeli town of Beit Shemesh, Hebrew for “House of the Sun,” recently witnessed a modern-day reenactment of Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of a bus. Rachel Weinstein, a secular Beit Shemesh resident, earned international recognition after…
A forgotten twenty-first century genocide. This is how Daowd Salih, founder of the Damanga Coalition for Freedom and Democracy in Sudan, referred to the current situation in Darfur. Since February 2003, Darfur, a western Sudanese region, has suffered intense conflicts…
Since the inception of its protracted European Union bid in 2005, Turkey has scrambled to fulfill the requirements dictated by current E.U. member states, including human rights reform and far-reaching economic legislation. These talks have recently ground to a halt,…
Minxin Pei, Ph.D., is a professor of Government and the director of the Keck Center for International and Strategic Studies at Claremont McKenna College. He is a former senior associate with the Asia Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Pei…
Lots of Energy But Will It Leave Cracks in the Environment? In her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand describes Ellis Wyatt, an oil tycoon who had discovered how to produce oil from shale. She writes: “It was as if…
The Antithetical Legacies of Václav Havel and Kim Jong-Il On December 18, 2011, history was provided with an odd coincidence that invites further reflection — the simultaneous deaths of Václav Havel, a dissident playwright, essayist, and poet who became the…
