#asia

While these institutions have made some headway in meeting the infrastructure needs of Asian countries, some critics of the World Bank and ADB argue they are slow and bureaucratic, and impose stifling environmental and social constraints which deter investment.

Beijing’s announcement on Thursday of a 10 percent increase in military spending, to $145 billion, marks the fifth consecutive year of double-digit increases, and is not without significant repercussions in Asia.

The Boston Global Forum (BGF), a non-profit forum for international scholars, hosted its opening session on July 2, aiming to engage leaders from the United States, Asia, and the United Nations to discuss the crisis in the South China Sea.  BGF Chairman and Co-Founder Michael Dukakis moderated the discussion, with the active participation of Professor […]

Following the release of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s new energy plan, nuclear reactors are set to restart across the island nation three years after the Fukushima disaster, leaving many fearing another radioactive plume. Citing economic and environmental concerns, Abe unveiled his government’s 20-year Basic Energy Plan on February 25, which aims to restart at […]

Relationship managers across Asia have a potently difficult year ahead as news reports continue to highlight actions and words that are anything but conducive to cooperation and understanding between regional states. When a former British ambassador to North Korea writes an op-ed in the Daily Telegraph titled “Are China, Japan and South Korea fanning the […]

The Chinese icebreaker Xue Long‘s rescue of the passengers aboard the stranded Russian research vessel MV Akademik Shokalskiy has made headlines around the world. Since December 24, the Russian ship has been stuck in pack ice near Antarctica’s Cape de la Motte, approximately 1,700 miles south of Tasmania. MV Akademik Shokalskiy was about midway through the month-long Australasian Antarctic Expedition, run by the University of New […]

You may have heard of the U.N., but have you ever heard of UNRISD? Perhaps not – as a research institute they aren’t going to grab as many headlines as the WHO, UNESCO or the Security Council. Yet the work they do is just as valuable, the latest example being a new program exploring when […]

On Tuesday, after 22 days at sea, the first-ever South Korean pilot service of the Northern Sea Route (NSR) reached its destination in Gwangyang, South Korea. Korean shipping line Hyundai Glovis chartered a Swedish oil tanker to carry 44,000 tons of naphtha, a light derivative of crude oil, from the Russian port of Ust-Luga, 110 kilometers […]

For all the talk of China and the Arctic, there’s one dark horse that definitely made itself known at the Arctic Circle: Singapore. With a speech that hit all the right notes, Sam Tan Chin Siong, Senior Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and a Member of Parliament, described the contributions Singapore can […]

“It’s so far, but so very near to us now.” This is what Dr. Uttam Kumar Sinha observed during the opening of the AsiArctic conference at the Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis (IDSA) in New Delhi, India last week. India received observer status in the Arctic Council in May of this year, along with […]

Now that the U.S. has been poised to strike Syria militarily, it is helpful to consider the United States’ role in the world. The premise of this documentary is intriguing: what if the United States removed all of its troops and military hardware from the dozens of bases it has all over the world? The […]

  U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has just returned from his second visit to Asia, only two months after partaking in the Shangri La Dialogue back in June, and his second visit to Asia in six months since becoming secretary of defense. Acknowledging the immense human suffering and tragedy that continues to unfold in Syria […]