Amara Thiha and Marte Nilsen The political implications of ultra-nationalist Buddhist monks and ideologies in Myanmar received much attention in the years before the 2021 military takeover. As Myanmar has turned more violent since the coup, ultra-nationalist monks have been radicalised further. What role are these monks playing in the political landscape of Myanmar today?… Read More Monks and militias in Myanmar
Stalin presented Orthodox leaders with a proposal: the Soviet state that had destroyed their Church would bring it back In September 1943, as the tide of the Second World War was turning in the Soviet Union’s favour, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin called a meeting at the Kremlin. Alongside the foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov and… Read More At the Kremlin in 1943
World heritage monuments in Córdoba and Istanbul stand at the centre of a reductionist bid to rewrite the past In these two remarkable buildings at opposite ends of Europe, in their stones and slates and marble and gold, in their pillars and arches and windows and mosaics, can be glimpsed the complexities of European history,… Read More Mezquita and Hagia Sophia: two sacred symbols and the culture wars that belie their complex history
There seemed a certainty in degradation: T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom In Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the… Read More Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges
A kaleidoscopic journey through a divided country…The river of bile on which Sharlet fights to stay afloat courses from one end of the country to the other. By Elizabeth D. Samet The Undertow: Scenes from a Slow Civil War by Jeff Sharlet Jeff Sharlet’s new book, The Undertow, plunged me into a vertiginous fever-dream. It induced a physiological response… Read More The Center Cannot Hold
Concern is growing in Iran after reports emerged that hundreds of schoolgirls had been poisoned across the country in recent months. On Wednesday, Iran’s semi-official Mehr News reported that Shahriar Heydari, a member of Parliament, cited an unnamed “reliable source” in saying that “nearly 900 students” from across the country had been poisoned so far. The first… Read More Alarm grows in Iran over reports that hundreds of schoolgirls were poisoned
By Lynn Parramore / Institute for New Economic Thinking When you think of original sin and the fall of Adam and Eve, an economics class probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind. After all, economics is a secular discipline. Or is it? Maybe not entirely, considering that the earliest economic thinkers had religion very… Read More The Original Sin of Economics
Jamila*, a widow living in Herat, lost her husband in a suicide attack about eight years ago. She has an 18-year-old daughter who is blind and a 20-year-old son who lost both legs in a mine blast. Jamila used to be a housemaid and bake bread for people in their homes. With this income she… Read More Afghanistan: single women and widows are struggling to find their next meal under Taliban restrictions
It was the first time that the Iranian authorities have admitted to holding tens of thousands of political prisoners. Some 500 persons were shot dead by government security forces in the course of last fall’s demonstrations, and most of those detained were simply protesting peacefully, which should not have been the basis for an arrest… Read More Iran’s Khamenei admits to holding “Tens of Thousands” of Prisoners of Conscience
More than four months after the death of Mahsa Amini, the Kurdish woman who died in custody after being arrested for incorrectly wearing her hijab, the Iranian authorities’ attempts to crush nationwide protests have seen more than 500 people killed by security forces, including 70 children. Four protesters have so far been executed by the state, with… Read More ‘They used our hijabs to gag us’: Iran protesters tell of rapes, beatings and torture by police
After the truth-shower 