Tag Archives: Asia

An alternative or multipolar version of globalization, the Eurasian Idea accepts globalization as the current major fundamental world process deciding the main vector of modern history.

Biofortification is a partial solution global hunger, which must go hand in hand with efforts to reduce poverty, food insecurity, disease, poor sanitation, social and gender inequality.

Governments in Asia and elsewhere would do well to focus actively on ways to mitigate the uncertain and potentially dangerous results of erratic or irresponsible US international behavior as early as possible, advises one analyst.

The sustainability of Asia’s food production systems is being questioned in a world with intensive agriculture. Current agricultural production and distribution already leaves hundreds of millions of people hungry in the world, while growth in agricultural production under a business-as-usual model will likely contribute to the planet approaching or even surpassing its safe operating space in terms of biodiversity, climate change and the nitrogen cycle.

Leadership is ineluctably a zero-sum game. It is much more likely that a stable and collaborative new leadership order in Asia will only emerge if political leaders are willing to work hard and make real sacrifices to create it. As a first step, both the US and China would need to recognize and acknowledge the need for mutual accommodation.

Japan, along with the rest of Asia, must seize anew the opportunity to join in shaping the future of the regional architecture. During the lost decades, Japan’s Achilles heel was its inability to see the bigger picture. Japan must now ‘think big’ and engage multilaterally for the Asian regional order.

If there is anything to be learnt from the history of India’s Second World War, it is that India’s ability to be a pivotal power in Asia is contingent on the restoration of the strategic and economic unity of the subcontinent. Decades on, this remains a project worth pursuing.

China is seeking to “redraw Asia’s geopolitical map” through the Twenty-First Century Maritime Silk Road and Silk Road Economic Belt projects. What looked like two Asias with quite different dynamics now looks more like one complex Asia, in which economic as well as military power is being used within a competitive logic between states.

Political leaders in Asia may help to check the conflation of Islam with violence and radicalization if they join in common cause with a plurality of states against radical violence and in favor of religious tolerance and mutual respect.

A growing middle class in Asia can mean more people lifted out of poverty and leading comfortable and productive lives. It can also mean more social inequality, more pollution, more congestion, and more loss of natural capital and public goods.