In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

To mark International Women’s Day and broaden understanding of the importance of increasing women’s rights and creating political and economic opportunities for women, The Asia Foundation yesterday hosted a discussion on “Women’s Changing Roles in Asia,” as part of its Asian Perspectives Series.

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While in Saudi Arabia this week for bilateral talks, Nepal’s finance minister, Barsha Man Pun, made a much-needed request to Saudi Arabia’s government to grant amnesty for at least six months for illegal Nepali migrant workers.

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The Philippines has been noted as having one of the smallest gender disparities in the world. The gender gap has been closed in both health and education; the country has had two female presidents…

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Over the past few months, Indonesians have been witnessing a procession of scandalous cases involving female lawmakers accused of bribery, embezzlement of state funds, and shady, back-door political bargaining.

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Religion is once again in the headlines about the Philippines as 600,000 members of the home-grown Iglesia ni Cristo (INC – Church of Christ) held a prayer rally in Manila yesterday. Meanwhile, Catholics cheered the Vatican’s formal announcement last week that the second Roman Catholic Saint from the Philippines…

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In a remote corner of the sprawling Indonesian archipelago, a community is tearing itself apart. On the night of February 11, residents from Pelauw village on Haruku Island in the eastern province of Maluku, turned on their neighbors, hurling homemade bombs and setting hundreds of houses on fire…

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The Philippines has many cultural similarities to the rest of Southeast Asia. Some similarities, take cockfighting for example, puzzle some Filipinos and give great pride to other Filipinos (particularly males). Cockfighting is pre-colonial (as the chronicler of Magellan’s voyage when it arrived in the Philippines, Antonio Pigafetta observed) and is shared with Southeast Asia…

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Nearing its 65th year of independence, India, the largest democracy and second-most populous country in the world, is undergoing another transformation: a second freedom struggle. Birthed from decades of frustration over rampant corruption, a large-scale movement led by activist Anna Hazare has energized the country’s youth…

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While a lucrative deep-sea fishing industry places Thailand among the world’s leading exporters of sea products, a grim specter of human rights abuse lurks below the surface of an industry whose contribution to the national economy is estimated to exceed $4 billion a year. A combination of factors – including a shortage of labor in this dangerous…

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One of the interesting things about team-teaching a course on “The Domestic Politics of Southeast Asia: The Philippines and Thailand” is that I myself have never taken a course on Southeast Asia. I was an American politics specialist as a graduate student, with a dissertation on “Interpretation and American Electoral Studies.” On the Philippines in particular…

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