In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

Over the past 90 days, the peace process between the Philippine government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) has been through the best of times and the worst of times. At the beginning of August, President Noynoy Aquino met…

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On September 20, former president and head of Afghanistan’s peace process, Professor Burhanuddin Rabbani, received an urgent call while in Dubai: Taliban leaders were ready to talk peace, he was told, and he rushed back to his home in Kabul.

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Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s controversial off-the-cuff remarks made earlier this month on the influence of conservative Islamic groups on the Bangladesh polity, led the Indian government to announce immediately – quite contrary to diplomatic practice – his much-awaited visit to Dhaka on September 6-7.

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Thailand’s political landscape throughout much of the 20th century was populated by numerous regional or personality-based parties, and characterized by weak coalition governments. Alliances and coalitions were made and broken easily, as parties sought the best deal for their constituents and members.

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Contrary to the predictions made by the plethora of political pundits watching Thailand’s elections that the Democrats would have difficulty holding their five current seats in Thailand’s Deep South, the Democrats instead ran away with nine out of 11 constituent seats.

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At a polling station in Chiang Mai province, election officials were busy counting votes just moments after the polls closed for Thailand’s July 3 general election. As counting continued, each ballot was placed aside in a pile, visible to the large crowd observing.

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Having served as a short-term international observer for the general election in Thailand earlier this month on July 3, I unfortunately became somewhat of an expert in the dark arts of vote buying. As one of 60 observers from the Asian Network for Free Elections (ANFREL) deployed around the country…

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On May 28, 2011, Nepal’s Constituent Assembly (CA) will end its tenure, for the second time, without having completed even a first draft of the constitution. In the lead-up to the deadline, a strike by ethnic and indigenous groups nearly shut down the nation’s capital Kathmandu late last month…

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Over the last months, the world has watched as uprisings and revolutions have spread across the streets and squares of the Arab world. In Egypt, entire families – mothers, wives, daughters, grandmothers, showed remarkable courage in standing shoulder-to-shoulder with their brothers, sons, and fathers…

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Earlier this month, the World Bank released its 2011 World Bank Development Report, “Conflict, Security and Development.” This highly ambitious report intends to challenge conventional wisdom and propose a new strategy for the international community to help countries emerge from war, long-running violent conflict, entrenched criminality, and fragility. In my view, the report has accomplished this goal, and in so doing, may change the way we work with fragile states and conflict-affected regions.

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