In Asia: Weekly Insight and Features from Asia

While many nations limped into the new year under the weight of somber economic forecasts, strong GDP predictions gave Asia a reason to ring in the Year of the Snake on a more positive note. This is certainly good news, but also consider this: over half of Asia’s population is women who, according to UN estimates…

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This year, spring arrived a few days early in Bangladesh’s capital, Dhaka, and its advent was a raging bloom. On February 5, a few Bangladeshi blogger-activists occupied the Shahbag intersection to protest against the mild sentence of life-imprisonment awarded to war criminal Abdul Quader Mollah…

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The dissolution of the Constituent Assembly (CA) in May 2012 has left Nepali politics in a deep impasse over the formation of an “election government.” The opposition has been refusing to go into an election until a broad-based government is formed under the leadership of Nepali Congress (NC), but the current prime minister…

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In a study I wrote a number of years ago, I quoted a peace activist in Mindanao lamenting the lack of success in ending the war between the government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF). He was speaking in the wake of President Estrada’s 2000 “all-out war” offensive that overran fixed positions of the MILF.

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Women make up more than half of the population in Asia, and the UN estimates that the Asia-Pacific economy would earn an additional $89 billion annually if women were able to achieve their full economic potential in these countries. To examine this disparity, The Asia Foundation, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State…

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Over the weekend, academics and practitioners from across the U.S. gathered at the University of Southern California for a conference that aimed to challenge some of the bedrock assumptions and rhetoric that underpin the movement against trafficking in persons.

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It has been a month since the fatal rape of a 23-year-old woman by a gang of six men on a moving bus in South Delhi captured headlines in India and around the world. In Delhi, where I live and work, the incident continues to pervade both the media and private conversations as people of all walks of life struggle to come to terms…

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Over the last several decades, Asia has become increasingly integrated with the rest of the world, its rapid development driven largely by exports to the United States and European Union. Yet, as the world’s main economic arteries shift eastward, intra-regional integration within Asia still lags behind.

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Yesterday, countries around the world marked International Migrants Day in recognition of the 214 million migrants on the move across the globe in search of better economic opportunity. No where is this recognition more important than in a place like Nepal…

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December 8-10, The Asia Foundation supported six highly regarded Burmese women entrepreneurs to attend the South Asia Women’s Entrepreneurship Symposium in Dhaka. The symposium, hosted by the U.S. State Department, brought together over 100 women entrepreneurs from across Asia to discuss shared challenges that limit their economic and political opportunities. Read more.

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