Amongst all Southeast-Asian countries, East Timor is not exactly the most notorious. The country, sometimes also referred to as Timor-Leste, is in fact easily outshined by all its immediate neighbours, namely Indonesia and Australia. Indeed, East Timor is not only substantially smaller in size, but it is also a fairly young nation. International recognition was not granted to the East Timorese until September 27th, 2002, when the United Nations General Assembly finally admitted Timor Leste as an official UN member.
On June 15, 2020, Indian and Chinese troops were engaged in a brawl near the Galwan River, which led to the death of 20 Indian Soldiers. This marks a startling culmination of years of disputes between both countries.
It would not be inaccurate to say that the Nile river, the longest in all of Eurasia, has played a foundational role in human history. After all, it has given rise to one of the first recorded civilizations thanks to its abundance of fresh water. This is no less true today, where it keeps shaping African geopolitics thanks to the vast resources it offers the nations it traverses: fish in abundance, an easy medium for transport, the possibility for hydroelectric power generation, and most importantly, fresh water.
April 20th, 2020 will go down in oil-market history as the day when the U.S. benchmark price for crude dropped below zero for the first time, meaning that producers would pay traders to take oil off their hands. In a massive and unprecedented swing, the future contracts for May delivery of West Texas Intermediate (WTI) tumbled to minus $37.63 a barrel.
Long before the discovery of the New World and roundness of the Earth, it was the Silk Road that connected the East and the West economically, culturally, and politically. The famous travels of Marco Polo were also set through this route. For almost 2 thousand years, from the 2nd century BCE to the 18th century, this road was the largest trade network in the world. Now, after more than 200 years, China is willing to make the Silk Road great again!
The current Israeli-Palestinian conflict dates back to 1947. In 1947, the United Nations adopted Resolution 181, which sought to divide the British Mandate of Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. On May 14, 1948, the State of Israel was created, sparking the first Arab-Israeli War. The war ended in 1949 with Israel’s victory.
In the past few months, Erdogan’s boisterous efforts to revivify the glory of the Ottoman Empire have dominated national and international headlines. The combination between the desire to form a strengthened and more assertive Turkey bearing the glory of its empire years has been termed “neo-Ottomanism”. Once one of the strongest and heavily multi-ethnic empires, stretching from the eastern Mediterranean to the heart of the Middle East, Turkey has recently commemorated a new turn in its foreign policy, one seeking the glory and security of the past.
On October 7th, 2020, a historic ruling was made by the Athens Appeals Court, giving verdicts for 68 members of the far-right political party, Golden Dawn, marking a very powerful moment in history as it was the first just verdict of a nationalistic group after the Nuremberg Court ruling in 1946 against the Third Reich.
In the recent weeks we have been flooded with information regarding the recently reignited conflict. However, this war isn’t of recent development, the area has known tensions since decades. The historic tension is generated by a discrepancy between who is de facto in control over the region, Armenia and who is de jure recognized as the Sovereign of the land, Azerbaijan. Nagorno Karabakh is an 11,458 square kilometers area with an estimated population of 143,000, the majority of which is ethnically Armenian, around 95%.
In these weeks, Belarus is facing the most important and persistent demonstrations since its independence from the USSR in 1991. For months, a sense of general disapproval about President Alexander Lukashenko’s government had been growing because of the inadequate way he had dealt with numerous situations, including the Coronavirus pandemic. Since the beginning of August, the country has been going through several violent protests between police and demonstrators, where frequent violations of human rights and the arrest of thousands of protesters were reported.