Category Asia
Death in Mazar-I Sharif
by Magnus Marsden The brutal killing of up to 140 Afghan Army soldiers on April 22nd at an army base located near the city of Mazar-i Sharif in the north of Afghanistan raises profoundly troubling questions about the state of the country and wider region. The killings in Mazar come shortly after an attack (claimed […]
Who Is Ecotourism’s Winner – Nature, Culture or Capital?
by Sara Loh ‘Capitalism thrives on crisis. This is its engine of innovation and creativity’ – Sian Sullivan For neoliberal conservationists around the world, the environmental crisis has been produced (and will be saved) by none other than capitalism itself; for nature, ecotourism is one of many neat solutions that flattens and deadens nature into […]
Precarity as Freedom? Youth, Neoliberalism and the Dissolution of ‘Japan, Inc.’
by Shuto Fukuoka It would not be an overstatement to say that the Japanese youth of today are significantly foreign to the one a couple of decades ago, in relation to their lives, values, and consciousness. Throughout the post-war period, and particularly the past two decades, Japan witnessed dramatic socioeconomic transformation. Japanese society was founded […]
Is Lapis Lazuli Fuelling Conflict in Afghanistan?
by Magnus Marsden **Republished from Hurst.** A recent Global Witness report has brought much-needed attention to the plight of Afghanistan’s lapis lazuli and tourmaline mines, located in the country’s north-eastern province of Badakhshan. The report highlights the ways in which the mines have become a focus of dispute between local ‘strongmen’ and the armed groups they […]
Actually Existing Silk Roads
by Magnus Marsden **Originally posted at Hurstpublishers.com.** ‘Our country is at the heart of Asia’, Zia, an Afghan trader in his mid-50s who works in St Petersburg’s Apraksin Dvor market, remarked to me in December 2015. ‘Yet if the heart has all the qualities that allow the entire body to function, so too is the […]
