The Syrian civil war is coming to a close, and it looks like Russia – er, Assad – has won. According to the Military Balance 2019, Since 2015, 500 senior...
The mouthpiece for a country’s premier statesman is occasionally bound to be dumbfounded by the public’s queries. But that can’t be a reason not to have one in a modern...
Guest post by Ananya Iyer Quickly having transformed from a sleepy town idealized for retirement to a fast-paced megalopolis, Bangalore faces the issues of a city that grew up too...
When I first saw the invitation for Uber’s discussion on women’s safety, I was prepared for an event dealing with the incorporation of the gender aspect in Uber rides. However,...
Guest post by Ananya Iyer There are a few industries that conspicuously follow the counterintuitive path of experiencing growth during an economic recession- discount retailers, casinos, repair, handymen. Among these...
This week I’d like to talk about Russia and its favourite neighbour, Ukraine. To say that the two have a shared history is an understatement. Over the last thousand years,...
Over the Horizon: Time, Uncertainty, and the Rise of Great Powers David M. Edelstein Cornell University Press (2017) In 2001 political scientist John Mearsheimer unleashed a scholarly fusillade on the...
Welcome back to the Jobscape, our weekly round-up of news and opinion on the state of employment and job creation in India. This week we discuss India’s demographic dividend, election...
If Marcus Tullius Cicero had been around in 2019, he’d have said that the sinews of war are infinite crude oil. So both Iran and Venezuela are major oil producers,...
Far from the spotlight (or at least the Indian spotlight), there is a cold war play happening between the Russia and the United States. The latest battleground is Venezuela where...
An interesting article in Science argues that deliberative mechanisms can resolve the present crisis in democracy. Although the solution by itself is not novel the article takes into account the latest...
As everyone who has read a history book once is fond of repeating, history repeats itself. This has been a week of Cold War nostalgia in more ways than one....
For the third year in a row, Russia’s position on the World Happiness Index has slipped – it now ranks just beneath Pakistan. Part of the reason its high rank...
Eye on China is a weekly bulletin offering news and analysis related to the Middle Kingdom. This week we cover the CPC’s new rules for cadres; Xi’s visit to Italy;...
By Pranav V Title: A Nuclear Winter’s Tale – Science and Politics in the 1980s Author: Lawrence Badash Publisher: MIT Press (2009) The contention between scientific conjecturing, and its radical...
By Dr Kajari Kamal, Faculty, Strategic Studies Programme The news of Indian Air force striking Balakot in a ‘non-military pre-emptive’ action came when former Indian diplomats and members of the...
It seems strangely appropriate that the largest series of protests that Russia has seen in years is due to the state attempting to do new things with the Internet. Just...
It’s been an eventful week for Russia on the global stage. Over the last few months. Turkey’s ham-fisted attempts to intervene in northern Syria seemed to only harden the geopolitical...
A while back, I wrote about Aleksandr Dugin’s Last War of the World Island: The Geopolitics of Contemporary Russia. Dugin’s worldview, I pointed out, was overly simplistic, relying on arbitrary definitions of...
Policy Focus Open Access Policy and Plan S: In a tweet, the Principal Scientific Advisor to the Government of India, Professor K Vijayraghavan announced India’s intention to join cOAlition S...
Last week, Ameya Naik and I were explaining government decision-making to our GCP class using Putnam’s two-level games framework. We used the 1991 Indian economic reforms to illustrate how external...
I read the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah’s first Reith Lecture on the subject of Creed recently. And what he has to say about religious beliefs makes for an interesting read,...
The Compound Eye Feb 15, 2019 Policy in Focus: Interim Budget, 2019: Instead of a policy, this fortnight we highlight announcements from the Interim Budget that embrace the development of...
Ambassador Shivshankar Menon’s recent keynote address at JNU pulled few punches in describing what ails the study of international relations in India. My colleague Pranay Kotasthane has already weighed in...
Amb Shivshankar Menon’s keynote speech on what’s wrong with IR studies in India has sparked a healthy discussion online. His main arguments: Indian students are well versed with abstract IR theory...
The raison d’être for intelligence analysis is being able to predict near-future events with reasonable accuracy. Based on the little that I have read, there is no mechanism that seeks to improve...
“Trade wars are good, and easy to win!”, Mr Trump had exclaimed. About a year after such an exclamation, there are hundreds of farmers, Trump’s traditional voter base, gathered around...
The Compound Eye – Feb 1, 2019 Policy in Focus – DNA Technology (Use and Application) Regulation Bill, 2018: The Lok Sabha passed the DNA Technology Bill, 2018, 2018 on...
Some debates, it seem, never go away. In the first half of the 19th century, France has some of the most extreme protectionist laws in the world. It had 58 prohibited...
It’s not an overstatement to say that over the last twenty years, the world has grown increasingly used to American primacy and leadership. This primacy also spills over to the...
