International Affairs

In what some will see as the latest step in the political ladder to Cold War version 2.0, Russia has been denied a place on the UN’s Human Rights Council after the UN General Assembly failed to vote for it as one of 14 new members. Brazil, China, Cuba,...

The Philippines has been under a heavy spotlight in the past few months. Unfortunately, the attention does not correlate with positive news. Since Rodrigo Duterte assumed the presidency on 30 June 2016, politics and the lack of rule of law and justice in the Philippines have become increasingly perturbing....

Yemen is a country in the grip of a civil war, which has far reaching implications, not just for its regional neighbours, but also for the Western powers that have long sought supremacy in the battle to claim the spoils of their Middle Eastern pie. For the UK, these implications...

Rio’s 2016 Olympics finished on August 21st. Ten days later, Brazil’s former president Dilma Rousseff was impeached. The event, which a large portion of the population thought symbolized the entry of the country into the hall of developed nations, was merely the end of one more of its political...

The use of referendums as part of a peace process is not the norm, but many states have done so to lend legitimacy to an agreement. For example, it was used to approve Spain’s draft constitution in 1978 marking the transition into democracy at the end of the Francoist...

Venezuela is currently mired in arguably the most severe economic, social, and political crises in the country’s recent history. The food crisis in particular, has had the country on knife’s edge for nearly 3 years now. Ever since global oil prices took a downward turn in mid-2014, Venezuela’s oil-dependent...

Brazil, better known as the ‘B’ in the BRICS - a group of major emerging market economies that also includes Russia, India, China, and South Africa - has been grabbing a lot of headlines recently. However, the news has hardly been encouraging. Instead of hearing much about the country’s...

Over the weekend, the Chinese government issued its second “red alert” for smog in the northern part of China, which includes the capital city, Beijing. The National Meteorological Center predicted that visibility in the worst affected areas such as Beijing would fall to less than 1 km (0.6 miles),...

On Sunday, October 25th, Argentina turned over a new leaf. Presidential and congressional elections marked the end of two consecutive terms of government under President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, the wife of the late Argentine President Néstor Kirchner. This election season, which began with primaries in early August, unfolded...

The ongoing debate about immigration policy in Europe has produced a tense political and social atmosphere in countries like Germany and Italy. According to Max Jacobson, Europe needs immigrants, but the Europeans do not want them (Koivukangas, 2002: 2). Apart from the Western European countries, the Nordic countries have...

Two weeks ago, U.S. sailors raced across the Florida Straits to participate in the first ever Havana Challenge regatta. The last regatta of this kind could not be held with formal permission due to U.S. restrictions on pleasure craft traveling to Cuba. The reunion of the sailing communities of...

For years, China´s “Great Firewall” has embodied the Chinese government´s ultimate project to restrict Chinese citizens´ access to information. The Great Firewall is powered by a massive computer system that prevents citizens from accessing Western news websites, blogs, or any content considered a threat by the Chinese government. Additionally,...