Posts tagged : "Asia politics"

Kourosh Ziabari - International Policy Digest: Association football is not a very successful sport in Iran, but it’s one of the most popular sports in a country with more than half of the population under 35 years old. It’s conventional for schoolchildren to develop an early passion for football and spend the majority of their leisure time playing with their close friends in the yards, gardens or street football pitches. It can be safely argued that football is the basis for many friendships among young people in small cities and rural areas in Iran. The culture of football in Iran and the passion it generates is comparable to what happens in Brazil, even though the achievements of the two countries in this sport is in no way...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: The humanitarian catastrophe in Myanmar’s Rakhine State has been described as the world’s most urgent refugee crisis. The roots of the ethnic conflict can be traced back to British colonial policy in what was then Burma, but it was the decision to strip the Muslim Rohingya minority of citizenship rights on the basis of their religion that laid the foundation for most recent abuses. While 135 national ethnic groups were recognized and granted certain rights, the Rohingya were effectively rendered stateless under the 1982 Citizenship Act, creating the world’s largest stateless minority. Decades of privation and humiliating restrictions culminated in violent clashes between the Arakan Rohingya...

Kourosh Ziabari - Iran Review: The largest media gathering in Europe wrapped up in the German city of Bonn on June 24. The Global Media Forum 2015, organized by the Deutsche Welle and sponsored by the German Federal Foreign Office, hosted around 2,000 politicians, media professionals, journalists, academicians and activists from across the world and provided the attendees with an opportunity to get familiar with the latest trends in online, print and multimedia journalism and explore the theme of foreign policy in the age of digital media. On the sidelines of the “Social media vs. digital jihad” workshop, which the Digital Mass Atrocity Prevention Lab had arranged, Iran Review interviewed the moderator Waslat Hasrat-Nazimi....

Kourosh Ziabari - North Korea, also known as DPRK, is a mostly unknown and mysterious country. There are several preconceptions and myths about it which can be hardly debunked since it is under immense international pressure over its nuclear weapons program and its alleged violation of human rights and most of the people, at least in the Western world, have come to believe that North Korea is not a safe place for living or traveling to. Every year, only a handful of foreign tourists, journalists and media correspondents are allowed to enter the country. Sweden, for some time, was the only Western country in which DPRK maintained a diplomatic presence. The Western countries regularly lash out at North Korea over what they claim to be its...

Kourosh Ziabari - Today, most of the international relations analysts and experts consider China as the world’s second political and economic power after the United States. China came second in the International Monetary Fund’s 2011 ranking of countries by GDP (nominal) and is one of the main producers of agricultural products, industrial commodities and the world’s number one exporter of goods to other nations. China is also the United States’ first trading partner and at the same time, it’s major economic and political competitor. The politics of China are thoroughly complicated and in most cases, incomprehensible. National interests define the limits of China’s foreign policy while some traces of opposition to the Western...