NM's blog

Comparing London to two cities, and to Bangkok in Thailand. In London: Fear of the person standing next to you, phone snatching, knife stabbing, you look over your shoulder while walking sometimes, complaining and screaming at, sometimes insulting, staff on buses, cafes and restaurants, shoplifting…. For five months in Pattaya and Chiang Mai, Thailand I have not seen all what I have seen in London. Why? London and Thai cities like Chiang Mai and Pattaya offer vastly different safety profiles, cultural norms, and public behaviours.  Your experience highlights a well-documented contrast between major Western capitals and Southeast Asian hubs. While London is a high-energy global financial hub, it struggles with specific urban property crimes and visible street anti-social behavior. In contrast, Thai culture places a massive premium on public harmony, emotional restraint, and community policing, which fundamentally changes how safe and relaxed you feel on the street.  [1]  H...

This short book “restores to the word "imperialism" the force that liberal commentary has tried to drain from it: not a relic of pith helmets and colonial maps, but the living logic of a capitalist world system hurtling through war, genocide, ecological plunder and great-power rivalry.” The first trap the author warns us of is the liberal hypocrisy , “which recognises Russian aggression in Ukraine or Chinese threats towards Taiwan as imperialist, while treating Western wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria or Gaza as tragic mistakes committed in the name of higher ideals. “The second is "campist" fantasy, which sees every enemy of Washington as progressive by definition. “ To oppose NATO expansion does not require prettifying Russian imperialism. To oppose US encirclement of China does not require pretending Beijing is a socialist alternative. To defend Palestine does not require outsourcing liberation to regional states whose own ruling classes pursue power, mar...

A good article by Julia Neima. The following are excerpts only. Access to the full article requires a subscription . Cuba is undergoing its biggest economic transformation in decades: private firms are back and small businesses employ a quarter of the workforce. But market reform has brought no political opening. TaTamanía is Cuba’s first private care home, which opened this spring in the capital’s Vedado district. This type of business was long prohibited under the revolution, but in recent years, a lack of resources has left public care facilities in a critical state. The economic, commercial and financial vice is tightening as Washington expands the scope of its sanctions…  Trump’s strategy is to throttle the state monopoly and force the Cuban government to allow a private sector to develop. This challenge has caused major upheaval in what has until recently been one of the world’s most state-controlled economies.  The agricultural reform of 1959, the sweeping nationalisati...

“Faced with the indifference and dehumanisation this system offers us, we want to make clear this is, above all, an unjust tragedy that has taken human lives .”

Is the argument of Western politicians that the MENA region is not ready of 'democracy' still prevalent? The explicit argument by Western politicians that the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region is inherently "not ready for democracy" has  largely receded from polite, official diplomatic rhetoric , but the core premise remains highly prevalent as an implicit driver of Western foreign policy. Rather than framing the issue as an cultural or societal deficit, contemporary Western leaders justify their backing of autocratic regimes through the lenses of  pragmatic stability, security, migration management, and economic self-interest .   The structural landscape of this political argument manifests through several distinct dynamics: 1. Shift from Cultural Incompatibility to "Crisis Management" The Post-Arab Spring Realism : Following the structural collapse of several democratic transitions after 2011 (e.g., Libya's prolonged instability and Tunisia...