Opinion

How climate crisis is driving heatwaves

This year, heatwaves have broken their earlier record in many continents. Last week, an extreme heatwave created havoc in most of the Western parts of Europe. Several countries declared a state of emergency; intense heat caused deadly wildfires, melted roads, and runways, and triggered widespread po...

Opinion

Growing protests worldwide but not with similar risks

The massive protest in Sri Lanka and its success in forcing its President and Prime Minister to resign has caught global attention. Coinciding with the powerful images of protesters occupying the Sri Lankan President’s palace, the footage of mass demonstrations in the Netherlands, Argentina, a...

Opinion

Populism in Asia is more robust than in Europe

The UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whom Donald Trump had once described as ‘Britain’s Trump,’ has been forced to resign after almost three years in office following the Conservative Party revolt against his leadership. After Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020, some right-wing ...

Opinion

A dangerous loop of refugee-conflict nexus exists

The UN Refugee Agency, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) annual Global Trends Report, shows that the number of people forced to flee their homes continues to rise globally. By the end of 2021, the number had gone up to 89.3 million, an 8 per cent increase from 2020.The total numb...

Opinion

Stockholm+50: Another opportunity to save the planet

Exactly 50 years ago, the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment took place in Stockholm. This was the first UN conference of world leaders to make the environment a major global issue. On 2-3 June 2022, world leaders are coming together again in Stockholm to mark its 50th anniversary.Th...

Opinion

World must not ignore internally displaced persons

If a person is forcibly displaced by conflict and is unable to or decides not to cross the national border is not considered a refugee. The number of these conflict-forced internally displaced persons (IDPs) worldwide increases exponentially.By the end of 2020, the total number of refugees (includin...

Opinion

High cost of non-cooperation over Ganges-Brahmaputra water

The Himalayas is the birthplace of some of the world’s important river systems, and the Ganges-Brahmaputra is possibly the most important among these rivers. This massive river system is the largest among all the rivers originating in the Himalayas and the third-largest globally, only overtake...

Opinion

Rising inequality poses a threat to world peace

There is an ongoing debate over rising income inequality and its adverse impacts on democracies. The inequality between countries is not growing as commonly assumed. This is because the annual economic growth in many developing countries is growing faster than in the industrialised developed world.S...

Opinion

The many dangers of language domination

Often religion is blamed for the increasing number of conflicts the world has witnessed since the end of the Cold War. But, it is no clash of civilisations. Most of the time, ethnic cleavages in violent conflicts are not religious but linguistic.As some research claims, collective grievances along w...

Opinion

What is fuelling Sri Lanka’s economic crisis?

Sri Lanka is again in turmoil. The country’s cabinet has resigned en masse, the President has declared a public emergency as protests have engulfed the country as it has run out of fuel and food grains in many places.Lanka lacks needed foreign exchange to import essential items, people are for...

Opinion

Why the world needs to be prepared for cyberwars

In the last week, when the world was tense due to the escalation of a serious military crisis in Eastern Europe, Ukraine faced a cyberattack on the online network of its Defence Ministry and two banks. Cyberattacks between two adversaries have been increasingly becoming a common method of warfare.Th...

Opinion

Populism makes countries vulnerable to hybrid wars

While the number of interstate wars has gone down, countries fighting civil wars within their territories have become more common. Wherever countries are fighting against each other, the conflicts rarely are fought between two rival armies on a battlefield.Taking a hybrid form and combining both mil...

Opinion

Why university students are central to a healthy democracy

While democracies in the world are in decline, its cause is generally seen as a failure to provide better governance, that has in turn resulted in the rise of populist authoritarianism.Democracy, to survive the onslaught of ethnonationalism and for its health and well-being, needs to provide better ...

Opinion

Climate change demands strong political leadership

After the Glasgow Climate Summit came to a disappointing end in November 2021, the world has been more or less occupied with the Omicron crisis, and the public and media attention on climate change has almost disappeared.The devastating impacts of climate change are becoming more pronounced and irre...

Opinion

There are reasons to be hopeful about 2022

Following a disappointing 2021, the world eagerly hopes for a different 2022. A new Ipsos survey shows that despite the threat of the Omicron variant of COVID-19, there is a positive feeling in the world about the new year.Nearly 77% of survey respondents in 33 countries expect a better and more pro...

Opinion

Water scarcity can lead to population migration in Middle East

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region gets special attention when discussing the global water scarcity situation or migration crisis worldwide. However, there is a very sporadic attempt at analysing the link between these two phenomena in the context of the MENA region.The correlation betwe...

Opinion

Dams are not a panacea to the planet’s climate crisis

Water has been providing energy for centuries, and hydropower was one of the earliest forms energies used to run factories. While energy transition has become the mantra of the world to mitigate climate change, hydropower has become an important component in many countries’ strategies to move ...

Opinion

Europe’s refusal to accept migrants tests its moral values

Since the migration crisis in Europe in 2015, the European Union is repeatedly breaking with the tradition of respecting international humanitarian law towards those fleeing from war and persecution.The EU, which claims “promoting peace and security and respecting fundamental rights and freedo...

Opinion

Future climate talks must focus on global water crisis

Besides large-scale human migration, any other impact of global climate change, which can create wars between countries, is insecurity over freshwater availability. Despite this, the global water crisis was rarely mentioned and discussed at the just concluded World Climate Conference (COP26) in Glas...

Opinion

How wars contribute to global warming

The discussion and negotiation on military emission are almost missing at the Glasgow UN Climate Change Conference (COP26). Though militaries are major emitters, the 2015 Paris Agreement has left the greenhouse gas (GHG) emission target to the discretion of individual countries.The reporting of mili...