Artiste : Maalouma Mint Mokhtar Ould Meidah
Titre : Yemma - Album : Nour
The Price of Sex is a feature-length documentary about young Eastern European women who’ve been drawn into a netherworld of sex trafficking and abuse. Intimate, harrowing and revealing, it is a story told by the young women who were supposed to be silenced by shame, fear and violence. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, who grew up in Bulgaria, takes us on a personal investigative journey, exposing the shadowy world of sex trafficking from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and Western Europe. Filming undercover and gaining extraordinary access, Chakarova illuminates how even though some women escape to tell their stories, sex trafficking thrives. Learn more at www.priceofsex.org.
(via theminhvi-affairs)
The power struggle between the British Empire and Russian Empire for influence in Central Asia during the 19th century was afterwards coined as the Great Game. In this strategic rivalry, Afghanistan played a key role because the British feared that the Russians would use Afghanistan as a base for forthcoming invasions into the then British colony India. The recent statements of US and Asian policy-makers might suggest that a new Great Game is underway, this time in the area of the South China Sea.
The South China Sea (SCS) is the semi-enclosed sea from the south of China to the north of Indonesia and from the east of Malaysia to the west of the Philippines. The territorial demarcations are disputed for decades as are the questions of sovereignty over the islands and islets which are located within the SCS. Several claimants such as Vietnam, Malaysia, Taiwan, the Philippines, and China currently possess islets in the SCS and question each other’s rights to do so. This situation has only marginally changed during the last twenty years, upgrading of military outposts on the islets being the notorious exception.
There are different reasons for the importance of these areas in the SCS, substantial fish stocks, existing and assumed energy resources (e.g., oil and gas resources) and highly frequented sea lanes are the main causes for interest.
The various fish stocks in the SCS build the economic basis for millions of fishermen in the littoral states, furthermore, the fish catch plays a pivotal part in the nutrition of the people living in this area. The demarcation of waters and the possession islets are important means to claim fishing rights in the area.
In the SCS are already various offshore oil extracting enterprises taking place, most of them near the coasts of China, Vietnam, and Malaysia. In the disputed area of the Spratly Islands are further oil reserves expected, thus the littoral states try to ensure their claims to participate in the subsequent exploitation of the oil fields.
Last but not least, the SCS is one of the busiest routes of global merchant ships, roughly half of the annual trade shipping is passing through the bottleneck at the entrance to the SCS, the Strait of Malacca. These sea lanes possess further significance since the majority of Chinese and Japanese imported oil is transported via the SCS. An interruption of these pivotal bloodlines would have significant consequences for the world’s second and third biggest economy, respectively. But since the majority of European-Asian trade is shipped through these waters, not only the littoral states have an interest in these busy sea lanes.
Combined, the economic and strategic importance of the SCS makes it a hotspot of geopolitics. Its mixture of energy resources and strategic sea lanes has a high potential for conflict but surprisingly, the region and its conflicts waned from the headlines of international newspapers and the mindfulness of geopolitical strategists. Over the last ten years, the several efforts to fight terrorism in the Middle East and Central Asia gave China free rein to arrange the relations to its south-eastern neighbours.
But since 2010, the conflict over sovereignty rights and territorial waters in the SCS is gaining new attention. When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stated that the free passage through the sea lanes of the SCS was an US national interest, she provoked harsh reactions from Beijing….
from CESRAN (Centre for Strategic Research and Analysis) - Turkey
- You are welcomed!
- 2008 @Hanoi, Vietnam.
by Alexander L. Vuving, Associate Professor at the Asia-Pacific Center for Security Studies
Who are the key players of Vietnamese politics? What characterizes its dynamics? What is to be expected of it in the next few years? This essay is an attempt to address the above questions. It suggests that the politics of Vietnam can be imagined as a game between four key players. If the govemment is defined as the central authoritative locus of politics in a country, then the Vietnamese Government is caught primarily between regime conservatives, modemizers, rent-seekers, and China. Each of these players is a bloc of diverse actors that share an ultimate strategic goal or inclination…
(for reading more, download the studies abstract in PDF)
