Special Facility No.110 – Stalin’s secret prison – wasn’t in remote Siberia, it was just outside Moscow. на русском языке
International constraint and mutual nuclear deterrence may have prevented all-out war with Pakistan in the past over contested Kashmir. With thousands fleeing their homes amid escalating violence, that may not remain a secure wager.
Russia’s Prison Service, the FSIN, wants to put inmates’ employment on a more businesslike footing, but their working conditions are still more like slave labour.
On 12 January, Arif Yunus, the distinguished Azerbaijani scholar, will ‘celebrate’ his 60th birthday in a prison cell.
It is now a criminal offence for Russian citizens not to declare their foreign passports or permanent residence permits.
The attack on the school in Peshawar in December shocked the world. In Pakistan, the upshot is a growing military shadow once more looming over a fragile democracy.
It’s been a year of searing images of horrifying mass civilian injury and death, from Gaza to eastern Ukraine. The world must set standards to curb resort to weapons with wide-area effects where many civilians are at risk.
Security think-tanks and expert communities in the Western world are perpetuating the dangerous myth that Muslim radicalisation is rife in Central Asia.
Central Asian security services have been abducting their countries’ citizens from Russia to stand trial on trumped-up charges. And the Russian police have been helping them.
Hannah Arendt would have called it the 'banality of evil'—how Islamic State dresses up medieval misogyny as divine direction.
The police were a symbol of the old, apartheid South Africa. Unfortunately they are becoming a symbol of the ‘new South Africa’ too.
Where stands now the ‘responsibility to protect’? Recent egregious intervention failures require simplistic nostra to be replaced by a more complex understanding.
