Asia

Deena Guzder exposes how the economic crisis has changed the nature of sex tourism in Thailand.

As U.S. citizens missed their chance to elect a woman for president for the first time in 2008, Bangladeshis elected a female prime minister past December for the fourth time. Sheik Hasina is currently one of 11 female heads of state worldwide according to the Council of Women World...

If a strong educational system is key to a country's success, there is every reason to worry about Afghanistan's future. Decimated by decades of war, Afghanistan has one of the world's lowest literacy rates. According to UN estimates, 90% of women, and 63% of men in rural areas are...

After a hotly contested presidential election that resulted in street riots and a disputed claim to a renewed mandate by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran stands at a crossroads: between reformist and conservative leadership, between its revolutionary past and its post-revolutionary future.

Ahmadinejad's claimed landslide was met with...

In September 2007, the government of Maharashtra, India, invited bids from private companies for the completion of the Nira-Deogarh water project in the Satara district of Maharashtra. The construction of the dam was completed some years prior to this, but canals for irrigation and distribution were not. It was...

The majority of India's water sources are polluted. A lack of access to safe water contributes to a fifth of its communicable diseases. Each day in the booming, nuclear-armed nation, diarrhea alone kills more than 1,600 people.

The regional scenario is even more grim given the projected...

In 2008, there were over 2,100 civilians casualties across Afghanistan. US airstrikes accounted for 552 deaths, up more than 70% compared to the year before. Militants were responsible for more than half the overall total. The bitter truth is that most of these incidents could be avoided. And yet they...

Sulu is an archipelago of some 900 islands and has been the target of an American-assisted counter-insurgency program for the past 4 years. Abu Sayyaf insurgents have been largely routed, and according to the Philippine military their numbers have been reduced to less than 300.

This is...

Desertification is one of the most important environmental challenges facing the world today, however it is arguably the most under-reported. Desertification is the gradual transformation of arable and habitable land into desert, usually caused by climate change and/or the improper use of land. Each year, desertification and drought account...

In the wake of the Mumbai terror attacks and the Obama administration's announcement of troop increases in Afghanistan, Pakistan has emerged as a central front in the War on Terror. As new leaders in Washington and Islamabad struggle against a surge of Islamic militancy and growing political instability in the...

Over the course of its 25-year conflict, Sri Lanka has been an island plagued by the abduction and disappearance of its citizens - some estimate tens of thousands. In the Eastern Province of the country—a region controlled by the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Ealam until mid-2007 when the government...

Since 2007, an experimental Pentagon program has been sending teams of civilian anthropologists and other social scientists into the hardest-fought regions of Iraq and Afghanistan to pursue a mission that's both deeply controversial and increasingly important to U.S. military strategy.

Social scientists work within frontline combat units...