Infiltrating the Khmer Rouge – The Nate Thayer Story

. . Several months ago I highlighted the work of Nate Thayer, one of the more accomplished investigative journalists of the post-Cold War era, here at the Stage. Some of Mr. Thayer’s most impressive work dates to the 1990s, when he was the Far Eastern and Economic Review‘s man on the ground in Cambodia. One […]

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A Few Comments on China, Vietnam and the HYSY981 Crisis

A Chinese coast guard ship fires a water cannon at a Vietnamese vessel.Image Credit: AP News (16 May 2014) Over the last two weeks remarkable things have happened in the South China Sea. I assume that the readers of The Stage have read the relevant news reports; I will not copy them here. At the […]

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What Books Do We Need to Rewrite All of Human History?

  Image source. The Long Now Foundation, a society devoted to human flourishing on a millennial timescale,  has started a project named the “Manual for Civilization.” The idea behind the Manual is not unlike that of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, a seed bank built deep beneath the ice of a remote Norwegian island that […]

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Understanding Dysfunctional Democracies

.. Over the last few days a fractious discussion about contemporary Thai politics has arisen over at Zenpundit, the premier space on this side of the blogosphere for discussions of strategic theory, history, political ideology, and the intersections between them. Yesterday  Lynn Rees, a superb essayist who posts regularly at the site, entered the discussion […]

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