Asia

This toolkit is a joined venture of the Heinrich Boell Foundation Afghanistan and UNIFEM Afghanistan and an outcome of the joined research project on women legislators in Afghanistan.

The Football game between Armenia and Turkey in September 2008 and sports diplomacy.

The roundtable conference was conducted by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in cooperation with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC). The report is an analysis of the roundtable recommendations.

The bulk of the media and parts of the intelligentsia, after first coming to terms with the Congress Party system, now prefer the two multiparty coalition systems: the United Progressive Alliance (UPA) or the National Democratic Alliance (NDA), even when the UPA is only going in for post-poll alliances with its erstwhile colleagues. The one thing that worries the media is a Third Front.

Despite the hopes of a bi-nodal party system since 1998, a secular alternative, reduced from being the second option in 1977 to the Third Front within a decade, has not ceased to linger in the background. It remains a parking space for satraps in search of greater role in national politics than their regional space would afford them.

After the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks many expected the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to benefit in the general elections. This was based on both the party’s emphasis on security and on the assumption that the attack would stir up anti-Muslim sentiments.

Some of the Offices of of the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Asia describe their work in the following short films.

China has emerged as Cambodia’s leading investor and donor and an increasingly important trading partner. Will the close relationship with China help Cambodia weather the global financial crisis? Or can we expect the economic slowdown in China to spill over into the Cambodian economy?

On March 31, 2009 the future of Afghanistan was discussed at a one-day conference in The Hague. That the conference was being held at such a senior political level has raised concern among Afghan civil society activists - will their views, will voices from Afghanistan in remain unheard?

NATO’s intervention in Afghanistan shows that the alliance has no choice but to co-operate with other multinational organisations, as well as major and regional powers in order to earn respect and legitimacy.