This is a transcript of Bearly Political’s most recent podcast. Listen to the full episode here. Zachary: Like a lot of people during the pandemic, I took up a new hobby: hiking. At the time, I was living in Southern France, near these alpine foothills, and every week or so I’d trek across those Mediterranean mountaintops […]
Tag: #World
Changing Climate, Changing Politics: the Presence of the Environment in Germany’s 2021 Election
Germany doesn’t elect its leaders based on charisma. Descriptions of Angela Merkel, like many adjectives thrown around German affairs, consist of stoic, calm, and unemotional, both in her politics and her public presence. Part of this is due to Germany’s political system, one in which the charismatic, ceremonial head of state, the president, is an […]
China Picks Up Where the West Has Failed
Nobody said democracy was easy, but the concept of a liberal democracy championed by the US and democratic European nations has taken a massive blow in the last year with its two biggest projects. Afghanistan and Myanmar are known as major sources of opium, and now also as failed Western experiments to try and bring […]
Sarah Edwards and Beyond: Building Cities That Are Safer For Women
3rd March 2021 was not a peculiar day for most living in South London. It was yet another day of lockdown amid the COVID-19 pandemic mandated by the Boris Johnson government. A woman was walking home at night from a friend’s house in Clapham Common. She went missing on the same night. Six days later, […]
The Art of State Engineering
Under the guise of development and democracy, state architecture is being used to conceal the centralization of power in both Malaysia and Singapore as leaders grapple with how to literally engineer the perfect, coordinated society. How does one engineer a harmonious state? Singapore’s People’s Action Party (P.A.P.) and Malaysia’s U.M.N.O. Party will argue that you […]
Technology with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Strategic Vision in 2019
Standing before the 17th General Assembly of the Chinese Academy of Sciences just over a year after his election to office, Xi Jinping opined, “we cannot always decorate our tomorrows with others’ yesterdays.” Five years later on October 1st, 2019, President Xi echoed that sentiment while addressing a crowd of thousands in Tiananmen Square, declaring, […]
Ethiopia’s Narrowing Window For Peace
Meskel Square, despite its lack of even one traffic light, is the busiest intersection in Ethiopia. It is a fitting representation of Addis Ababa, the bustling capital city of 3.6 million people which it resides in. However, on October 9th of this year, Meskel Square was ordered completely shut down. On the same day, an […]
Years in the Making: How Hindu Nationalism Has Shaped Indian Policy Towards Kashmir
A phone blackout. Military troops deployed to enforce a statewide curfew. Foreign journalists banned from entering a region the size of Idaho. Thousands arrested — including protesters, activists and politicians. In the Indian state of Jammu & Kashmir, this has been the reality since August of 2019. And it could get worse. Jammu & Kashmir […]
Gangs and Gulags: How Vladimir Putin Utilizes Organized Crime to Power his Mafia State
“I’m sorry, the Russian Mafia is after me.” While this statement sounds like it’s straight out of a 1960s Bond movie, it was actually uttered by disgraced NFL defensive lineman Justin Bannan on October 16th after non-fatally shooting a woman in a building he partly owned. The validity of Bannon’s claim is for prosecutors to […]
The Raucous Minority (Myth?)
Featured Image: Masses gather to grieve and pray outside of St. Anthony’s Church, Kochikade On the 21st of April 2019, three churches and three luxury hotels were targeted in a series of coordinated suicide bombing attacks across Sri Lanka. The attacks were linked to the National Thowheeth Jama’ath (NTJ), a local Islamist terrorist group whose […]
Libya: Going Green
Currently The internet will tell you that a bullet wound could heal within no more than two weeks, barring any tissue or bone damage. But one can imagine some degree of psychological trauma contributing further to a healing process. Consider the cause for bullets flying to begin with and the timeline continues to extend. Dozens […]
Julius Malema: Land Expropriation Without Compensation
The Face of Radical African Resistance Julius Malema, the powerhouse leader and founder of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), is currently one of the most significant political firebrands in South Africa. At the age of 38, he has spearheaded the second largest opposition party to the African National Congress (ANC) and spent the last six […]
The Chinese Government Greets Its 70th Anniversary with Anxiety Rather Than Jubilation
In June 1949, a few months before emerging as the victor in a trailing civil war, Mao Zedong articulated the two pillars that would embody the new system of governance: a “domestic united front under the leadership of the working class” that would lay a foundation for “people’s democratic dictatorship” and an international alliance with […]
Is the Kashmir Lockdown a Ticking Time Bomb?
On August 5th, 35,000 paramilitary Indian troops mobilized to join the 700,000 already stationed in Jammu and Kashmir, the Indian-controlled state in the Kashmir region. Soon after the move, the entire state was put under intense lockdown, which the Indian parliament claimed was in response to a new and violence-prone political movement that had emerged […]
Unpopular Populism: The Dismal Prospects for Far-Right Politics in Canada
He has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax” perpetrated by “environmentalist alarmists.” His immigration policy includes building border fences, restricting family reunification, and making temporary foreign workers less competitive. And he spends much of his time railing against “the Liberal cult of diversity” on his Twitter account, a platform he uses to comment on — […]
Cuba’s Healthcare System: A Political, Social, and Economic Revolution
In the news and media, Cuba is portrayed as a country too ambitious for the political reality we live in. The political reality we live in here in the United States tells the story of a free market-based health care system, where the government is not responsible for the well-being of its people. But is […]
Saudi Arabia: A Modern Prince’s Unconventional Quest for Power
In an era where world leaders wield Twitter as their political weapon of choice, Saudi Arabia has initiated a sanctions war with Canada–culminating in the complete severing of relations between the two countries–on the basis of a single tweet. On the surface, this appears to be a bizarre overreaction by the Saudi government. Yet, in […]
The Decline of Mugabe and the Political Surge in Zimbabwe: What is to be, or not to be in the post-Mugabe era?
After years of authoritarian rule in Zimbabwe, it looks as though the tide is set to change. Political tension in Zimbabwe was demonstrated in a recent ten-hour long meeting of the country’s ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union—Patriotic Front (ZANU–PF). Several party members were either suspended or expelled without being given a chance to argue […]
To the Land of the Kiwis—Problems Arising from the Chinese and Indian Tidal Wave of Immigration to New Zealand
New Zealand today has more ethnicities than there are countries in the world. Starting in 2013, the land of the Kiwis has seen record net gains of migrants from countries such as India, China, the Philippines and Britain. New Zealand’s two largest immigrant pools are Chinese and Indians—who now comprise of 17 and 16 percent of […]
A Shadowy Web of Unknowns: Unearthing the Underground Economy in Nuclear Materials
100 tons of plutonium, 1,000 tons of highly enriched uranium, and 30,000 nuclear warheads make up the known Russian nuclear arsenal today. However, following the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, large parts of the USSR’s vast arsenal of nuclear-grade weaponry were left scattered and unmonitored, meaning the actual arsenal size may be much […]
Cyberwar with China
The U.S. has been hacked on over 700 occasions in just five years on fronts ranging from corporate to private to governmental. Over the past two years, the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) was hacked on two separate occasions; the hack this year was deemed the largest in U.S. history, with 5.6 million fingerprints and […]
Can Narendra Modi Shift India’s Standing on the World Stage?
Narendra Modi, India’s new prime minister, isn’t your average politician. He comes from a humble background as a street tea seller, didn’t publicly acknowledge that he was married until filing for party nomination, and even helped break a Guinness World Record by using 3D holographic projections to present 53 simultaneous campaign speeches. This September, Modi visited the […]