TFF PressInfo

Ethnic minorities expert Barry Sautman gives his take on education, the next Dalai Lama, Han chauvinism and Beijing’s treatment of Uygurs September 24, 2024 Barry Sautman is a professor emeritus at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Division of Social Science and visiting professor at Tsinghua University. An expert on China’s ethnic minorities, particularly the Tibetan and Uygur communities, his research focuses on minority rights, cultural preservation and social change. This interview first appeared in SCMP Plus.For other interviews in the Open Questions series, click here. This article/interview was first published by the South China Morning Post on September 23, 2024 What drew you to ethnic minority issues in China? I’d been to Xinjiang perhaps three or four times many years ago. I was concentrating on a particular subject, which was preferential policies. At that time I was studying them broadly, going to different minority areas including Tibet,...

Jens Stoltenberg says the alliance is ‘not just regional but global’, a Western overreach that will be dangerous and destabilising Alex Lo September 24, 2024 In politics and war, delusion often sounds like vision. Jens Stoltenberg certainly has “that vision thing”, as the late George H.W. Bush once derisively called it. If the retiring Nato chief is anything to go by, and I hope not, the biggest military alliance in history with “North Atlantic” in its title is about to go global. Is this Western alliance about to expand into the East? If so, what do you call that? Western imperialism redux? This article was first printed by the South China Morning Post on September 24, 2024 In his parting gift for world peace or rather world war, Stoltenberg said in an interview with Foreign Policy, which is itself an undeclared information organ of Washington’s security and foreign policy elites,...

And its positive attitude to the West Jan Oberg Shanghai, China, September 16, 2024 When travelling around China, one of many things to note is that the Chinese are very positive toward the West, make use of Western inspirations, and know much more about the West than Westerners know about China.This is quite remarkable because, historically, China has been the object of ruthless Western colonialism and warfare as well as racism—e.g. the ”yellow fewer/danger” syndrome—while China has done nothing similar to the West. Here are some examples, big and small, of the mentioned knowledge and fascination of the West: • Many young Chinese have chosen to have a Western name, like, say, Alison or Kevin. They say it is difficult for us in the West to remember and pronounce Chinese names. • The Chinese know all the Western brands and gladly call their products something related to the West. They...

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On August 6, Hiroshima Day, 2024, I published a long, very well-documented article by Irene Galtung, the daughter of peace research professor Johan Galtung, about the tragic circumstances surrounding his last months alive and the human rights violations they both had to endure. What is left of that publication now is only my foreword below. As the editor and publisher of The Transnational, I have decided under threat to delete it, and I owe our readers to explain how I came to that decision. The reason is that her mother and Johan’s wife, Fumiko Nishimura Galtung, her two half-brothers, Andreas Galtung and Harald Eide Galtung and her brother Fredrik Galtung, had turned to lawyer Jon Wessel-Aas at the Glitterlind Law Firm in Oslo, asking him to demand that it be deleted in its entirety. The reason behind that demand and warning was that they considered that text constituted violations of their constitutional right to privacy and amounted to defamation. Thus, according to the...

Jan Oberg July 26, 2024 In its recent analysis – “How Four US Presidents Unleashed Economic Warfare Across the Globe” – The Washington Post illustrates what I have called “sanctionitis” – the disease of (over)using sanctions as a means to conduct foreign policy and cause great harm to the world economy, the US economy but also to millions of innocent people who suffer from the consequences of them. But the WP merely points out that sanctions are inefficient from a US point of view in that they have not achieved what was intended, indeed sometimes the opposite. It uses various kinds of pejoratives like “dictator” about leaders of states the US sees as enemies. It fails completely to point out that sanctions – particularly long-term sanctions – are, mostly, grossly immoral because of their humanitarian consequences. Be this as it may, something has happened when Washington Post does publish such...

Jan Oberg July 16, 2024 On July 11, 2024, after the NATO Washington Summit, Global Times in Beijing was so kind as to publish my comparative thoughts on the famous Five Principles on Peaceful Coexistence – just celebrated in Beijing – and five principles I have extracted from NATO’s concepts and policies. Quite a contrast! Here is how it begins: “The West showed virtually no interest in the recent celebration of the 70th anniversary of the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence in Beijing. These Five Principles, created by then China’s premier Zhou Enlai and Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru, are enshrined in the Chinese Constitution and aim to promote peaceful, nonviolent relations among nations. However, this is not the case with NATO, which marks its 75th anniversary on July 9-11. If officially it too had five principles, they would be: 1. offensive deterrence; 2. forward “defence”; 3. nuclear weapons and the...

Easter Island Rapa Nui “Best wishes for the Season,” we easily write and read these days. So let us reflect on religare, reconnect between that out there and that in here, in us, for globalizing truths. A few years ago, these unpublished lines for the Season were written in the Pacific, under a cloudless sky, with waves peaking, with white foam at the top. Rapa Nui, Easter Island was on the horizon, one of these places where the creation of humans looks about as old as God himself and human beings have not yet been able to pollute (deplete, yes!) everything.  Gratitude is seeping in, attaching itself to good emotions in body, mind and spirit. Happiness is the word, some kind of release. Sukha is the word in the Hindu-Buddhist tradition. Further out is nirvana, the dissolution at the end of the pilgrim’s journey. First published on Transcend Media Service,...

Photo by Tim Mossholder “We’re the greatest nation on the face of the earth… I have never been more optimistic about the future of our country… There’s no country in the world better positioned to lead the world than America… Just remember who we are. We are the United States of America, for God’s sake.” Joe Biden, US President Richard Falk July 11, 2024 The Democratic Party is waging its 2024 electoral campaign by focusing on two themes: first, a denunciation of all that Trump proposes to bring to the presidency, centering on the destruction of American democracy if elected, and secondly, a positive domestic record of the Biden years with several notable benefits for the American people including jobs and wages, climate, energy policy, social protection, gun control, and a stock market at record highs. What is missing from this rosy picture of America and even more so from...

TFF Associate, Professor Chaiwat Satha-Anand has died at 69: Professor of nonviolence who opened path to peace in Thailand Noblest and kindest among – and for – humanity. TFF Associate since 1991 and a dear friend of Christina and me since before that, a great scholar of nonviolence, a mediator and a Muslim in the 94% Buddhist Thailand. We worked together for decades in IPRA, the International Peace Research Association, as teachers in Italy at IUPIP and throughout the decades at TFF, where we have published many of Chaiwat’s deeply insightful peace research analyses. His death is a great loss to true peace research, but his legacy will remain with all of us in this academic field. Years ago, Chaiwat invited me to a conference in Bangkok, but not only that. He told me that he thought I worked too hard and needed to relax a bit, so, consequently, he...

The issue of state sovereignty under international law and its inconsistencies and duplicities has become more complex than ever, especially after the outbreak of the Ukraine war and the “Ukrainization” of the Taiwan issue (even though Taiwan is not a sovereign state like Ukraine). However, the focus of this analysis is relatively modest: we examine a region of the Western Balkans in which the countries have already (more or less voluntarily) lost or given up their statehood and sovereignty. The concept of the so-called “Western Balkans” (WB) – comprising Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Kosovo, North Macedonia, and Bosnia and Herzegovina – was concocted in the corridors of power in Brussels and Washington. This artificial sub-region, with its flexible geography and borders, lacks logical coherence. It effectively creates a buffer zone of weak states that are unlikely to ever meet the criteria for EU integration despite being offered European perspectives and hopes. However, these...

July 4, 2024 “Each of us has had our own experience of the cascading failures of process, leadership, and decision-making that have characterized this Administration’s intransigent response to this continuing calamity. Taken together, these paint a picture of an overlapping and systemic set of problems in this Administration’s policy approach, and a series of warnings that have gone unheeded…” Read the entire – extraordinarily important – statement here. It is a significant example of civil disobedience and personal ethics. It all began with Josh Paul when he resigned from the State Department last year. See also the video below. This is the way to go. May thousands upon thousands feel inspired and resign, too – and not only in the U.S. but in all Western countries that facilitate and support the genocide in Gaza and the barbaric policies in the Middle East.