Foreword — Today marks 50 years since Bangladesh’s independence so I thought I’d share a story I wrote in 2018 for a university BAME society event. As we were exploring identity, my original idea was to address one of the primary assessments made consciously or unconsciously upon seeing me, namely my colour. After a Dulux colour chart labelled me as ‘leather handbag’ I didn’t have much to go on. Floodplain is the ground my family grew on, the life-giving sediment from which lives and livelihoods across Bangladesh are born. …
Murder! — The unlawful premeditated killing of one human being by another.
It sounds simple enough, so where do your elected officials stand when politicians across the Western-world have said they are willing to let thousands die for the possibility of saving markets or of reaching herd immunity? Geographical factors of course have led some countries to feel the sting much more than others, but there is little doubt political decisions have been of major consequence. Those politicians taking a more populist stance have time and time again chosen to delay action, electing instead to ignore their own specialist scientific…
Hailed as the ‘Mandela of the East’, Aung San Suu Kyi has profited from the vogue that non-violent prodemocracy campaigning and decades of house arrest has afforded her. Modest, eloquent and refined in disposition, Aung San Suu Kyi is the Oxford-educated, youngest daughter of Aung San — the father of the nation of Myanmar. 1988 saw Suu Kyi rise to prominence aghast with the totalitarian military junta failing to carry out her father’s legacy of continued democratisation, ham-fistedly crushing protests - leading to the bloody deaths of potentially thousands. The junta ruled via the ‘Burma Socialist Programme Party’ which through…
Data is everywhere. At almost every opportunity it is now gleaned off our actions and our interactions with the world around us to inform any number of metrics through the services we use. The sheer quantity of this information is big data.
Putting it into perspective
Bureaucracy and policy making through collected data is almost as old as formalised writing and data has only become easier to gather with the increasing sophistication of information systems and with the interconnectivity of the online world. From healthcare and Fitbits, to mass migrations and mapping conflict intensity during the Arab spring to electrical grids remaining functional while…
Here in the UK and worldwide, lockdown and its divisive progeny have led many to desperately scrape the barrel for the pacifying effects of some much needed novelty. As a once busy musician I’ve found myself with almost an entire calendar to fill, and so, after trying to avoid eating all the food known to me in the house (predominantly biscuits), I’ve stumbled upon the little known hobby of blinking at prose in the vain hope of deciphering tales left in the wake of by gone years. For weeks sirens and their accompanying icy blue auras have penetrated my double…
Analysing the deadlocks of the EU decision-making process in the post-Covid recovery
Foreward: This piece was written collaboratively and submitted for a competition at the East-West European Institute. It was published on 17/12/2020 available at: https://eastwest.eu/en/anti-covid-measures-eu-identity/
The European Union is a political and economic organisation crossing different policy areas, with its crucial concept of European integration being upheld throughout several external and internal crises, the most recent of which is Covid-19. Implementing restrictive measures to battle the pandemic, the Member States were dragged into severe recession and ideological conflicts by the sudden paralysis of their economies. The EU forecast that…
