Economics and Finance

In 1995, Ismail Serageldin, vice-president of the World Bank remarked that “if the wars of this century were fought over oil, the wars of the next century will be fought over water”. It makes sense; water is above all resources on earth most vital to human existence. An exponentially rising world population and increasing environmental degradation combine to create mounting ... Read More »

The Tri-Border Area (TBA) of Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina is the breeding ground of a peculiar partnership, which intertwines two of the most complex conflicts of this century: the wars on terror and drugs. It is home to a large and thriving Lebanese community that moved here in the 1980s, which only represent a fraction of the total Lebanese population in ... Read More »

The common war strategy of demoralizing the enemy by providing them with one’s own ideology over radio airwaves had found its way into the Cold War tactics. Western German radio stations were using frequencies that were so strong they could be easily received and thus heard in the East, behind the wall. The, so-called „Westfunk“, widely condemned by the eastern ... Read More »

When taking a look at the countries that once constituted the Soviet Union, one notices either violent internal unrest and bloody civil wars, or ongoing stagnation and economic crisis. Even several developing countries in the global South seem to outpace the former Soviet Republics due to their lack of dynamism. This has not always been the case, however, for central ... Read More »

In the last days of 2017, Iran experienced the largest protests in the country since the protests that followed the disputed Iranian presidential elections in 2009. After incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared victory, protests arose and culminated in what became known as the Green Movement. These street protestors challenged the results of the election, alleging that voting fraud and irregularities ... Read More »

While the international community has been focusing on the possibility of an armed conflict on the Korean peninsula, a war – even though not mentioned in the headlines – is already being fought between China and Japan. The battleground of this conflict is Southeast Asia, the soldiers are bankers and the bullets are investment loans. One does not have to ... Read More »

Cryptocurrencies are digital assets meant to work as mediums of exchange. They do not rely on central regulation but cryptography which, in the absence of banking control, secures transactions, verifies asset-exchanges and controls the creation of additional units. The first-ever introduced cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, created in 2008 by allegedly pseudonymous Satoshi Nakamoto, has gradually cemented its position as a valid alternative ... Read More »