The pathway to compromise is never easy to find, at home or abroad, but it was visible in Colombia this week in the peace agreement that ended a 52-year guerrilla war. What opened this route was good political leadership. President Juan Manuel Santos asked Colombians who had suffered from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) insurgency to forgive those they regarded as terrorists. FARC’s leader, Rodrigo Londono, asked for forgiveness, in turn, “for the pain we have caused in this wa

In a decade’s time, visitors to Southeast Asia, as well as South and Northeast Asia, may find their personal experiences in their respective destinations differ quite drastically.  Each Asian nation is busy operating at its own pace, plotting a new stage of economic development and growth -- despite ongoing global economic uncertainty.    In the process of this seismic shift, some countries have chosen to work in partnerships while others are tackling the challenges alone. All of them reflect As

What do the presidents of Egypt and Iran, two countries across the Sunni-Shiite chasm in the Middle East, have in common? A lot, it turns out, including preoccupation with their internal stability and hunger for economic growth. Both talk about moderation and the deep resources of their ancient cultures, even as the region’s sectarian war rages. They claim to want greater human rights but insist that their systems can only change gradually. They seem to worry most about security -- the specter o

These are days of grave disillusionment with the state of the world. Sinister forces of fanatical, faith-based killing -- something that we in the West, at least, thought had largely ended by 1750 -- are back. And they have been joined by and are reinforcing forces of nationalism, bigotry, and racism that we thought had been largely left in the ruins of Berlin in 1945.In addition, economic growth since 2008 has been profoundly disappointing. There is no reasoned case for optimistically expecting

The Islamic State group hasn’t had much success yet in recruiting militants among the vast Muslim populations in Southeast Asia. But what happens when the caliphate’s capitals in Syria and Iraq are destroyed, and hundreds of foreign fighters from Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines try to go home?Experts here in Australia see the counterterrorism challenge as a regional problem, rather than simply an affliction of the Middle East and North Africa. They fear that a potentially dangerous new p