📢 แจ้งเตือน: world affairs - Kapook Update 2025

An aerial view of Stanley, Falkland Islands (Malvinas), a 2019 image. Argentine President Javier Milei said on September 3 that the “winds of change' favoured Argentina's claim to the Falkland Islands, pointing to Washington's readiness to review its neutrality on his country's dispute with Britain.

A new fight over the Falklands

Argentina’s President Javier Milei seems set to jettison his conciliatory approach to the British occupation of what the UK calls the Falkland Islands and Argentines call the Malvinas. The discovery of oil reserves lends a new edge to the dispute.

Preparations are under way for the BRICS Summit 2026, near Bharat Mandapam on Mathura Road, in New Delhi on September 9, 2026.

WORLD ECONOMIC ORDER

Not anti-West, but alt-West

Why India’s BRICS presidency matters.

GERMAN POLITICS

AfD breakthrough shows Germany’s firewall against the far right is breaking

The AfD’s record result in Saxony-Anhalt shows how difficult it is becoming for Germany’s mainstream parties to keep the far right out of power, as deeper economic and demographic grievances continue to power its rise.

Every disaster also presents an opportunity to learn: Himanshu Thakkar

The expert on water and hydropower project-related issues says that the Rasuwa floods have Himalayan implications for Nepal and India.

Anusua Mukherjee

Two police officers walk past a counter-protest where one waves a flag that reads “Fed up of Nazis”, outside a venue where the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party is holding its election rally in Magdeburg, eastern Germany, on September 4, 2026.

Europeside: Notes from a Small Continent

What hope for Germany?

The economy is imploding. Tens of thousands of car workers are set to lose their jobs. The far right is about to take its first state premiership. For Germany’s floundering government, militarism and war are seen as the solution.

The history and geography of grief in Nepal

The land has built a rich grammar for absorbing catastrophe, from the rituals of Gai Jatra to the fatalism of the “cursed country”. But it has yet to find a language for responsibility and accountability.

RUSSIA-UKRAINE WAR

Peace in Ukraine is nowhere in sight

The Ukraine war has reached a stalemate, with neither side able to force victory or accept the concessions needed for peace. For India, the challenge is to ensure that whatever settlement emerges does not constrain its strategic autonomy.

More stories from World Affairs

Rescue work continues in the aftermath of flash floods at Trishuli Center in Nepal's Nuwakot district on August 31, 2026.

When a flood crosses three countries, why can’t South Asia’s disaster plans?

South Asia has the pieces of a regional disaster-response system, but no reliable mechanism that makes those pieces work together. Nepal’s recent floods show how quickly that gap can turn a cross-border hazard into a regional crisis.

UN Security Council members during a vote to extend the deployment of a UN peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of Congo, at UN headquarters in New York on December 19, 2025.

It’s time the UN fixed itself

The UN has become a bloated bureaucracy undermined by big powers and incapable of stopping urgent crises of war and climate change. With initiatives like UN80 only scratching the surface, the next Secretary-General must prepare for serious reform.

An aerial view shows houses deluged in sludge following flash floods at Devighat, Bidur Municipality, along the confluence of the Trishuli and Tadi rivers in Nepal's Nuwakot district on August 27, 2026.

Nepal floods leave a trail of death and devastation

The disaster has killed hundreds, stranded thousands, and crippled vital infrastructure, exposing the growing risks faced by communities living amid a rapidly changing Himalayan climate.

Frontline News Desk

Rohingyas gather during an event at a refugee camp in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh, on August 25, 2026, marking the anniversary of their exodus.

Recontaining the Rohingya

UNHCR’s closure of the Cox’s Bazar Transit Centre in southeastern Bangladesh is sending Rohingya refugees who were moved there for their safety back into the camps, without clear safeguards or meaningful alternatives.

Jayalakshmi Itla Ragiri

A diorama with figures of mujahideen fighters at Manzar-e-Jahad, the museum that commemorates the Afghan resistance to the Soviet invasion of 1979, in Herat, Afghanistan.

Unravelling jihad

Former IPS officer Anju Gupta explores the connection between terrorism in India and the Af-Pak terror infrastructure, joining the dots on how India came onto the jihadis’ radar.

An attendee wears an American flag pin and a cross necklace during a Republican special primary runoff election watch party in Columbia, South Carolina, USA, on August 25, 2026. Beneath America’s polished consumer culture lies widening class inequality, elite privilege, and a political system that serves wealth and power. (Image is for representational purposes only)

Return of the Ugly American

American exceptionalism has decayed into narcissistic vanity, and the gap between America’s polished self-image and the reality of its arrogant, self-serving foreign policy and corrupt domestic politics is producing the “Ugly American” once again.

In this image posted on August 26, 2026, Union Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal interacts with Indian and Japanese startups, investors, and innovators, during a roundtable, in Tokyo, Japan.

India is expanding FTA access faster than exporters can use it

India is signing more trade deals and reaching more markets, but low FTA utilisation means many Indian exporters are failing to capture the tariff advantages negotiated on their behalf.

A Pakistani woman (left) with her Indian relative (centre) ahead of their return to India via the Samjhauta Express train, also called the Friendship Express, that ran between Delhi and Lahore, at the railway station in Lahore on August 8, 2019.

India and Pakistan can still find each other across the border

The grief and loss of Partition are inseparable from stories of friendship and human connection that survived 1947. For younger generations, that shared past is a reminder that the distance need not define the ties between the people.

Mani Shankar Aiyar

A visitor’s guide to American decline

The country still has its abundance. What seems to be disappearing is the civic and intellectual culture that made it a superpower.

Mohenjo-daro, the ancient capital of the 4,000-year-old civilisation of the Indus Valley, is located in Pakistan.

The identity crisis behind Pakistan’s new civilisational turn

Pakistan spent decades marginalising its pre-Islamic past. Now, driven as much by Indus water diplomacy as conviction, it is reclaiming its ancient civilisations and figures as sources of soft power. Can it embrace a history it once sidelined?

The DRDO’s Autonomous Flying Wing Technology Demonstrator, an indigenous high-speed unmanned aerial vehicle, during a flight test from the Aeronautical Test Range in Chitradurga on July 1, 2022.

India’s e-warfare resilience gap demands course correction

The strides India has made in electronic warfare infrastructure often don’t get the recognition they deserve. But the system is currently more capable of countering adversary drones than protecting its own, and therein lies a problem.

Sudhanshu Kumar

Secretary (West) Sibi George (right) with Md. Golam Sarwar, Secretary General, SAARC, in New Delhi, on July 7, 2026.

Rethinking SAARC’s revival

Member-states should look beyond domestic interests to cultivate regional interests and keep the SAARC spirit and the grouping alive.

Aditya Gowdara Shivamurthy

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