Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Kurniawan Arif Maspul
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If holy sites can be levelled, what’s next for international law?
On the first day of May, in the quiet southern Lebanese village of Yaroun, a monastery that had stood for generations disappeared in a cloud of dust. The Sisters of the Holy Saviour monastery and its adjoining school — described by Lebanon’s National News Agency as one of the region’s…
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Bab el-Mandeb cannot become a gateway for recognition politics
The Bab el-Mandeb Strait has always carried an ominous name — the ‘Gate of Tears’. Today, it feels painfully literal. This narrow maritime corridor linking the Red Sea to the Gulf of Aden carries not only more than 10 per cent of global seaborne trade, but also the accumulated tensions…
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What if the West has been misreading Iran for 40 years?
The enduring temptation in Western strategic thinking is to treat Iran as a problem to be managed rather than a civilisation to be understood. That misreading has proven costly. Beneath the daily churn of sanctions, proxy skirmishes, and nuclear brinkmanship lies a far deeper story—one of continuity, identity, and power…
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When Lebanon’s ceasefire still hunts journalists, truth becomes prey
There is a particular cruelty in silencing those whose sole weapon is a camera, a notebook, or a voice. The killing of Lebanese journalist Amal Khalil in southern Lebanon is not an isolated tragedy; it is part of a pattern that is becoming impossible to ignore, and even harder to…
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Why should the Middle East trust a superpower that breaks its own rules?
A narrow ribbon of water, barely 33 kilometres wide at its tightest point, has once again exposed the fragility of global order. The Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly 20 per cent of the world’s oil supply flows, has become less a trade corridor and more a theatre of strategic…
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Is Sudan too far for the world to care
Silence, in international politics, is rarely neutral. In Sudan, it has become lethal. Three years into a civil war that has displaced more people than any other conflict on earth, the scale of devastation sits in jarring contrast with its absence from global consciousness. Since fighting erupted on 15 April…
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The victory Iran names, the diplomatic space it unexpectedly opens
In a world fatigued by endless war cycles and diplomatic stalemates, moments that signal even the possibility of strategic recalibration deserve careful, even hopeful, attention. The recent statement attributed to Iran’s Supreme National Security Council—asserting not merely survival but a structured Political and military outcome following confrontation with the United…
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When the world moves faster for oil than for lives
There is a peculiar moral inversion unfolding in the waters of the Persian Gulf. As oil tankers idle and insurance markets shudder, more than forty countries have mobilised with urgency and precision to reopen the Strait of Hormuz—a narrow maritime corridor through which roughly 20 per cent of the world’s…
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What Israel’s death penalty reveals when law becomes a boundary of belonging
A law can sometimes reveal more than a thousand speeches ever could. Israel’s newly passed ‘Death Penalty for Terrorists’ statute does precisely that. It is not merely a legislative shift; it is a structural declaration about whose life is protected, whose is conditional, and whose is extinguishable. In the charged…
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Is America still a democracy, or just a power with democratic branding?
The crisis unfolding around Iran is not simply another Middle Eastern confrontation. It has become something far more profound – a test of whether the democratic world still believes in its own values, or whether those values have quietly been replaced by brute power dressed up as principle. The document…
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The Bab al‑Mandeb Strait where uncommon conflict became a common burden
A dangerous new chapter is unfolding in the Middle East, and the world is responding with an uneasy silence. What is emerging around the narrow waters of the Bab al-Mandeb is not simply another regional confrontation. It is a moment that could reshape the global economic order, the credibility of…
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Great‑power recklessness and the future of Gulf security
The Strait of Hormuz has always been more than a stretch of water. It is a pressure point of the modern world – where oil, ideology, history and fear collide in ways that reverberate far beyond the Middle East. The recent US–Israeli strike on Iran, described in the attached analysis…
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Israel’s strike on Iran has now triggered a multi-front missile crisis
Since the night Israeli warplanes struck Tehran and killed senior Iranian officials, the region has lurched from retaliation to rupture — missiles now crossing NATO airspace, drones hitting the Caucasus, and a once-contained confrontation spilling across borders with alarming speed. They are tearing at the fragile trust that underpins the…
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Why Iran and Lebanon matter, and who shapes what comes next
The Middle East stands again at the lip of an abyss, and the tremor is not regional – it is global. The reported killing of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in joint US–Israeli strikes, followed by Tehran’s missile retaliation and the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, has…
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When a supreme leader is assassinated, the Global South trembles
The killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in joint United States–Israeli strikes has torn a hole not only through Iran’s leadership, but through the fragile architecture of the international order itself. The shockwaves are no longer confined to Tehran. They ripple through the Strait of Hormuz, across Gulf capitals, into energy…
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Strikes push Lebanon’s ceasefire toward collapse
The sky over southern Lebanon no longer carries the promise of rain. It carries the low mechanical hum of drones and the crack of air strikes that arrive without warning. In villages such as al-Ain and Aitou, families wake to rubble where bedrooms once stood. Recent Israeli strikes in eastern…
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How Addis and Ankara are shaping a more stable Red Sea
At the edge of the Red Sea, where history has always been written in salt and blood, a new chapter is quietly unfolding. It is not the clash of empires that once defined relations between the Ottoman fleet and the highland kingdom of Abyssinia. It is something subtler, more ambitious,…
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Who fears the truth? The lawfare campaign to silence Francesca Albanese
Francesca Albanese has become one of the most polarising figures in contemporary diplomacy, not because she commands armies or signs treaties, but because she insists on describing what she sees. Since assuming her mandate as United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories in…
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Munich 2026 faces Gaza’s unanswered call for justice
At the Munich Security Conference 2026, beneath glittering chandeliers and tight security, diplomacy moved to script — until one question broke it. Dutch parliamentarian Kati Piri asked what many had whispered, but few had dared to say aloud: where is the accountability for Israel’s actions in Gaza? The room did…
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Indonesia’s 8,000: Can stabilisation proceed without normalisation?
Gaza has become a scar on the conscience of the international system. With more than 72,000 Palestinians reported killed and over 1.9 million displaced at the height of the latest war, the strip stands as a symbol of immeasurable grief and diplomatic failure. In November 2025, the UN Security Council…
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Khartoum wake-up call, how Riyadh will stabilise Sudan
In Geneva last October, Saudi Arabia did something rare in the long agony of Sudan’s war. It spoke plainly. Before diplomats and humanitarian officials, Riyadh’s envoy condemned the Rapid Support Forces’ assault on El Fasher as ‘grave’, demanding immediate humanitarian access and denouncing attacks on civilians, aid workers and infrastructure.…
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The architecture of deceptions in the West Bank
History does not always collapse with the sound of gunfire. Sometimes it dissolves through paperwork, zoning maps, cabinet votes and regulatory notices that barely make the evening news. The latest Israeli security cabinet decisions on the West Bank belong to that quieter, more consequential category. They do not declare annexation.…
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Addis and Riyadh reaffirm priorities at a critical regional moment
Across the Red Sea, history has always travelled faster than politics. Long before borders, treaties or modern diplomacy, the Horn of Africa and the Arabian Peninsula were bound by faith, trade and survival. Today, as global power fractures and regional orders are rewritten, that ancient corridor is again becoming one…
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Gulf allies urge restraint as Washington weighs escalation
At a moment when the Middle East stands on the edge of escalation, the decisive voices have already been heard — not from Washington, but from Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Doha and other GCC nations. In the last 48 hours, the Gulf has moved from anxious diplomacy to the edge of…