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There is no doubt that the political speech of the Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad is of exceptional importance in understanding the developments of the war in Syria, and clarifies the position of all parties involved in the war, whether local, regional or international. Accordingly, and based on the dismantling of political discourse, the identification of its core, as well as its variables and major themes of this discourse, this study aims to understand the levels of complexity, paths and the fate of the war in Syria that certainly does not come free of charge, the hardest of which is the human cost whether for the victims or the displaced persons.

After a careful study of all the resilient factors in the literature review to categorize the primary data based on Assad’s discourses in the media, through a “qualitative research study” of his “interviews and discourses,” it is found that the Assad’s rhetoric is highly relevant to his tenacious presidency. The research reveals the themes that dominated Assad’s interview responses and speeches and his strategy of framing the revolution as a foreign insurgency against his government. In fact, Assad delegitimizes any semblance of the uprisings as a “pro-democracy movement” or “revolution,” denying the presence of a rebellion against his government.

By the analysis the study found out that Bashar Al-Assad continued to focus on certain reasons and issues that led to the crisis and the continuation of the war, such as the Muslim Brotherhood’s involvement, considering the Syrian opposition abroad as agents of Western countries, Syria is subject to a regional and international conspiracy, terrorism is a major scourge that must be fought and that the army is essential in resolving the battles taking place there. Likewise, emphasizing the internal dialogue with all stakeholders and involved parties is the way to solve the crisis.The Syrian President’s speeches do not focus much on the accusations against his regime from the opposition or the international parties involved in the conflict.

Assad’s resiliency has made him a distinct leader in the region. This paper analyzes the factors contributing to Assad’s resiliency. The literature review consists of the existing theories on authoritarian persistence and Assad’s power base in particular. The literature review discusses the factors that helped Assad adopts his resiliency strategies to the conflict environment. The research focuses on how Assad used the media as a platform for displaying his own manipulative narrative of the conflict. It concludes that Assad’s use of the media as his propaganda tool legitimized his rule, making it highly relevant to his persistence.

This article outlines the challenges faced by the next Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) in 2022 – the need to address economic problems resulting from Hong Kong’s slow growth; its inability to restructure its economy to broaden job opportunities and improve upward mobility for young people; and the government’s belated attempt to deploy innovation and technology.

This article is based on the author’s in-depth analysis of the current situation and insights on the challenges faced by the next Chief Executive.

Tensions are inherent in the concept of “One Country, Two Systems”. Back in November 2012, Deputy Director of the Hong Kong and Macao Office Zhang Xiaoming already reminded Hong Kong of the need to manage well three sets of relationships: (1) maintaining the “One Country” principle while preserving the SARs’ “separate systems”; (2) upholding Central Authority while preserving the SARs’ “high degree of autonomy”; and (3) unleashing the economic potential of mainland China while raising the competitiveness of the SARs. These three sets of relationships represent three fundamental difficulties in implementing “One Country, Two Systems”. However, Hong Kong kept ignoring Beijing’s advice and failed to resolve the tension between the mainland and Hong Kong SAR, culminating in the riotous events of 2019, which morphed into a dangerous, anti-China insurgency.

The next Chief Executive needs to mediate between the constitutional requirements of the Central Authority while preserving Hong Kong SAR’s “high degree of autonomy”, its unique character and lifestyle. He or she also needs to deal with continuity and change. Hong Kong cannot stand still, and should not allow itself to be lulled by the “50 years no change” mantra into overlooking the need to move with the times. Much reform needs to be implemented by the next Chief Executive to give people hope, faith in “One Country, Two Systems” and true love of the country.

Brain-drain insurgency has become pervasive amongst professionals and the last option for everyone in the country to realise a sustainable quality of work-life (QWL). All youths now in the country have perceived migrating to the international workspace as a noble idea. This study investigates the incidence of brain-drain and QWL amongst academics in Nigerian universities.

To sparkle a clearer understanding concerning factors preventing the QWL amongst Nigeria's lecturers, this study utilised a cross-sectional research design to survey the participants across all departments in federal institutions through an explanatory research approach. This study applied an array of adapted scales to evaluate members of academic staff track of what provoked the incidence of brain-drain amongst Nigerian lecturers and possible influence on their QWL. The study surveyed 431 members of academic staff in Nigerian universities to collect useful data and employed a structural equation model (SEM) to analyse the obtained data.

The outcome of this study highlights that there is a horrible condition of service amongst Nigerian lecturers, a poor compensation system, poor academic research funding and lack of autonomy are bane to the QWL experienced in Nigerian tertiary institutions today. This study indicates that poor staff development and inadequate university funding are part of the justification that provoked brain-drain insurgence, and allowed the government to lose their skilled and competent egg-heads in the university to other foreign nations of the world.

This study demonstrated that brain-drain has become part of Nigeria's national life given that all professionals are seeking better life where their skills, competence and energy would be valued. Brain-drain was not common until these days amongst academics and fewer studies were noted but this study showed a novel paradigm regarding the QWL and brain-drain trajectory.

The per capita GDP of the countries of Southeast Asia (SEA) varies from less than $5,000 to over $97,000. This paper aims to analyze the political factors behind such variation, such as wars, extreme politics, political instability, and kleptocratic governments and leaders, and how they affect the development experience within the region.

This paper uses the comparative political economy analysis approach to make a comparison among SEA countries using knowledge from well-known political–economic history and development data from World Development Indicators provided by World Bank.

A long period of political stability creates a favorable environment for investment that, in return, stimulates sustained economic growth in SEA. The countries have all grown rapidly, but their experience of development varies. The four countries that avoided political extremes (Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand and Brunei) have the highest per capita incomes today. Those that have had long periods of war and political instability, but which have also had substantial periods of stability (Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines), come next. Cambodia and Laos have suffered long periods of war and are the least developed. Myanmar’s military rulers, through civil wars and kleptocratic mismanagement of the economy, have prevented growth much of the time.

Most studies of Southeast Asian growth have analyzed the experience of single countries and missed the central role played by extreme politics, including wars, to explain why some countries have much higher per capita incomes than others. This paper is expected to fill this gap.

This paper operationalizes insecurity and governance crises to study their effects on stock market response to two political events in Nigeria – the 2015 and 2019 presidential elections.

An event study was used to capture the market responses. Abnormal returns at the aggregate and sectoral levels were measured over several time windows before and after the respective election results were announced.

The market reacted strongly positively to a change in presidency from an incumbent to an opposition party candidate in the 2015 election but weakly positively, at best, to the re-election of the incumbent candidate in the 2019 election. In addition, banking stocks exhibited greater sensitivity to these events than oil and gas stocks.

There may be peculiarities with the Nigerian case and with the two elections analyzed. Therefore, future research could focus on understanding the extent to which the results generalize to the broader sub-Saharan context and other regions that face similar governance challenges.

Understanding that markets may have a different perception towards incumbent versus opposition candidate electoral victories during periods of insecurity and governance crisis is important for investors, policymakers, researchers and the wider society.

Past empirical studies on political events and stock returns in Sub-Saharan Africa contexts such as Nigeria ignore shifts in voter mood and produce contradictory findings. This paper helps to resolve some of these contradictions by providing insight into how the markets can have a different perception towards incumbent and opposition candidate electoral victories during periods of insecurity and governance crisis.

This paper focuses on two examples of constitutional corruption in India where the constitution is used for questionable political reasons by the Bharatiya Janata Party under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The paper relies on public documents and media reports to analyse Prime Minister Modi's handling of the purchase of Rafale jet fighters from France and the revocation of Articles 370 and 35A which resulted in the division of the State of Jammu and Kashmir.

Constitutional and democratic norms were violated in both cases, but the Supreme Court did not find any irregularities in the sale of the Rafale jet fighters. The second case is under challenge in the Supreme Court. The analysis reveals how the Modi government has undermined democratic values and used constitutional provisions to pursue its partisan and ideological agenda.

The paper focuses attention on the often neglected topic of constitutional corruption in India.

The purpose of this study is to unravel the changing nature of climate change impact on the food and human security sector of the Nigerian State.

This study is an in-depth case study that involves the use of both quantitative and qualitative data. Statistical data on climate variability in Nigeria obtained from reliable databases were use in the making of analysis. Also, data derived from semi-structure interviews and special reports from International Non-governmental organizations on the subject matter were also used in the study. The findings of the study were based on an in-depth analysis of both primary and secondary sources of data. The secondary data were derived from existing published academic works. The primary data was developed using qualitative data that were collected from January to November, 2018 to 2019 in the different regions of Nigeria. For the South East, primary data was collected from Abakaliki, Ebonyi State. In the South-South, primary data was collected from Asaba, Delta State. In the South West, primary data was collected from Barutin, Kwara State. In the North East, primary data was collected from Maiduguri, while in North West, data was collected from Gusau, Zamfara State. In the North Central, data was collected from Markurdi, Benue State. During the data collection, 48 semi-structured Key Informant Interviews (KIIs) were carried out in the six selected research areas that represented their geo-political zones. Six Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) were carried out, one for each of these six selected cities. Each of the Focus Group Discussions comprised between five and seven respondents. The idea of KIIs and FGDs is to allow the respondents to freely express their ideas comprehensively. Again, in other to get varied forms of responses, the respondents are mainly farmers however, a number of NGOs, civil servants, fertilizer sellers, government officials, transporters and aged men and women/retirees. It should be noted that the respondents cut across male and female gender of all ages and ethnic configuration. The respondents were also randomly selected through social networking. To avoid having people of similar The KIIs were three academics; two community leaders; two small scale fish farmers; rice, cassava, fish, livestock and crop farmers. All KIIs ad TIs were transcribed and analysed using thematic content analysis.

The findings revealed that climate change has negatively affected food security in Nigeria. it has also led to continuous armed confrontations over natural resources thereby undermining human security in the country.

This study is 100% original and can be assessed through turn it in evaluation.

This paper aims to present a brief discussion on the geopolitical aspects of diplomatic divergences between India and Bangladesh regarding the Rohingya issue. Presently, more than a million people are living in 30 refugee camps in Bangladesh. In August 2017, the plight of Rohingya refugees broke all the previous record and had largely affected the Cox's Bazar region of Bangladesh when Bangladesh decided to provide shelter to the Rohingyas, identifying them as “Forcibly Displaced Myanmar Nationals (FDMN). Due to geographical closeness and historical linkage with both Myanmar and Bangladesh, India, despite taking strict measures to avoid any cross-border opportunities for Rohingyas, could not escape the consequences. Myanmar, due to its strategic position and natural resources, has always been the epicentre of attention and investment of foreign powers. The crisis has all the elements in it to create political turbulence in South Asia and South East Asia. A peaceful environment based on mutual trust and cooperation is required for the continuing economic growth of the region. Considering the importance of in-depth research in this arena, the study pursued the qualitative method.

Suicide and attempted suicide is an important health issue and the number of people who die of suicide exceeds that of conflicts. Kashmir has been suffering from a low intensity war since last 20 years in which thousands have been killed or injured. There has been phenomenal increase in cases of psychological disorders along with suicide and and suicide attempters. Suicide in a conflict zone is viewed with indifference due to focus on the physical part of trauma. Difficulties faced by the suicidal patient and his attendants are seldom highlighted. 1408 patients who reported to emergency room for suicide attempt from 2000 to 2008 were taken for the study. All the patients underwent the hospital protocol for poisoning management. Patients were subjected to detailed psychiatric evaluation and questions were specifically asked about the difficulties encountered during management. Most of the cases were females with 92.11% belonging to the Muslim religion. 76.20% cases were from a rural background. 32.5% had been referred because of the lack of specific antidotes. Forty-three percent required arrangement of transportation by their own family members. Fifty-seven percent had been stopped for security checks along the way. Seventy-three percent felt that the attitude of the staff hostile. Twenty-three percent of patients had to share a bed. Almost all patients were questioned by security agencies within the hospital. More than 68% patient reported hostility amongst their neighbors. Suicidal poisoning is a significant health problem in Kashmir and management of these cases is fraught with difficulties across the spectrum of health care. Educating the doctors at primary care about first aid, improvement in community services followed by long term resolution of the conflict would go some way in alleviating the difficulties faced by a suicidal patient and his family in a conflict zone.

There is a noticeable dearth of literature offering Marxist perspectives and analyses on the Bangsamoro struggles for self-determination, ethnic and religious identities and social justice. A reason for this may lie in the general derision of bourgeois academics and conventional commentators on the supposed paucity of Marxist theories on nationalism, ethnicity and religion. This may have influenced, ironically, Filipino Marxist thinkers into being indifferent to this research topic. Far from the truth, however, that Marxism is essentially an economic determinist social conflict theory, its historical materialism offers a rich treasury of analyses and perspectives on nationalism, self-determination, religion and ethnic identity within the context of class struggles as the acme of the theory of scientific socialism. The paper, therefore, offers a scientific analysis of the Bangsamoro Question from a Marxist standpoint beyond the perspectives of psychologism, naturalism and ethno-racialism, which are usually deployed by traditional and uninformed commentators in analyzing ethnicity questions and quests for separatism.

The paper employs the historical and class analysis of the dynamics, relationships and struggles of classes in the history of the Bangsamoro struggles against colonialism and the subsequent postcolonial regimes up to the present time.

As a scientific paradigm, historical materialism presents itself as a general scientific social conflict theory. Using this framework through historical and class analyses, the paper proves the improbability of the Moros’ quest for separatism or genuine autonomy at this historical point. It, therefore, asserts the linking of the Moro struggles to the more immense struggles of the Filipinos for national and social liberation from imperialism.

The paper is limited to the historical and class analyses of classes’ dynamics and struggles. It is, therefore, far from an exhaustive analysis of the Moro struggles using different non-Marxist social conflict theories.

The research can be considered a practical guide in analyzing and predicting the trajectories of the Moro struggles in Mindanao and Sulu.

The work addresses the question from radical and Marxist premises.

This is a highly original and valuable work from the point of view of Marxist social conflict theory.