António Vieira da Cruz

Editorial que escrevi no sexto número da revista Think South Asia, que edito com o apoio do South Asia Democratic Forum: --- Nepal is the country we chose to focus on this time. With about 27 million people and landlocked between India and China, Nepal has in Kathmandu its capital and also the headquarters of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, also known by the acronym SAARC. It is interesting indeed to see Nepal´s recent societal changes, in the common people as in the political elites. After a very good country profile by S. M. Hasan, Dr Siegfried Wolf from Heidelberg tells us more about the possible role of Nepal in regional cooperation, making reference to a very useful survey report South Asia Democratic Forum conducted in Nepal in 2011, in partnership with Gallup Europe. As Mr Malik Saqib Ali says in his article about economic integration, South Asia has 23% of the people in the world, 5% of its soil mass, and only 3% of the world’s total GDP. But a...

Artigo sobre a Índia publicado com o apoio do South Asia Democratic Forum no último número do Think South Asia, aqui . --- The Republic of India is a country with 3.287.590 square kilometres of area and an estimated population of 1,24 billion people. Its borders are with Pakistan to the northwest, Tibet (under the Chinese administration), Nepal and Bhutan to the north, and Bangladesh and Burma to the northeast. On the Indian Ocean, India’s neighbours are the Maldives to the southwest and Sri Lanka to the southeast. These numbers mean that India has a larger population than Europe (all countries together), or the Americas (North and South), or Africa. We can find an Indian identity, or at least a harmonic set of similar identities within India, making of it the most populous liberal democracy in the world. And, with a birth rate bigger than China, India is set to overtake its neighbour country as the world’s most populous nation by 2030, according to the latest United Na...

Em baixo o artigo que escrevi no quarto número da revista Think South Asia (19 de Novembro), que edito com o apoio do South Asia Democratic Forum. Principais países em destaque: Sri Lanka e Paquistão. Neste número fala-se também da educação como forma de combater o extremismo e o terrorismo, e temos ainda a honra de contar com Vytautas Landsbergis, o primeiro Presidente da Lituânia após o comunismo. ---   Por mares nunca de antes navegados, Passaram ainda além da Taprobana* Luís Vaz de Camões, in “Os Lusíadas” – Canto I   In this edition of Think South Asia we put the focus on Sri Lanka. With a long history and a very distinctive identity formed by a great profusion of different ethnicities and a meeting point of religions, Sri Lanka has a incredibly rich culture. Its privileged geography puts Sri Lanka in a very central and strategic situation in the Indian Ocean. As in the first stanza of his opus magum “Os Lusíadas”, the Portuguese poet C...