A specialist consultancy providing bespoke advice and creative solutions for complex cultural, ethical, and religious issues in contemporary geopolitics.
Oxford House Research publishes weekly briefing papers on topical and global issues authored by associates and a range of external contributors. Members receive these by email each week.
Setting the scene Life and faith are mysteries. We enter and experience both through factors beyond our understanding and control. Our parentage and DNA, our appearance and abilities, our predispositions and cultural formation are among life’s ‘givens’, it seems as if by chance. We sometimes – no, often – wish it were not so. Hence, […]
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If, by any chance, you have noticed Oxford House’s ‘Weekly Briefings’ have been far from weekly in the past two or three months, I am both grateful and (a little) embarrassed. The simple fact is – apart from a three-week encounter with a new COVID variant (that prevented an important trip to China) – I […]
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Recent events in Israel and Gaza have shocked the world. No reasonable, moral person can feel anything but outrage and disgust. To Jews, here is another ‘massacre of the innocents’; to Palestinians of every kind, another reason to hate and hope against hope to flee Gaza or build a new homeland. To many outsiders, here […]
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I remember being haranged by an ‘evangelical’ atheist in Oxford University a few years ago who came at me with the surprisingly unnuanced claim: ‘Religion is the cause of everything that is wrong with the world today!’ Then – and, indeed, now – I can’t help wondering if the immoderate passion he demonstrated might not […]
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Duncan Smith, Fraud and Corruption: Cases and Materials (2022) To those of us working on the front-line, Duncan Smith’s latest book Fraud and Corruption: Cases and Materials (Springer, 2022) is an invaluable resource. As Deputy Head of Fraud Investigations at the European Investment Bank (EIB) in Luxembourg, Smith is well-placed to write on the challenges […]
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Pope John Paul II (1920-2005; r. 1978-2005) was, like his predecessors John XXIII (1881-1963; r. 1958-1963) and Paul VI (1897-1963; r. 1963-1978), committed to the Catholic Church’s involvement in – if not direction of – international affairs. To that end, he and his staff cultivated and (usually) retained close connections with numerous governments and government […]
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Immediate issues have magnetic power. It can be hard to resist their pull. Pressing matters in international relations dominate minds and media coverage: North Korean missile tests, meetings between Xi Jinping and US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken (b. 1962), Vladimir Putin’s clash with Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin (b. 1961), the catastrophic loss of […]
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My theme is Indonesia, specifically the nature and importance of its Islamic identity. Since the fall in 1998 of authoritarian President Soeharto (1921-2008; Pres. 1968-1998), Indonesia has been on the ascendant. With 88% of its 276m citizens Muslim,[1] it is the largest Muslim-majority country and the third largest democracy in the world. For the past […]
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The American Civil Rights activist and martyr Dr Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-1968) wisely observed: ‘Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ As he continued, ‘We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.’ That is, like a garment without seam, humanity exists in an unbreakable, but […]
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The plight of the Rohingya in Myanmar is widely known but little understood. From August 2017, when the persecution and displacement of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya finally made the front pages, the atrocities meted out against this ancient Muslim minority inside and outside Myanmar have drawn comparison with the Jewish ‘Holocaust’ in Nazi Germany.[1] […]
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