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.
Grief has many faces; as Anglo-American poet critic T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) said of death, it ‘has a hundred hands and walks by a thousand ways’. Shell-shocked military children at a father’s funeral. Mothers cradling photos of infants vaporised in an airstrike. Distraught professionals unjustly accused. Women silently abused. The dreams of adolescence turned to the […]
Continue Reading
This is my second ‘Briefing’ for Oxford House on the military conflict and humanitarian crisis that is consuming Ethiopia, particularly the rugged northern district of Tigray. To recap. Years of growing political and military tension led to a confrontation between the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) – which dominated Ethiopian politics for almost thirty years […]
Continue Reading
About five years ago, people I knew in China started to disappear. I had heard of this happening in other parts of the world, but never seen it first-hand. 2017 was the 500th anniversary of monk-theologian Martin Luther’s (1483-1546) dramatic nailing of ’95 Theses’ on a church door in Wittenberg, Germany, which many see as […]
Continue Reading
It may be that Oxford is landlocked and I am just back from a peaceful break on the beautiful Pembrokeshire coast in SW Wales, but the sea has been much in mind in the last few days. With its awesome power and spine-chilling way of stilling a soul as it crashes on pebbly shores and […]
Continue Reading
In her review of the new multi-media West End experience Doctor Who: Time Fracture, Kate Wyver sets the scene: ‘A time fracture from a future explosion has caused a rip in the fabric of the universe, throwing time and space off-kilter. We’re wandering through the centuries trying to pick up clues’ (Guardian, 17 June 2021). […]
Continue Reading
High in the remote mountains of northern Ethiopia a terrible war is waging. Out of sight from a COVID-stricken world and preoccupied media, brutality reigns. The conflict in Tigray, which began in early November 2020, is perhaps the most brutal and secretive anywhere. Initially a fight between Special Forces of the Tigray Regional Government and […]
Continue Reading
In April 2021, the UK Government announced large cuts to its support for global health programmes. Many of these programmes are directed to tackling serious disease and/or building public health systems. Cuts to other areas of Development are also in train as a consequence of the UK Government’s decision to reduce its overall aid budget […]
Continue Reading
The ribbon village of Maiden Newton lies comfortably along a soft valley six miles north of the county town of Dorset, Dorchester, which local author Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) famously re-cast in his realist, romantic novels as the dark but alluring Casterbridge. If you take a back lane east from Maiden Newton, you plunge through an […]
Continue Reading
Pictures of rockets, rioting, chanting crowds, bleeding bodies, death, and destruction from Gaza, Lod, Jerusalem, Hebron, and Tel Aviv, have filled screens and dominated news coverage in the last seven days. International concern – sometimes outrage – at renewed conflict between Israeli and Palestinian militants, and now Jewish and Arab Israeli communities, has been broadcast […]
Continue Reading
I look down from our tenth floor flat on one of India’s historically most successful new ‘Metros’, Bangalore, home now to 12.7+m citizens; many drawn by the promise of jobs in the booming IT industry or by pressure on rural life in India’s move to Super-Power status. But it’s a city in a country now […]
Continue Reading