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.
How is it that two cultural systems with apparently clear moral expectations can produce two Communist dictators who apparently hate the West? Behind President Xi Jinping (b. 1953; Pres. 2012-present) and China’s ruling cadre lie more than 2500 years of Confucian philosophical-moral formation that has left a lasting impression on the way Chinese today see […]
Continue Reading
‘Church-State’ relations are inherently complex; perhaps especially so in a world now sensitized, in deep, divisive, and dangerous ways, to a nation’s distinctive cultural and spiritual identity and the rights of a person to believe, or not believe, in a certain way. The separation of ‘church’ (qua religion and/or spirituality) and ‘state’ in the Indian […]
Continue Reading
I am delighted to introduce the work of our outstanding Argentinian Associate Dr Pablo Baisotti. Pablo is a historian and social scientist (with an MA and PhD from the ancient University of Bologna, Italy), whose multidisciplinary approach to Latin America studies sheds important light on contemporary global issues. There is much here to make one […]
Continue Reading
I am delighted my brother Jonathan and I have been able to collaborate on this week’s Briefing. Jonathan was educated at Highgate School in London, and then at Oxford and Harvard Universities. He was in the education profession for 42 years and served as Head of two American independent schools for 34 years. He continued […]
Continue Reading
Pakistan is a wonderful, but vulnerable country. Internal politics, religious extremism, and ecological risk plague its life and its international profile. My focus here is on the crippling effects of the recent floods that brought havoc, heartache, and the loss of life to many inside and, I should stress, outside the country. For, Pakistan is […]
Continue Reading
I am delighted that my colleague at St Mary’s University, Dr Andrea Sau, has provided us with a Guest Briefing on ‘Ideology’, a special interest of his and of immediate relevance to us all. The eminent Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl Jung (1875-1961) wrote many years ago, ‘Our blight is ideologies – they are the […]
Continue Reading
Human nature being what it is, in most countries and cultures crimes of all kinds abound. Though statistics over the last twenty years from the US and UK indicate a general decline in crime overall, such statistics are famously impacted by levels of reporting, policing and investment, and contradicted by the emergence of new types […]
Continue Reading
During the past few weeks, the world has witnessed two very different, but thankfully equally peaceful, transitions of power. In the young, vibrant East African country of Kenya and in the historic United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, power has, with the assent of the people, passed in an orderly fashion from one […]
Continue Reading
As my wife and I prepare for our summer break (this is the last Briefing until September), we have been looking back on the year. We both have elderly mothers, who make demands but remind us of ultimate realities. We have four fine grandchildren, who bring delight but intensify our concerns about the future. We […]
Continue Reading
Overshadowed internationally by the crisis in Ukraine, torn domestically between the Scylla of conflict over Taiwan and the Charybdis of ethnic regionalism in Xinjiang, and buffeted, as we saw in Part I, by waves of domestic discontent, Xi Jinping’s ‘New China’ faces the greatest challenges to its identity and coherence since its inception in 1949. […]
Continue Reading