Afghanistan 2019: Between peace talks and presidential elections, another year of uncertainty

Afghanistan in 2019 was characterised by the Presidential elections, held on 28 September, and whose results were announced at the end of December 2019, and by the peace talks between the US and the Taliban. Against such backdrop, the analysis presented in this article traces the evolution of peace talks between the US and the Taliban during the year under examination, and accounts for the developments that characterised the peace process. The latter had also an important intra-Afghan dimension, with the Consultative Loya-Jirga, which was held between 29 April and 3 May 2019. The socio-economic situation of Afghanistan is also analysed, with a specific focus on the role of women in the country’s political and economic life. With regards to Afghanistan’s international relations, this study dissects the geopolitical alignments taking place in 2019, with an assessment of the role that Russia, India, Pakistan and China played in the country during 2019

Afghanistan 2018: Parliamentary Elections and regional power shifts

The year 2018 was characterized by parliamentary elections, held on 20 October. While the elections represented an important moment for Afghanistan’s democracy, both the run up and the aftermath were characterized by confusion and insecurity, with the election results still not announced by the end of 2018. The security situation remained volatile hindering not only political processes but also the country’s economic growth. Civilian casualties caused by anti-government forces remained almost at the same levels of 2017. On the external front, the last 12 months saw both a political and military shift in the US’s approach to the country, partly departing from the previously announced South Asia strategy. 2018 also signalled an increase in China’s engagement in Afghanistan, as well as the reiteration of the troubled relationship between Kabul and Islamabad

Sino-Pakistani relations in the time of COVID-19

As China's economy contracts in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and with nearly $20 billion of China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) projects in Pakistan, policy makers in Islamabad and Beijing are keen to reaffirm the importance of their strategic partnership. Here Filippo Boni (Open University) details the recent history of Sino-Pakistan relations, and how Covid-19 has impacted them over the last few months

NLSE on the half-line with point interactions

We investigate the existence and the uniqueness of NLS ground states of fixed mass on the half-line in the presence of a point interaction at the origin. The nonlinearity is of power type, and the regime is either $L^2$-subcritical or $L^{2}$-critical, while the point interaction is either attractive or repulsive. In the $L^{2}$-subcritical case, we prove that ground states exist for every mass value if the interaction is attractive, while ground states exist only for sufficiently large masses if the interaction is repulsive. In the latter case, if the power is less or equal to four, ground states coincide with the only bound state. If instead, the power is greater than four, then there are values of the mass for which two bound states exist, and neither of the two is a ground state, and values of the mass for which two bound states exist, and one of them is a ground state. In the $L^{2}$-critical case, we prove that ground states exist for masses strictly below a critical mass value in the attractive case, while ground states never exist in the repulsive case.Comment: 17 page

The Impact of the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor on Pakistan’s Federal System: The Politics of the CPEC

The China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is often portrayed as the flagship project of the Belt and Road Initiative. While much attention has been devoted to its geopolitical repercussions, its impacts on Pakistan’s federal system and interprovincial relations have not yet been explored. Organized around interviews conducted in 2015, 2018, and 2019, this article demonstrates that the construction of the economic corridor is acting as a centripetal force in Pakistan’s federal structure, despite the potential for such a large external investment to redress the disparities between provinces

India at 70: Introduction to the BASAS 2017 Special Issue

This introduction to the 2017 Annual Conference of the British Association for South Asian Studies offers an overview of the collection of selected articles presented at the conference. Overall, the Special issue consists of six articles, including four research articles addressing a wide range of topics spanning from the role of women during the Emergency rule (1975–1977) to the difficult relationship between minorities and the Hindu majority in recent years, and two viewpoint articles. These viewpoints touch on two extremely important and timely topics: Urvashi Butalia, who was the keynote speaker at the conference, looks at Partition and at the importance of survivors in preserving the memory of such a momentous event, whereas Deborah Sutton addresses the articulation of Hindu nationalist views in the scholarship of the ‘Ghent School’. The introduction to the Special Issue also highlights how the research presented in this collection can offer comparative insights to broader phenomena occurring in other regions alike

Two dimensional NLS ground states with attractive Coulomb potential and point interaction

We study the existence and the properties of ground states at fixed mass for a focusing nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation in dimension two with a point interaction, an attractive Coulomb potential and a nonlinearity of power type. We prove that for any negative value of the Coulomb charge, for any positive value of the mass and for any L$^2$-subcritical power nonlinearity, such ground states exist and exhibit a logarithmic singularity where the interaction is placed. Moreover, up to multiplication by a phase factor, they are positive, radially symmetric and decreasing. An analogous result is obtained also for minimizers of the action restricted to the Nehari manifold, getting the existence also in the L$^2$-critical and supercritical cases.Comment: 25 page

Prescribed mass ground states for a doubly nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation in dimension one

We investigate the problem of existence and uniqueness of ground states at fixed mass for two families of focusing nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations on the line. The first family consists of NLS with power nonlinearities concentrated at a point. For such model, we prove existence and uniqueness of ground states at every mass when the nonlinearity power is $L^2-$subcritical and at a threshold value of the mass in the $L^2-$critical regime. The second family is obtained by adding a standard power nonlinearity to the previous setting. In this case, we prove existence and uniqueness at every mass in the doubly subcritical case, namely when both the powers related to the pointwise and the standard nonlinearity are subcritical. If only one power is critical, then existence and uniqueness hold only at masses lower than the critical mass associated to the critical nonlinearity. Finally, in the doubly critical case ground states exist only at critical mass, whose value results from a non--trivial interplay between the two nonlinearities.Comment: 17 page