Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou announces his South China Sea Peace Initiative during the 2015 ILA-ASIL Asia Pacific Research Forum in Taipei, Taiwan, May 26, 2015 (AP photo by Wally Santana).

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the South China Sea territorial disputes and the various claimant countries’ approaches to addressing them. Last month, Taiwan proposed a peace plan to resolve territorial disputes in the South China Sea and reduce regional tensions. In an email interview, Lynn Kuok, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Center for East Asia Policy Studies and a senior visiting fellow at the Centre for International Law, Singapore, discussed Taiwan’s role in the South China Sea disputes. WPR: What are Taiwan’s claims in the South China Sea, and to what […]

Young boys working on a coffee plantation in Nicaragua, Nov. 7, 2013 (photo by Flickr user trocaire licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license).

Last month, Costa Rica announced an initiative that aims to eradicate child labor by 2020. In an email interview, Noortje Denkers, a program official for the International Labour Organization’s International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour, discussed the fight against child labor in Central America. WPR: How widespread is child labor in Central America, and in what sectors is child labor most common? Noortje Denkers: According to global estimates on child labor from 2012, the broader regional figures show that Latin America and the Caribbean, including Central America, has shown the greatest progress in the fight against child labor […]

Ethnic Rohingya women and children gather to receive a meal at a temporary shelter, Bayeun, Aceh province, Indonesia, May 23, 2015 (AP photo by Tatan Syuflana).

Over the past month, as many as 8,000 migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh found themselves adrift at sea off the coasts of Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia without adequate water, shelter and food. They were primarily Rohingya refugees seeking asylum from persecution in Myanmar and impoverished Bangladeshis searching for economic opportunities. The plight of these men, women and children was the result of a short-lived but dramatic crackdown by Southeast Asian states in early May on the movement of refugees and migrants into their territory by smuggling networks. That resulted in what one observer from the International Organization for Migration described […]

Aerial photo showing China’s alleged reclamation of Mischief Reef in the Spratly Islands, South China Sea, May 11, 2015 (Ritchie B. Tongo, Pool Photo via AP).

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the South China Sea territorial disputes and the various claimant countries’ approaches to addressing them. China’s increased pace of island-building in the disputed South China Sea has angered many of its neighbors, but China insists that its land-reclamation activities are no cause for concern. In an email interview, Mira Rapp-Hooper, a fellow with the Asia Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and the director of its Asia Maritime Transparency Initiative, discussed China’s rights under the U.N. Convention on the Law of the Sea. WPR: What […]