Beyond the Indus

A conversation with British filmmaker Andy Ball.

[caption id="attachment_292640" align="alignright" width="250"] British filmmaker Andy Ball, the director of "The Clearing." (Photo Supplied)[/caption]

Andy Ball is a British documentary cinematographer and director with more than five years of experience in Cambodia, where he has focused on character-driven and investigative videos about human rights and environmental issues in Southeast Asia.

His latest work is "The Clearing," which premiered one year after five activists from the award-winning environmentalist group Mother Nature for plotting against the government, after they had sounded the alarm about river pollution and land reclamation projects.

Ball spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about The Clearing, which follows Chandaravuth, the group’s most outspoken member, and his colleagues in the months leading up to their incarceration as they continued on a collision course with Cambodia’s rulers.

The Mother Nature environmentalists refused to buckle under pressure, and the severity of their sentences – up to eight years behind bars – shocked many people in Cambodia.

Environmental activists, NGOs, and human rights groups have urged the government to release them, noting the Phnom Penh Appeal Court has indefinitely postponed the activists’ appeal of the conviction.

“These activists should never have been imprisoned. These young men and women pose no threat to the Cambodian state,” the rights group Licadho said in earlier this month.

Ball’s work has been published and broadcasted by Mongabay, BBC, CBS, New York Times, South China Morning Post, and Insider.

A conversation with EU parliamentarian Chloe Ridel.

Six months ago, the European Parliament’s Subcommittee on Human Rights charged Chloe Ridel, a French Member of the European Parliament, with preparing a report focusing on how the EU can address a dramatic rise in transnational repression.

That Draft Report on Addressing Transnational Repression of Human Rights Defenders is now being considered by the EU Parliament, which must decide how to overhaul a system that is failing to protect EU citizens from countries as far afield as Iran and China.

Ridel spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about the links between transnational repression,  international crime syndicates, and autocratic governments in Asia, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East, and what the EU needs to do to fight the scourge.

She says the EU has fallen behind nations like Australia and Canada in tackling transnational repression. It even lacks its own data base and relies on Freedom House to document repression that has included killings, abductions, torture, and the jailing of opposition politicians, rights activists, and journalists.

In February, Freedom House released that found a quarter of the world’s governments were using tactics of transnational repression. China topped the list of “physical and direct incidents” with 22 percent of recorded cases between 2014 and 2024.

Among the major problems are Interpol, which Ridel says is not fit for the purpose, given that red notices issued by authoritarian regimes are then used by Interpol agents to detain and return political dissidents to their countries of origin, and too often to a tragic fate.

Ridel became a Member of the EU Parliament for France’s Socialist Party in 2024. She has been spokesperson for the party since March 2023 and sits on the EU parliament’s subcommittee for human rights.

Prior to this, she was a French civil servant and a member of the Jean-Jaures Foundation in Paris. In 2020, she co-founded a think tank, the Rousseau Institute.

What led to the flare-up of the long-running dispute between the two Southeast Asian neighbors?

The Diplomat’s Asia Geopolitics podcast host Ankit Panda () is joined by Sebastian Strangio to discuss the recent fighting between Thailand and Cambodia.

Click the play button above to listen. If you’re an iOS or Mac user, you can also subscribe to The Diplomat’s Asia Geopolitics podcast ; if you use Windows or Android, you can subscribe , or .

If you like the podcast and have suggestions for content, please leave a review and rating on iTunes and TuneIn. You can contact the host, Ankit Panda, .

What comes next for Japan?

’s Asia Geopolitics podcast host Ankit Panda () is joined by Tobias Harris, author of the  Substack newsletter, to discuss recent developments in Japanese politics.

Click the play button above to listen. If you’re an iOS or Mac user, you can also subscribe to ’s Asia Geopolitics podcast ; if you use Windows or Android, you can subscribe , or .

If you like the podcast and have suggestions for content, please leave a review and rating on iTunes and TuneIn. You can contact the host, Ankit Panda, .

A conversation with veteran correspondent Ian Timberlake.

Ian Timberlake cut his teeth as a foreign correspondent in Timor-Leste where he initially worked as a stringer for Agence France-Presse (AFP). In the late 1990s, he witnessed the end of the Suharto regime in Indonesia and the atrocities that were inflicted in the former Portuguese colony amid the fight for independence.

Over the next three decades he spanned the globe, working with AFP from bases in Jakarta, Singapore, Hanoi, and Hong Kong and then further out in Khartoum, Riyadh, Washington, and finally Nicosia, from where he has just retired.

He is now back in Bangkok and takes an interest in white collar crime and money laundering. He does his best to keep up with the latest technological advances deployed by criminal syndicates and international law enforcement agencies alike.

Timberlake, a dual Canadian-Australian citizen, spoke with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about a career that began in 1986 on Ontario newspapers where he specialized in his great passion, crime reporting, and shared an award for investigative reporting.

That career included stints working on the decks of an aircraft carrier during the invasion of Iraq and a fact-checking desk while taking on assignments in conflicts zones like Sri Lanka and Afghanistan.

Throughout it all, he says, justice is rare but journalists must speak truth to power and continue to hold world leaders accountable for their actions, despite the relentless assaults and issues confronting the press.

Confronting the junta with words and the realities of a war they started.

Joe Freeman is an American writer and researcher who has worked across Southeast Asia for more than a decade, reporting from Thailand, Cambodia, the Philippines and in Myanmar during the mid-2010s when the country was experiencing a rare era of democracy.

It was then that he covered the defamation trial of poet Maung Saungkha, who would eventually fight on the frontlines of Myanmar’s civil war, after it erupted in 2021 when an elected government was ousted by the military.

Freeman was determined to find Saungkha and the result was the book "Frontline Poets: The Literary Rebels Taking on Myanmar's Military," which includes a collection of gritty poems by five poets from all walks of life.

Intermixed with the poems are illustrations and photographs chronicling their lives from early writings to the dramatic upheavals that followed the – and how they responded to the events that are tearing Myanmar apart.

"Frontline Poets" was co-authored with Aung Naing Soe, a prominent Burmese filmmaker and journalist who has reported on Myanmar for several international news outlets, and features poetry published in original English translations for the first time.

Freeman also says "Frontline Poets" continues a grand tradition in Burmese poetry, inspired by the country's long history of uprisings and revolutions dating back more than a century, when poems were used as an expression of opposition to the British colonialists.

In this podcast, he talks with The Diplomat’s Luke Hunt about his latest work, published by River Books, and how "Frontline Poets" seeks to shine a light on that rich historical legacy.

How are Central Asian states navigating great power dynamics?

’s  podcast hosts Ankit Panda () and Katie Putz () discuss the recent China-Central Asia summit.

If you’re an iOS or Mac user, you can also subscribe to The Diplomat’s Asia Geopolitics podcast ; if you use Windows or Android, you can subscribe , or .

If you like the podcast and have suggestions for content, please leave a review and rating on iTunes and TuneIn. You can contact the host, Ankit Panda, .

Will Lee Jae-myung succeed in implementing a pragmatic foreign policy?

’s  podcast hosts Ankit Panda () and Katie Putz () discuss the geopolitical environment that South Korea's new government inherits.

If you’re an iOS or Mac user, you can also subscribe to The Diplomat’s Asia Geopolitics podcast ; if you use Windows or Android, you can subscribe , or .

If you like the podcast and have suggestions for content, please leave a review and rating on iTunes and TuneIn. You can contact the host, Ankit Panda, .