All posts by Michael Charney

A native of Flint, Michigan, Michael Charney is a full professor at SOAS, the University of London, in the Centre for International Studies and Diplomacy (School of Interdisciplinary Studies) and the School of History, Religions, and Philosophies, where he teaches global security, strategic studies, and Asian military history. He received his PhD from the University of Michigan in 1999 on the subject of the history of the emergence of religious communalism in Rakhine and has published a number of books on military history in Southeast Asia and the political and intellectual history of Myanmar. He was a postdoctoral research fellow at the Centre for Advanced Studies at the (National University of Singapore) where he researched religion and migration, was a project professor at the Institute for Advanced Studies of Asia at the University of Tokyo, and has spent most of the last two decades at SOAS, where he was elected to the Board of Trustees in 2016. He is a regular commentator in the media on events in Myanmar.

Civilization has Trumped the State Paradigm

There are powerful people pushing for the intertwining of Russian, Israeli, and US interests. These shadowy interests clearly reflect … civilizational thinking about global politics.

/ December 8, 2025

American Liberalism’s Event Horizon?

Can a new party be created in time to save American liberalism that can oppose the very clear bond between the causes of white, Christian, racio-nationalism and the extremist Zionism of Benjamin Netanyahu?

/ September 30, 2025

Yes, I am a Globalist

We live in a world that is so interdependent that the World Community cannot afford to have large parts, like the United States, turn rogue and attempt to call all the shots, without cooperating and paying their share.

/ July 30, 2025

Do Trump’s Policies Amount to the “Ethnic Cleansing” of America?

We are now only four months into the new administration, but in this short time, it has become clear that Trump’s America is not just a cultural war, but a demographic one as well.

/ May 12, 2025

Fort Apache, Washington D.C.: Race at the Centre of the Effort to Reassert a White America

While the US government domestically circles the wagons, mobilises the cavalry, and urges settlers to take refuge within a metaphorical Fort Apache 2025, it does so internationally as well.

/ May 6, 2025

All Hail Ceasars: Republican democracies die easily

It is a sign of disease when our Congressmen and Senators attempt to honor a president as a Caesar and abandon their duty to defend the Constitution. We do not have many great things to say about the Caesars of (global) human history.

/ March 19, 2025

The “White Settler” State Mentality Destroying the World for Everyone

The idea that the white settler can do anything with what is found on "their" land has today resulted in planetary climatic consequences. There must be a fundamental re-evaluation of core American values to dismantle the systematic grip of white settlerism in the United States.

/ February 11, 2025

Gulf of Mexico to Gulf of America? Why History Should Count

The Trump Administration changing the Gulf’s indigenous name demonstrates the continuing control over political institutions by the descendants of European settler populations – illegal migrants, in today’s western parlance – who continue to seek to erase the actual crimes of their Euro-supremacist ancestors’ genocidal theft of that extra-European land – and sea.

/ January 24, 2025

As Burma Studies in Japan becomes politicised, can the Rohingya hope for better from the rapidly developing Chinese Academy?

Burma Studies in many countries has always been the gloved hand of state intelligence. And Burma Studies in Japan is no exception.

/ October 29, 2024

For Muslims in the Global South, American hostility began in 1979

if anyone wonders why America has backed off so far (and beyond) from responding to humanitarian catastrophes presented as security operations, against the Tamils in Sri Lanka, the Rohingya in Myanmar, and the Palestinians in Gaza, then they do not understand the structure of the contemporary world, as it has grown up since 1979.

/ May 24, 2024