Category: Analysis

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Tom Harper, Lecturer in International Relations, University of East London

As the 14th Dalai Lama celebrates his 90th birthday with thousands of Tibetan Buddhists, there’s already tension over how the next spiritual leader will be selected. Controversially, the Chinese government has suggested it wants more power over who is chosen.

Traditionally, Tibetan leaders and aides seek a young boy who is seen as the chosen reincarnation of the Dalai Lama. It is possible that after they do this, this time Beijing will try to appoint a rival figure.

However, the current Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in India, insists that the process of succession will be led by the Swiss-based Gaden Phodrang Trust, which manages his affairs. He said no one else had authority “to interfere in this matter” and that statement is being seen as a strong signal to China.

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Throughout the 20th century, Tibetans struggled to create an independent state, as their homeland was fought over by Russia, the UK and China. In 1951, Tibetan leaders signed a treaty with China allowing a Chinese military presence on their land.

China established the Tibetan Autonomous Region in 1965, in name this means that Tibet is an autonomous region within China, but in effect it is tightly controlled. Tibet has a government in exile, based in India, that still wants Tibet to become an independent state.

This is a continuing source of tension between the two countries. India also claims part of Tibet as its own territory.

Beijing sees having more power over the selection of the Dalai Lama as an opportunity to stamp more authority on Tibet. Tibet’s strategic position and its resources are extremely valuable to China, and play a part in Beijing’s wider plans for regional dominance, and in its aim of pushing back against India, its powerful rival in south Asia.

Tibet provides China with a naturally defensive border with the rest of southern Asia, with its mountainous terrain providing a buffer against India. The brief Sino-Indian war of 1962 when the two countries battled for control of the region, still has implications for India and China today, where they continue to dispute border lands.

As with many powerful nations, China has always been concerned about threats, or rival power bases, within its neighbourhood. This is similar to how the US has used the Monroe Doctrine to ensure its dominance over Latin America, and how Russia seeks to maintain its influence over former Soviet states.

Beijing views western criticism of its control of Tibet as interference in its sphere of influence.

Read more:
India and Pakistan tension escalates with suspension of historic water treaty

Another source of contention is that Beijing traditionally views boundaries such as the McMahon line defining the China-India border as lacking legitimacy, a border drawn up when China was at its weakest in the 19th century. Known in China as the “century of humiliation”, this was characterised by a series of unequal treaties, which saw the loss of territory to stronger European powers.

This continues to a source of political tensions in China’s border regions including Tibet. This is a controversial part of China’s historical memory and continues to influence its ongoing relationship with the west.

Demand for natural resources

Tibet’s importance to Beijing also comes from its vast water resources. Access to more water is seen as increasingly important for China’s wider push towards self-sufficiency which has become imperative in the face of climate change. This also provides China with a significant geopolitical tool.

For instance, the Mekong River rises in Tibet and flows through China and along the borders of Myanamar and Laos and onward into Thailand and Cambodia. It is the third longest river in Asia, and is crucial for many of the economies of south-east Asia. It is estimated to sustain 60 million people.

China’s attempts to control water supplies, particularly through the building of huge dams in Tibet, has added to regional tensions. Around 50% of the flow to the Mekong was cut off for part of 2021, after a Chinese mega dam was built. This caused a lot of resentment from other countries which depended on the water.

Moves by other nations to control access to regional water supplies in recent years show how water is now becoming a negotiating tool. India attempted to cut off Pakistan’s water supply in 2025 as part of the conflict between the two. Control of Tibet allows China to pursue a similar strategy, which grants Beijing leverage in its dealings with New Delhi, and other governments.

Another natural resource is also a vital part of China’s planning. Tibet’s significant lithium deposits are crucial for Chinese supply chains, particularly for their use in the electric vehicle industry. Beijing is attempting to reduce its reliance on western firms and supplies, in the face of the present trade tensions between the US and China, and Donald Trump’s tariffs on Chinese goods.

Tibet’s value to China is a reflection of wider changes in a world where water is increasingly playing an important role in geopolitics. With its valuable natural resources, China’s desire to control Tibet is not likely to decrease.

Tom Harper does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. China’s interest in the next Dalai Lama is also about control of Tibet’s water supply – https://theconversation.com/chinas-interest-in-the-next-dalai-lama-is-also-about-control-of-tibets-water-supply-255843

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mollie O’Hanlon, PhD Candidate, Exercise Physiology, Nottingham Trent University

England footballer Lucy Bronze recently said in an interview that “cycle syncing” gives her an edge on the pitch. This practice involves aligning your training schedule to the different phases of your menstrual cycle.

Cycle syncing has become increasingly popular in recent years – especially among athletes who are looking to get an edge over the competition. Even Chelsea women’s football team have put this new approach to use, tailoring training schedules according to each player’s menstrual cycle.

For the average person, tailoring your workouts to your menstrual cycle is probably not going to have much of an impact. But for a professional athlete such as Bronze, cycle syncing could be a gamechanging strategy in shaping her elite performance.

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The menstrual cycle begins and ends with menstruation (a period). While the length of the menstrual cycle varies for each person, it’s usually around 28 days.

The menstrual cycle is underpinned by fluctuations in levels of the female sex hormones oestrogen and progesterone. This is why the cycle is divided into three key phases: early follicular, late follicular and the luteal phase.

The early follicular phase usually lasts around seven days and begins with the start of your period. This is when hormone levels are at their lowest.

The late follicular phase follows on from the first seven days, and is where ovulation happens – usually around day 14 of the cycle, though this will depend on cycle length. Ovulation is when the egg is released and you’re at your most fertile.

After that comes the luteal phase (lasting around 12-14 days), when progesterone peaks to prepare the body for pregnancy. If pregnancy doesn’t happen, hormones drop and the cycle begins again.

It’s no secret that mood and energy levels can shift – sometimes significantly – throughout the menstrual cycle. This is why some female athletes have begun using cycle syncing. By tailoring training schedules to match hormonal fluctuations, women are gaining a deeper understanding of their bodies and the symptoms they experience throughout each phase – empowering them to train smarter, not harder.

Bronze said the strategy has transformed her performance, saying that during certain phases of her cycle she feels “physically capable of more and can train harder”.

Despite these testimonials, scientists are yet to reach a definitive conclusion on how the menstrual cycle affects athletic performance.

So far, there’s some suggestion that there may be a slight dip in performance (specifically to strength and endurance) during the early follicular phase. However, these effects are minimal – and highly dependent on the person. It’s also not entirely clear what mechanisms underpin these small performance dips that some women experienced.

Other research suggests that certain aspects of the neuromuscular system (the network of nerves and muscles that make movement possible) – specifically how our muscles generate force – is altered during the luteal phase. Research has also found that certain muscles may fatigue less quickly during this phase as well.

This implies that during the luteal phase, there may be changes in signals from the brain and spinal cord to the skeletal muscles. However, no changes in the neuromuscular function have been observed.

Part of the reason it’s so difficult for researchers to gather enough evidence to draw firm conclusions on the menstrual cycle’s potential effects on athletic performance is because of the huge variability in menstrual cycle characteristics, which makes it difficult to study. Phase length, hormone levels and symptoms can differ widely between women – and even from cycle to cycle.

The small effects seen in these studies will have little effect on how most of us train or exercise. But for an elite athlete, these minuscule differences could have an effect on their training and competition, which may be why so many are willing to give the practice a try.

So while it isn’t entirely clear how much influence certain menstrual cycle phases have on performance, how you feel during different phases could certainly affect your ability to train at your best.

Around 77% of female athletes experience negative symptoms in the days leading up to and during menstruation. Fatigue, feeling less motivated and even experiencing digestive issues such as bloating and nausea, could all affect your ability to train at your best.

Trying cycle syncing

If you’re still interested in giving cycle syncing a try to see if it has any effect for you, the best place to start is by tracking your menstrual cycle. This will help you understand your body, how you feel in each phase of your cycle and what effect certain symptoms have on your training.

It’s recommended you track your cycle for at least three months before making any changes to your training to establish a baseline and spot trends over time.

For example, if you notice you often feel fatigued when training in your luteal phase, it may help to focus on ensuring you fuel well with carbohydrates before and during workouts. Or on days where you feel more energetic and motivated to train, you might be able to push yourself a bit harder in your workouts.

Whether you’re playing for England in the Euros or simply working towards your own fitness goals, understanding your cycle can help you train smarter, manage your symptoms better and stay consistent with your training.

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Lioness Lucy Bronze uses ‘cycle syncing’ to get an edge on her competition — here’s how the practise works – https://theconversation.com/lioness-lucy-bronze-uses-cycle-syncing-to-get-an-edge-on-her-competition-heres-how-the-practise-works-260153

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Aybars Tuncdogan, Reader in Digital Innovation and Information Security, King’s College London

The cyber-attack on Marks & Spencer will lead to an estimated £300 million hit to the company’s profits this year. It now aims to have online shopping at the store back to normal by August, more than three months after IT systems were compromised.

Fans of M&S clothing and food will be relieved after all of the uncertainty. But that level of uncertainty, as well as the huge cost, is surely a sign that big retailers, which millions of people rely on, need to change how they think about – and invest in – cybersecurity.

It has to be an absolute priority. After all, few marketing strategies or HR initiatives can save a company £300 million in just six weeks. But perhaps a more sophisticated cybersecurity department could have done just that.

To be fair, M&S faced a relatively rare, high-impact ordeal. Most cyber-attacks of this nature don’t affect customers so directly, and much of the recovery typically happens behind the scenes.

But M&S shoppers saw online orders collapse, contactless payments fail and refunds, gift cards and loyalty points not functioning. Disruption in stock-management and warehousing led to empty shelves and food waste.

On June 27, M&S issued a public apology and a £5 digital gift card to affected customers. But research suggests that the most important element of keeping customers onside is the quality of the recovery process, and whether normal service is eventually resumed.

To get back to normal service, it is possible that a ransom was paid to the cyber attackers, but M&S has refused to confirm or deny this. (One survey found that many organisations hit by cyber attacks agreed to pay a ransom – and then suffered a subsequent breach, often from the very same culprits.)

But even when normal service returns, when hackers steal customer data, as they did with M&S, research suggests that this information is often reused by criminals in identity theft and phishing. A study even found that victims of data breaches are more likely to have mortgage applications denied.

From what we know about the breach at M&S, it seems that the cyber-attackers simply used a phishing technique to get the support desk of a third-party contractor to reset the password of an admin-level account. That said, although in this case the main vulnerability was human, the lesson to be learnt here is that sometimes just one vulnerability can shake the whole system to its core.

This is why business owners need to think of cybersecurity not just as a tedious and inconvenient IT issue, but as a core function of the business. Otherwise, as the M&S case illustrates, it is simply not possible for the rest of the corporate structure to operate.

Testing times

So cybersecurity targets must be incorporated into every department to ensure collective defence. And organisations also need to stress-test the different aspects of their systems.

That could be checking on human responses, but it should also include technology (like a vulnerability in the web server), physical barriers (a poorly secured server room door) and HR procedures (failure to revoke ex-employee access).

These lines of defence have to be stress-tested regularly and from multiple angles, rather than being considered an annual checkbox activity for compliance.

Scenario-based tests – essentially a cyber fire-drill — such as internal threat simulations and response exercises, can provide useful insights into an organisation’s readiness to detect, respond to and recover from cyber-attacks.

It’s also important that organisations learn to communicate clearly once a breach occurs. Research into responses to data breaches suggests that any backlash is sharper when the company seems to be trying to hide the breach, which may later be publicised by the criminals instead.

Consumers should also remember that they are not powerless. We may not be able to prevent a data breach, but all of us can help to stop attackers from infiltrating our online worlds by something as simple as not re-using the same passwords.

By remaining sceptical, we can prevent attackers from using the information they stole to phish us later. And by thinking carefully about what personal data we share with companies, we can reduce the impact of future breaches.

Aybars Tuncdogan does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. How M&S responds to its cyber-attack could have a serious impact on its future – and its customers – https://theconversation.com/how-mands-responds-to-its-cyber-attack-could-have-a-serious-impact-on-its-future-and-its-customers-260429

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Magnus Marsden, Professor of Social Anthropology, University of Sussex

The winter season of 2024-25 marked a resurgence of fur clothing – both faux and real – in fashion across Europe and North America. Shearling jackets and embroidered “Penny Lane coats” featured widely in reports on the latest fashion trends. Vintage fur coats are also back in vogue.

To many, the resurgence came as a surprise. The anti-fur movement, especially influential in the 1980s, continues to shape perceptions of fur. In the 2010s, cities including New York and Los Angeles banned the use of fur to make clothes. The UK meanwhile banned the farming of fur-bearing animals, and, alongside the EU, has committed itself to legislating against all fur imports.

Just last year the town of Worthing, in England, debated whether their mayor should wear ceremonial robes trimmed with fur or not. Despite these trends, many young people have embraced the renewed trend of wearing real fur.

Some clothes made from animal skins became popular during the counter-cultural movement of the 1960s, but historically, fur has mostly marked status, wealth and luxury. Today, many critics interpret fur’s return to fashion as a cultural expression of rightwing politics.

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Fur is prominent in the “boom boom” fashion trend, which emphasises excess and “male-coded values”. It has been described by fashion journalists as “over-the-top and unashamed about its own greed and lack of wokeness”.

Fur clothing is a reminder of the moral tensions between need and desire, and luxury and excess. In addition to being inter-generational, these debates are also about gender. For much of the 20th century, fur coats symbolised femininity, erotic power and class position in the west. But by the 1980s, advertising campaigns depicted women who wore fur as either stupid and unthinking or thinking and unspeakably cruel, leading many to jettison it.

Fur’s return to fashion has injected old debates with new significance. Some young people are willing to wear faux fur because it does not involve killing animals. But others argue that, because it is made from synthetic material, faux fur is actually more environmentally damaging and prefer to wear the real thing. They claim that wearing vintage fur is a form of “sustainable consumption” but are challenged by those who argue that this fashion trend ultimately justifies killing animals to make clothes.

The boom boom trend is said to embody a contemporary expression of 1980s “conspicuous consumerism”, but in an era of economic austerity the adoption of fur by young people suggests the clothes they wear identify their desires rather than their financial reality.

A global history of fur

Today, as in the 1980s, the perspectives, interests and experiences of non-Europeans are often unheard in debates around fur. A decline of fur-bearing animal populations in North America and Siberia from the early 19th century, led to a global expansion in fur farming.

Read more:
How central Asian Jews and Muslims worked together in London’s 20th-century fur and carpet trade

From the 1850s, for example, Central Asia supplied furs to Europe and North America. Local artisans cured the pelts of karakul lambs – a native breed – to yield a rich and glossy fur. In central and south Asia, men of high status wore karakul hats; in Europe and America, they were mostly used to make women’s coats.

After the Russian revolution of 1917, many nomadic and semi-nomadic pastoralists, who raised sheep and other animals, left central Asia and moved with their flocks to neighbouring Afghanistan. The trade in karakul fur grew in the country, and foreign currency reserves came to depend on lambskins sold at auctions in London and New York.

In the 1960s, sheepskin coats made in Afghanistan – known as “Afghans” – became popular in the west, being worn by stars including Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones. The 1969 British edition of Vogue featured an interview with an icon of “oriental chic”, the “beautiful, dashing, intelligent, adventurous” Afghan socialite, Safia Tarzi, who lived in Paris, and ran a boutique clothing shop in Kabul.

The Afghan coat enjoyed a resurgence in 2000 having been worn by the character Penny Lane (Kate Hudson) in the film Almost Famous.

Read more:
Friday essay: how ‘Afghan’ coats left Kabul for the fashion world and became a hippie must-have

In the 1980s, the anti-fur campaign contributed to a declining market for karakul. For decades, rumours of Central Asian shepherds extracting lambs from the wombs of sheep to ensure a steady yield of delicate pelts had circulated. Moral opposition to the practice was not confined to the west.

During my research on globally dispersed activists, intellectuals and merchants from Afghanistan, a man from Afghanistan, now based in London, told me that his father banned his family from wearing karakul hats because sheep and their lambs were treated cruelly.

In the 1990s, civil war destroyed much of the infrastructure of the karakul industry in Afghanistan, but a trickle of pelts reached auction houses located in Frankfurt, Copenhagen and Helsinki.

In the 2000s, international development organisations attempted to revive the trade, though sales never returned to anyway near the levels of the 1970s. By the 2010s, families in northern Afghanistan struggling economically opted to send sons to travel illegally to Turkey to find work as shepherds for commercially oriented Turkish farmers.

Promotional videos of fashion houses occasionally touch on the Penny Lane coat’s ties to Afghanistan, but media coverage of fur fashions rarely address its historical connections to central Asia.

Magnus Marsden received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council including for the research upon which this article is based.

– ref. From Kabul to the catwalk – the surprising global history behind fashion’s fur revival – https://theconversation.com/from-kabul-to-the-catwalk-the-surprising-global-history-behind-fashions-fur-revival-256382

Source: The Conversation – UK – By Mark Horowitz, Visiting Clinical Research Fellow in Psychiatry, UCL

A new review of antidepressant withdrawal effects – written by academics, many of whom have close ties to drug manufacturers – risks underestimating the potential harms to long-term antidepressant users by focusing on short-term, industry-funded studies.

There is growing recognition that stopping antidepressants – especially after long-term use – can cause severe and sometimes debilitating withdrawal symptoms, and it is now acknowledged by the UK government as a public health issue.

One of the main reasons this issue took decades to recognise after the release of modern antidepressants onto the market is because medical guidelines, such as those produced by Nice (England’s National Institute for Health and Care Excellence), had for many years declared withdrawal effects to be “brief and mild”.

This description was based on studies run by drug companies, where people had only taken the medication for eight to 12 weeks. As a result, when patients later showed up with severe, long-lasting symptoms, many doctors didn’t take them seriously because these experiences contradicted what the guidelines led them to expect.

Our recent research helps explain this mismatch. We found a clear link between how long someone takes antidepressants and how likely they are to experience withdrawal symptoms – and how severe these symptoms are.

We surveyed NHS patients and found that people who had used antidepressants for more than two years were ten times more likely to have withdrawal effects, five times more likely for those effects to be severe, and 18 times more likely for them to be long lasting compared with those who had taken the drugs for six months or less.

For patients who used antidepressants for less than six months, withdrawal symptoms were mostly mild and brief. Three-quarters reported no or mild symptoms, most of which lasted less than four weeks.

Only one in four of these patients was unable to stop when they wanted to. However, for long-term users (more than two years), two-thirds reported moderate or severe withdrawal effects, with one-quarter reporting severe withdrawal effects. Almost one-third of long-term users reported symptoms that lasted for more than three months. Four-fifths of these patients were unable to stop their antidepressants despite trying.

About 2 million people on antidepressants in England have been taking them for over five years, according to a BBC investigation. And in the US at least 25 million people have taken antidepressants for more than five years. What happens to people in eight-to-12-week studies is a far cry from what happens to millions of people when they stop.

Studying what happens to people after just eight to 12 weeks on antidepressants is like testing car safety by crashing a vehicle into a wall at 5km/h – ignoring the fact that real drivers are out on the roads doing 60km/h.

History repeating itself?

Against this backdrop, a review has just been published in Jama Psychiatry. Several of the senior authors declare payments from drug companies. In what looks like history repeating itself, the review draws on short-term trials – many funded by the pharmaceutical industry – that were similar to those used to shape early treatment guidelines. The authors conclude that antidepressants do not cause significant withdrawal effects.

Their main analysis is based on eleven trials that compared withdrawal symptoms in people who had stopped antidepressants with those who had continued them or stopped taking a placebo. Six of these trials had people on antidepressants for eight weeks, four for 12 weeks and just one for 26 weeks.

They reported a slightly higher number of withdrawal symptoms in people who had stopped antidepressants, which they say does not constitute a “clinically significant” withdrawal syndrome. They also suggest the symptoms could be explained by the “nocebo effect” – where negative expectations cause people to feel worse.

In our view, the results are likely to greatly underestimate the risk of withdrawal for the millions of people on these drugs for years. The review found no relationship between the duration of use of antidepressants and withdrawal symptoms, but there were too few long-term studies to test this association properly.

The review probably underestimates, in our view, short-term withdrawal effects too by assuming that the fact that people experience withdrawal-like symptoms when stopping a placebo or continuing an antidepressant cancels out withdrawal effects from antidepressants. But this is not a valid assumption.

We know that antidepressant withdrawal effects overlap with side-effects and with everyday symptoms, but this does not mean they are the same thing. People stopping a placebo report symptoms such as dizziness and headache, because these are common occurrences. However, as was shown in another recent review, symptoms following discontinuation of a placebo tend to be milder than those experienced when stopping antidepressants, which can be intense enough to require emergency care.

So deducting the rate of symptoms after stopping a placebo or continuing an antidepressant from antidepressant withdrawal symptoms is likely to underestimate the true extent of withdrawal.

The review also doesn’t include several well-designed drug company studies that found high rates of withdrawal symptoms. For example, an American study found that more than 60% of people who stopped antidepressants (after eleven months) experienced withdrawal symptoms.

The authors suggest that depression after stopping antidepressants is probably a return of the original condition, not withdrawal symptoms, because similar rates of depression were seen in people who stopped taking a placebo. But this conclusion is based on limited and unreliable data (that is, relying on participants in studies to report such events without prompting, rather than assessing them systematically) from just five studies.

We hope uncritical reporting of a review based on the sort of short-term studies that led to under-recognition of withdrawal effects in the first place, does not disrupt the growing acceptance of the problem and slow efforts by the health system to help potentially millions of people who may be severely affected.

The authors and publisher of the new review have been approached for comment.

Mark Horowitz is the author of the Maudsley Deprescribing Guidelines which outlines how to safely stop antidepressants, benzodiazepines, gabapentinoids and z-drugs, for which he receives royalties. He is co-applicant on the RELEASE and RELEASE+ trials in Australia funded by the NHMRC and MRFF examining hyperbolic tapering of antidepressants. He is co-founder and consultant to Outro Health, a digital clinic which helps people to safely stop no longer needed antidepressants in the US. He is a member of the Critical Psychiatry Network, an informal group of psychiatrists.

Joanna Moncrieff was a co-applicant on a study of antidepressant discontinuation funded by the UK’s National Institute for Health Research. She is co-applicant on the RELEASE and RELEASE+ trials in Australia funded by the NHMRC and MRFF examining hyperbolic tapering of antidepressants. She receives modest royalties for books about psychiatric drugs. She is co-chair person of the Critical Psychiatry Network, an informal group of psychiatrists.

– ref. Antidepressant withdrawal: new review downplays symptoms but misses the mark for long-term use – https://theconversation.com/antidepressant-withdrawal-new-review-downplays-symptoms-but-misses-the-mark-for-long-term-use-260708