www.unuudur.com: The latest news of Mongolia in the World

One of the things I really like about the broad variety of disciplinary academic perspectives on Mongolia that I come in contact with (for example, a lot of the discussions at the recent Oxford Deserts Conference), is that I get to learn a lot in the process of this contact. The same can be said [...]

Mining policy is a good entry point to understand the overall policy-making processes of Mongolia. For one, mining has been one of the dominant economic sectors of Mongolia since the early 1900s.

Coinciding with the birth of New Prime Minister, Mr. Enkhsaikhan, former Prime Minister and one of the political heavyweights, made an interesting presentation at the research workshop on the “Constitutional Reform” – link. He was sharing his view on creating a bicameral legislature and a strong president. For making his points clear, he referred to [...]

Though considered a healthy—albeit developing—democracy, Mongolia has in recent years become dominated by the competing interests of its political and business factions, whose collective actions undermine the country’s democratization trends as well as complicate Ulaanbaatar’s foreign policy. For now, Mongolia resides in a stable and largely friendly neighbourhood, its democratic system is peaceful, and it [...]

The imminent release of Transparency International’s Corruption Perception Index (Dec 3) is as good an occasion to think/write about corruption in Mongolia as any.

Mongolia has always been evaluated as “free” by the Freedom House Freedom in the World report.

Mongolia is continuing its positive run in world indices and rankings with the release of the WorldBank’s “Ease of Doing Business” ranking, moving from 88 to 76.

It’s been quite a year for Mongolia in that the rest of the world paid some attention to Mongolia, at least in punctuated bursts…

Some days ago, I considered whether we might take the share of the party vote achieved by the MPRP in tomorrow’s election as an indication of (a rise of) populism in Mongolian politics. Having had the opportunity to speak to a few supporters of the MPRP in the past several days of visiting campaign offices [...]

As Ivanhoe Mines/Robert Friedland is slowly pushed out of Mongolia, the commercial relationship between Canada and Mongolia is likely to shrink.

Jonathan Manthorpe is one of the most prominent voices on contemporary Asia in Vancouver as the long-time international affairs columnist for the Vancouver Sun. Today he wrote a story that portrays many of the current developments in a very – and in my mind – unduly negative way: “Miner’s Motherlode Mongolia Faces Instability Ahead of [...]

Mongolia has vast and largely untapped mineral deposits of copper, gold and coal, but until recently, has remained largely impoverished. With several big mining projects on the horizon, however, there is promise of an economic boom that will present the government with a very real challenge: how do you manage to successfully exploit these resources [...]

While I was completing my practicum with the Tourism Department at the Ministry of Nature, Environment and Tourism, I had the opportunity to meet with many of the major stakeholders in the industry. On several occasions, the relationship between the country’s rapidly expanding mining sector and the tourism sector came up in the conversation.

Mongolia’s democratic polity make it not only fascinating for research and especially comparative research, but make it a – sadly – unusual case in its general neighbourhood. For more than 20 years Mongolia has now been nominally democratic and many of the tell-tale indicators of democracy in action are in place: multiple well-established political parties, [...]

After the recent flurry of reporting (Economist I, Economist II, National Post, Globe & Mail, The Northern Miner, The Financial Times, The Australian, on the electionineering sparring match between some Mongolian MPs and, who?, Ivanhoe?, the current government? China? some writers (Peter Koven for the National Post, Brenda Mouw for the Globe & Mail) are [...]

Today, I published an Asia Pacific Memo that argued that no stable anti-mining coalition has coalesced in Mongolia to support or advance the recent petition asking the government to open negotiations with Oyu Tolgoi to increase the government ownership stake. Likewise, I don’t foresee a pro-mining party emerging any time soon.