In a small, dimly lit room at the Burmese immigration office, on the border of northern Thailand and Burma, there is a large, luminous portrait of Gen. Than Shwe, festooned with medals and ribbons. His steely gaze surveys the hundreds of foreign tourists who cross the Thai-Burma border bridge to visit the ramshackle, open-air market...

It began innocently enough, like any other workshop—a large university auditorium; speakers from the United Nations, foreign business consortia, and local government; and an obscure member of the Thai royal family ringing an auspicious gong. However, the hundreds of delegates seated in the auditorium were not savvy investors or scientists but raw-boned, palm-blistered Thai rice...

In 1958, when the first barbed-wire barricades were rolled out by the British colonial government across Ledra Street in the capital of Cyprus, it seemed inevitable that the seeds of division would yield a bitter harvest of intercommunal conflicts, regional tensions, and, finally, the partition of the whole island. Where minarets and churches once jostled...

Somewhere in the Arabian Desert, a Rolls Royce Silver Spirit rockets along the highway under a smuggler’s moon.  The driver is a Saville Row bespoke-suited expatriate.  By day, he teaches English.  By night, he transports illegal consignments of alcohol from Bahrain to Riyadh through sandstorms of biblical dimensions and past curious Bedouin tribesmen.  Above, a...