The beat Organised crime set to thrive in Latin America in 2020 InSight Crime has predicted that political instability, diminishing regional and international cooperation, and the increasingly transnational and interconnected nature of criminal syndicates will …
Despite the substantial transformation in Indonesia’s political system, there’s more continuity than change in Indonesia’s security outlook and strategic culture. Since its early years, Indonesia has developed strategic doctrines that include the concept of a …
The 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Red Army is an occasion marked by angst as well as sadness. Anti-Semitism is back with a vengeance around the world, as if the lessons …
It is disappointing that the Brits are doing the wrong thing on 5G, having not exhausted other possibilities. Instead they have doubled down on a flawed and outdated cybersecurity model to convince themselves that they …
Over the past year, long-suppressed strategic debates re-emerged in South Korea: accepting a less-involved United States, strengthening relations with China, securing an independent nuclear weapons capacity, or combining all of these and steering a path …
The outbreak of a new coronavirus that began in the Chinese city of Wuhan has already infected over 4,000 people—mostly in China, but also in several other countries, from Thailand to France to the United …
Four years have now passed since the release of the 2016 defence white paper, the most recent comprehensive review of Australia’s defence policy and capability. The main contours of that document were set down as …
The link between climate change and human security has been on the global security radar for decades. Researchers have long understood how and why the earth’s climate is changing and what these changes mean for …
A month on from my earlier post on bringing the Australian Defence Force into the global warming fight, a lot has changed. Responding to the national bushfire catastrophe, the government has deployed more than 6,000 …
Looming over this year’s commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem, were two contradictory impulses that lay behind the creation of the Jewish state: cosmopolitanism and nationalism. A …
Australia had a part in East Timor’s march to tragedy and a key role in its salvation. Cruel ironies and strange mirror effects mark Australia’s performance in the lead-up to Indonesia’s invasion, in 1974–75, and …
It’s that time again. Coinciding with the biggest musical countdown of the year is the biggest countdown of a defence and strategy site’s most popular articles of 2019. This year saw a couple of perennial …
‘Great nations do not fight endless wars’, US President Donald Trump declared in his 2019 State of the Union speech. He had a point: military entanglements in the Middle East have contributed to the relative …
Speaking at the Shangri-La Dialogue in May 2019, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong called on China and the United States to reach a strategic accommodation amid their festering dispute over trade, technology and other …
On 24 October, the world will mark the 75th birthday of the United Nations and the liberal international order. Most agree that this framework—comprising the UN, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and other …
US President Donald Trump’s hope that the Korea question—particularly the part about North Korea’s nuclear capabilities—could be resolved by the sheer force of personality has been confirmed as a fantasy. The best that can be …
Laws and regulations covering outer space are mired in geopolitical gridlock and are failing to keep pace with burgeoning commercial use of space and new technologies. Dependency on space is increasing both in everyday civilian …
Since the mid-1970s, Australia’s defence strategy has revolved around two key principles. But as our strategic environment changes, those two guiding lights are becoming increasingly incompatible. We can decide to keep one or the other, …
Iran’s economy minister, Farhad Dejpasand, has called on the multilateral Financial Action Task Force (FATF) to discipline the US over its use of budget funds to finance the assassination of General Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad …
On 30 November 2019, with the death of Sir Michael Howard, we in the strategic studies community lost one of our outstanding leaders of the 20th century. Born into a well-connected stratum of British society …
