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Australia, UK and UN dragged into information operations targeting West Papua
22 Dec 2020 | Ariel Bogle and Albert Zhang

On Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, a network of accounts is targeting the West Papua independence movement with memes and messages designed to shape international and domestic narratives about the separatist movement. The region has been …

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  • Indonesia
  • West Papua
  • influence operations
  • social media
China’s green gambit
22 Dec 2020 | Minxin Pei

Can US President-elect Joe Biden walk and chew gum at the same time? If walking is managing domestic pressures and chewing gum is pursuing a balanced foreign policy, the answer is far from clear. The …

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  • China
  • Joe Biden
  • United States
  • climate change
Australia must do more to prepare for a SolarWinds-style supply-chain attack
22 Dec 2020 | Tom Uren

The Australian government’s 2020 cyber security strategy is overwhelmingly focused on increasing the cybersecurity efforts of the defence organisation and law enforcement agencies. The mounting crisis in the United States from the hacking of software …

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  • Australia
  • Russia
  • cybersecurity
  • supply chain
Turkey forges a strategic future independent of Russia and the West
21 Dec 2020 | Connor Dilleen

Recent analysis of Turkey’s foreign policy tends to focus on several complementary narratives. Ankara is seen to be slowly moving away from its NATO partners and towards Russia. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears to …

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  • Erdogan
  • NATO
  • Russia
  • Turkey
From the bookshelf: ‘Chinese spies: from Chairman Mao to Xi Jinping’
21 Dec 2020 | Robert Wihtol

As China expands its reach around the globe, it is important to understand not only its foreign, economic and security policies but also its massive covert operations. Roger Faligot, an investigative journalist who specialises in …

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  • China
  • book review
  • espionage
  • spying
Brexit and the Brussels effect
21 Dec 2020 | Paul De Grauwe

In its negotiations with the European Union over post-Brexit trade relations, the British government has become entrenched in its demands for full sovereignty. In the future, it wants to determine all of the rules about …

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  • Brexit
  • EU
  • sovereignty
  • trade
Fifty years of Foreign Affairs: the scrooge effect
21 Dec 2020 | Graeme Dobell

Australia heads towards a dismal achievement: halving what it spends on diplomacy in only three decades. The Joe Biden rule (‘Show me your budget, and I will tell you what you value’) says Australia has …

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  • Australian government
  • DFAT
  • foreign policy
Policy, Guns and Money: 2020 in 30 minutes
18 Dec 2020 | ASPI staff

In the final episode of Policy, Guns and Money for 2020, The Strategist’s Brendan Nicholson, Anastasia Kapetas and Jack Norton share their thoughts on the key events and geopolitical developments of 2020, and the areas …

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  • Australia–China relations
  • bushfires
  • coronavirus
  • elections
What Australia’s intelligence community wants for Christmas: a secure private cloud
18 Dec 2020 | Michael Shoebridge

Christmas sometimes brings presents you don’t expect—this year, for me, an excitingly titled ‘Request for expressions of interest’ that appeared on AusTender is one of them. It’s about Australia’s peak intelligence agency, the Office of …

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  • Australian intelligence community
  • cloud computing
How LGBTQ+ activism is helping shape the fight for democratic freedoms in Hong Kong
18 Dec 2020 | Hal Crichton-Standish

While the Covid-19 pandemic has shifted attention away from Hong Kong’s fight for democratic freedoms, protests have made the city a focus of the Chinese government’s authority and stance on human rights. Recent events have …

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  • Hong Kong
  • equality
  • human rights
Opportunities for reforming the Australian government’s data centre procurement arrangements
18 Dec 2020 | Gill Savage and Anne Lyons

Data has been referred to as the ‘new oil’ or ‘new gold’, but it’s more than that. Most organisations can’t function without it. That applies equally to governments. Australian government data creation, collection, storage and …

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  • Australian government
  • data
  • outsourcing
  • procurement
The legacy of the Arab Spring
18 Dec 2020 | Shlomo Ben-Ami

When the struggling street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself alight in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, on 17 December 2010, he could not possibly have imagined how consequential his desperate protest would be. By sparking a wave …

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  • Arab Spring
  • Middle East
  • autocracy
  • democracy
Noise around Afghanistan inquiry risks distracting from need to prevent future war crimes
18 Dec 2020 | Neil James

To our national detriment, much of the public discussion on war crimes alleged to have been committed by Australian soldiers in Afghanistan is focusing on secondary, peripheral or irrelevant issues. Some public confusion has resulted …

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  • ADF
  • Afghanistan
  • SASR
  • special forces
Should Australia be buying border-security technology from China’s Nuctech?
17 Dec 2020 | Kelsey Munro and Lin Li

The subsidiary of a Chinese defence conglomerate nicknamed ‘the Huawei of airport security’ is increasingly dominant in border-control and security-screening technologies globally. Last month, Canada’s foreign affairs department backflipped on its plan to buy security …

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  • Australia
  • China
  • data
  • national security
Morocco’s rejuvenation of ties with Israel will be felt across the Muslim world
17 Dec 2020 | Amin Saikal

The Kingdom of Morocco has come full circle in its relations with Israel and its stance on the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence. It has revived its 1990s approach by recognising the Jewish state …

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  • Islam
  • Israel
  • Morocco
  • foreign policy
Australia must protect its Chinese-language media
17 Dec 2020 | Alex Joske, Lin Li, Alexandra Pascoe and Nathan Attrill

In an already acrimonious year for Australia–China relations, an ‘utterly outrageous’ tweet from a mid-level official at China’s foreign affairs ministry shows the extent to which the Chinese-language media environment is being shaped by the …

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  • Australia
  • CCP
  • WeChat
  • censorship
  • media
The risks in returning to the Iran nuclear agreement
17 Dec 2020 | Malcolm Davis

US President-elect Joe Biden has signalled that he won’t simply reverse Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal and stated that the United States would rejoin the agreement if Iran returned to …

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  • Iran
  • JCPOA
  • Joe Biden
  • nuclear weapons
Iron or? Getting energised about reducing Australia’s trade dependence on China
17 Dec 2020 | Michael Shoebridge

So, all Australian coal exports to China seem to have stopped. As usual, the Chinese government is keeping its actual decisions to itself and letting them leach out through state media and other sources. In this …

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  • Australia–China relations
  • iron ore
  • renewable energy
  • trade
Blinken’s call: opportunities abound to revitalise US engagement in the Indo-Pacific
16 Dec 2020 | Yan C. Bennett and John Garrick

US President-elect Joe Biden has identified Antony Blinken as his preferred secretary of state. Challenges and opportunities abound to refashion outgoing President Donald Trump’s foreign policies that aggressively rolled back Obama-era commitments. The ‘America first’ …

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  • Indo-Pacific
  • Quad
  • US foreign policy
  • multilateralism
The five-domains update
16 Dec 2020 | Tracy Beattie, Hal Crichton-Standish, Daria Impiombato, Alexandra Pascoe and Albert Zhang

Sea state The US Navy is planning to raise a 1st Fleet for the first time since 1973 in response to China’s naval build-up in the South China Sea. Under the plan, ships would likely …

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  • airpower
  • cyber espionage
  • naval capabilities
  • space
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