Singapore and Kuala Lumpur are about to enjoy their annual week of speechifying and Asian strategic star-gazing, driven by copious amounts of coffee and conversation. Perhaps only in Southeast Asia could two ‘unofficial’ back-to-back conferences …
A quick first read of the principal ‘strategic environment’ chapters of the new White Papers (Chapters 2, 3 and 6) gives a broad feel for the document as a whole. The overall tone of the …
This year will mark 25 years since then Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans delivered a landmark address (PDF) to an Australia–Indonesia business group in Bali, in which he first raised the importance of ‘building ballast’ into …
This is a shortened version of a longer paper presented to the Alliance 21 meeting in Washington. Abridgment by Kristy Bryden. The arrival of US Marines in Australia has started a national, regional and international debate that …
In my last post, I argued that critics of Indonesian military (TNI) reform are taking too narrow a view of its progress. For most critics, the primary yardstick for measuring the success of TNI’s reform agenda …