The dispute over the ownership of Diego Garcia and the rest of the Chagos Archipelago involves a complex array of legal, human rights, security and geopolitical issues. The United Kingdom wants to retain the islands it calls the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). Mauritius wants to see the
Book review: Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future (Hachette, 2020)
The Ministry for the Future is a novel set in the near future which describes the disastrous consequences of a warming planet and the steps humanity takes to mitigate them. It is ultimately an optimistic story about
2020 had a whole lot up its sleeve. When the year started, there was one big, burning issue in Australia: the bushfires ripping through swaths of countryside, torching towns and choking cities with smoke.
Alex Oliver, Lowy’s Director of Research, had a close encounter during what was supposed to
An end-of-year series as the Lowy Institute staff and Interpreter contributors offer their favourite books, articles, films or TV programs this year. Look back on more recommendations and reflections.
Okay, so 2020 wasn’t exactly a favourite year. I did learn how to bake a nice sourdough during
An end-of-year series as the Lowy Institute staff and Interpreter contributors offer their favourite books, articles, films or TV programs this year. Look back on the series and watch for more recommendations and reflections in the days ahead.
Love on the Spectrum is a documentary series
An end-of-year series as the Lowy Institute staff and Interpreter contributors offer their favourite books, articles, films or TV programs this year. Look back on the series and watch for more recommendations and reflections in the days ahead.
Long before a certain New York real estate developer
An end-of-year series as the Lowy Institute staff and Interpreter contributors offer their favourite books, articles, films or TV programs this year. Look back on the series and watch for more recommendations and reflections in the days ahead.
Like the best spy novels, Lauren Wilkinson’s
An end-of-year series as the Lowy Institute staff and Interpreter contributors offer their favourite books, articles, films or TV programs this year. Look back on the series and watch for more recommendations and reflections in the days ahead.
The world has observed the United States under the
The verdict of John le Carré (real name David Cornwall) on the outcome of the Cold War was: “The right side lost, but the wrong side won”.
This ambiguous conclusion is attributed to le Carré’s favourite character, George Smiley, in his novel The Secret Pilgrim, but it is an unmistakable
An end-of-year series as the Lowy Institute staff and Interpreter contributors offer their favourite books, articles, films or TV programs this year. Look back on the series and watch for more recommendations and reflections in the days ahead.
A few years ago on a flight from New Delhi to Rome, I
An end-of-year series as the Lowy Institute staff and Interpreter contributors offer their favourite books, articles, films or TV programs this year. Look back on the series and watch for more recommendations and reflections in the days ahead.
A year like no other. From global pandemics to climate
“Neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily,” said the 17th-century French aphorist François de La Rochefoucauld. He might have added, had it existed at the time, the United States of America.
No country, with the possible exception of China, has played as large a role as a symbol
An end-of-year series as the Lowy Institute staff and Interpreter contributors offer their favourite books, articles, films or TV programs this year. Watch for more recommendations and reflections in the days ahead.
There are few occasions in life when my “2020 books read” spreadsheet
An end-of-year series as the Lowy Institute staff and Interpreter contributors offer their favourite books, articles, films or TV programs this year. Watch for more recommendations and reflections in the days ahead.
It seems like an eternity ago now, but it was only eight months ago that Tiger
Many women fight wars every single day within their homes. This is not the violence of wars that features on the nightly news, but something far more insidious – a hidden conflict that is far more costly. Domestic violence is rampant, within both developed and developing countries, yet is a
In November, the French Senate unanimously voted to return a small selection of pre-colonial African artefacts to Benin and Senegal that were looted by colonial forces. Benin will receive 26 artefacts from the former Kingdom of Dahomey, while Senegal will receive a sword and scabbard belonging to a
We debated whether “favourites” was really the right word for 2020. But given it’s been a tumultuous year, we figured a little consistency wouldn’t hurt for our end-of-year series as the Lowy Institute staff and Interpreter contributors again offer their favourite books, articles, films
Current perceptions of renewables have been driven by the need to address climate change, a narrow view that overlooks benefits such as reducing our reliance on imported energy and creating thousands of high-tech jobs. As countries grapple with the outwardly ineffective efforts to pass climate
While the world’s attention in recent weeks has been firmly fixed on the United States’ presidential race, Russia under Vladimir Putin has made a number of surprising moves. One was a swift deployment of its peacekeepers to the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region, putting a stop for now to a bloody
2020 could be defined as a year of global crises – health, political, environmental and economic. The G20 is caught among all four, and how the forum responds raises questions about whether it is facing its own existential crisis.
With a chaotic US election and presidential transition as well as
A man who has earned a reputation for compromise and dealmaking over his half-century in Washington, Joe Biden has also won the presidency by presenting himself as a national unifier, while simultaneously putting forward a policy agenda that some consider to be the most progressive in American
In the last five years, the French city of Nice has been targeted twice by jihadist terrorism. Both times the perpetrators were young men from Tunisia, the smallest country in North Africa, situated between Algeria and Libya.
The first incident came on Bastille Day in 2016, when an attacker
At a speech before the UN General Assembly on 22 September, China’s President Xi Jinping made the world’s single largest climate commitment to date by stating that China would become carbon neutral by 2060. The significance of this statement for the global fight against climate change cannot be
Book Review: Peter Edwards, Law, Politics and Intelligence: A Life of Robert Hope (UNSW Press, 2020)
It is the frustrating lot of members of the intelligence community in a liberal democracy to suffer the alarums raised by habitual conspiracy theorists, the slings and arrows of outrageous
After sexual assault allegations calling out more than 100 men, including prominent members of Iranian society, first appeared on social media in August, women in Iran are having their own #MeToo moment, and the movement is gaining publicity. The latest high-profile figure to be accused of sexual
Twenty years ago, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 1325, a landmark to formally recognised the disproportionate impact of conflict on women and girls. Yet this year, there is no new resolution to mark the anniversary of what became the Women, Peace and
Book review: Thomas Orlik China: The Bubble that Never Pops (Oxford University Press, 2020)
Way back in 2001, Gordon Chang wrote a book entitled The Coming Collapse of China. Western analysts of China have been predicting a crisis ever since. Among the many concerns have been China’s massive
Book Review: Geoff Raby, China’s Grand Strategy and Australia’s Future in the New Global Order (Melbourne University Press, 2020)
Since the middle of the 19th century, four periods in Australian history have been marked by intense antagonism towards China: the gold rushes of the 1850s; the
The election of Wavel Ramkalawan as President of Seychelles breaks the 43-year stranglehold of the party of former dictator France-Albert René. For Australia and the West, the election result removes many old assumptions about the central Indian Ocean and presents some new risks and opportunities
South Africa may be facing an unholy mix of insurgency, radicalism and major power competition in the Western Indian Ocean.
Much attention is given to the rivalry between major naval powers operating in the Indian Ocean. This has included the dense concentration of international military forces in
While the Pacific has pulled off a miracle by remaining largely Covid-19–free, the economic devastation in the pandemic’s wake is wreaking havoc across the region. Economies are in freefall, thousands of already scarce formal sector jobs are being lost, and families are being displaced and
The Chinese government has officially encouraged women to have equal roles in social, economic and political life. Still, traditional culture and practice continue to subject women to lower social status inside families (especially in rural areas), in the media, and in employment, including in the
The Mekong, Southeast Asia’s most important river, has for millennia supported the rise and fall of empires and is responsible for the livelihood of over 65 million people who live directly on its riverbanks, relying on the river for food, accommodation and employment. The river
With an estimated 75 billion cubic metres (BCM) of water annually, Afghanistan is, on paper, a self-sufficient water country. However, the country also “has one of the lowest levels of water storage capacity in the world”. Most of the water from its major river basins such as the Amu,
Few people would recognise respiratory failure as a critical threat to their health without also placing Covid-19 – an amplifier of respiratory failure – in the same category. Yet, this is essentially the way many Australians view climate change and its impacts, according to the 2020 Lowy
Book review: Philip H. Gordon, Losing the Long Game: The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East (St. Martin’s Press 2020)
Philip H. Gordon, the White House Coordinator for the Middle East during the Barack Obama administration, and now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign
President Xi Jinping grabbed headlines last month with the announcement that China, the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, is aiming for carbon neutrality within 40 years. Xi’s speech, to the UN General Assembly, gave no details about how this would be achieved, beyond a
In 2009 China was blamed for destroying the Copenhagen conference on climate change, leaving the world with no successor to the Kyoto Protocol. In 2015, along with France and the United States, its leadership helped make the Paris Agreement a reality. And in 2020, China is the first major greenhouse
Book review: Mark Moran and Jodie Curth-Bibb (eds) Too Close to Ignore (Melbourne University Press, 2020)
Borders have been in the news in Australia, with the novel if frustrating experience of interstate pandemic restrictions leaving residents unable to cross previously free borders to access
The explosion and fire on board a supertanker off Sri Lanka this month, following closely on last month’s disastrous oil spill in Mauritius, serve as a reminder that environmental security threats are front and centre of security concerns among many Indian Ocean states. This issue will become only
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed and impotent in the face of the manifold problems that currently confront the world. Pandemics, persistent poverty, great power rivalry, not to mention the spectre of runaway climate change (which will undoubtedly make all of the above worse and possibly trigger the
Turkey’s reimagining of the Pax Ottomana has not made many friends in the region, and it currently finds itself at odds with Egypt, UAE and Greece to name a few. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has made very clear his ambition that Turkey will be a leader in the Mediterranean and in
Book review: Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism (Doubleday 2020)
If democracy is the guiding light of a civilised world, wherefore that world if the light is flickering? This is the premise of Anne Applebaum’s Twilight of Democracy. And as the title
Book review: Vincent Bevins, The Jakarta Method: Washington’s anti-communist crusade and the mass murder program that shaped our world (Hachette, 2020)
The world is awash with reports of alleged Chinese interference and influence operations in diverse countries and international organisations.&
Book review: Patrick Porter, The False Promise of Liberal Order: Nostalgia, Delusion and the Rise of Trump (Polity Press, 2020)
A familiar response to the growing global disorder has been to lament the demise of the liberal or “rules–based” international order and to call for its restoration
Mauritius is the legitimate sovereign over the Chagos Archipelago, including the island of Diego Garcia, which hosts an important US military base in the Indo-Pacific region. The government of Mauritius has publicly announced its willingness to enter into an agreement that would preserve the base,
The liberal order faces its greatest crisis since the end of the Cold War. Liberalism is in retreat around the world. The United States is led by a president whose America-first realpolitik contradicts the very idea of rules-based governance. Europe has seen the rise of “illiberal democracies”.