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At sea, safety is just as important as security

The extraordinary rescue of crew from a stricken South Korean freighter off the US coast this week might have taken place on the other side of the world, but it serves as a reminder that safety of life at sea is a challenge everywhere. Closer to home, the Indian Ocean Rim Association (IORA) has made

By Sam Bateman

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Kremlinology: What does Russia want? Rules Based Audio podcast out now

Episode 9 of the Lowy Institute’s new podcast, Rules Based Audio, is out today. In Kremlinology: What does Russia want? the dissident Russian journalist and academic Yevgenia Albats talks about how President Vladimir Putin has dominated Russian politics for two decades; and former

By Kelsey Munro

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The withering of Robert Mugabe, as told by Australia’s Prime Ministers

The way incessant talk of China’s rivalry with the United States dominates the present turbulent world, it’s hard to conceive of an earlier time when Australia’s prime ministers devoted hours upon hours to the fate of far-off Zimbabwe. But the death on Friday of African independence hero-

By Daniel Flitton

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Can Japan catch up in the economic scramble for Africa?

Recently, China entered the market as an exporter of used cars overseas. The Chinese Ministry of Commerce revealed the populous African nation of Nigeria as one of the destinations for 300 cars in the first batch of freight. The vehicles included brands such as Land Rover, Toyota, Hyundai,

By Anthony Maliki

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In Java, the water is running out

Indonesia’s dry season has never been easy. Dry winds blow from Australia and rainfall is almost nonexistent, which leads to major forest fires, choking air pollution, and searing heat, along with the energy-sapping effect the season has on residents. For many parts of Indonesia, one problem has

By Kate Walton

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The Kainaki II Declaration is a signal of Pacific strength

It was indeed an emotional moment when Pacific leaders and delegates were greeted by small children of Tuvalu – submerged in water surrounding a model of their sinking islands with their call to “Save Tuvalu, save the world”, upon their arrival to the 50th Pacific Islands Forum held this month

By Dame Meg Taylor

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Disinformation and democracy: Podcast out now

In May 2016, before Brexit and Trump, the right-wing populist Rodrigo Duterte was elected President of the Philippines amidst a co-ordinated disinformation and trolling campaign on social media. In a nation of 105 million where Facebook is embedded into everyday life, political

By Kelsey Munro

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Keep calm and fly on … unless someone stops me

Shame is a powerful emotion, but is it powerful enough to save the planet? Almost certainly not. But the question has assumed unexpected prominence as the sensitive Scandinavians and the schoolgirl activist Greta Thunburg spearhead a campaign to encourage us to fly less, simply because it’s the

By Mark Beeson

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Hong Kong Protest City: Podcast out now

In the latest episode of the Lowy Institute’s new half-hour podcast, Rules Based Audio, I’m talking to Lowy Institute Research Fellow Ben Bland and Hong Kong-based Financial Times journalist Primrose Riordan about the roots of the ongoing political unrest in the city, and where it

By Kelsey Munro

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Climate change is a national security issue

If only a minister of the Morrison government would be as forthright in identifying climate change as a massive destabilising force in Australia’s region as the Chief of the Defence Force Angus Campbell has been. In a private speech in Bowral in June, General Campbell is reported to have sounded

By Pat Conroy

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Australia’s great and powerful friends: Podcast out now

In the latest episode of the Lowy Institute’s new half-hour podcast, Rules Based Audio, I am talking to Lowy Institute Executive Director Michael Fullilove about the state of play between Canberra, Washington and London. Allies with close historical and political ties

By Kelsey Munro

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Congo’s Ebola outbreak: sounding a global alarm

As the one year anniversary of the ongoing Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province draws near, the World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has sounded the global alarm about this most recent outbreak of the deadly virus. Over 2500 cases and

By Jesse Schnall

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Xi Jinping: much more than just one man

Book Review: Xi Jinping: The Backlash by Richard McGregor (Penguin, Lowy Institute, 2019) Richard McGregor has written a dazzling account of the first six years of the Xi Jinping era and what he sees as the “backlash” to Xi’s increasing authoritarianism domestically and assertive foreign and

By Geoff Raby

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Richard McGregor on the backlash against Xi Jinping - podcast out now

Episode 5 of the Lowy Institute’s new podcast, Rules Based Audio, is out today. In Xi Jinping - The Backlash, Lowy Senior Fellow Richard McGregor discusses his new book on the Chinese leader, which studies the domestic and international reaction to Xi’s centralisation of

By Kelsey Munro

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India’s latest crisis: 600 million people struggle with drought

The agonising and often exhausting wait for the monsoon has long inspired India’s writers and poets. But it’s the country’s farmers who know all too well the impact a delayed or indeed a failed monsoon can have on millions of lives. The monsoon is India’s life-giver, its rebirth and its

By Edmond Roy

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Unpacking the Asia Power Index – Podcast out today

This week on the Rules Based Audio podcast: power in Asia. Who’s got it, who’s losing it, and who’s using what they’ve got in the smartest way? The world’s geopolitical centre of gravity is shifting to Asia; and tensions between the region's great powers threaten to shape this

By Kelsey Munro

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Book review: Hugh White’s How to Defend Australia

Book Review: How to Defend Australia, by Hugh White (La Trobe University Press, 2019) Defence commentator Hugh White never shouts from the rooftops, and his new book How to Defend Australia is written in the same measured tone that has long driven his more strident critics crazy. Yet if White

By Sam Roggeveen

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Are Australians more worried about climate change or climate policy?

The latest Lowy Institute poll indicates that Australians are increasingly concerned about climate change and its implications. Three figures are particularly telling. First, and perhaps most striking, Australians have identified climate change as the most critical threat to Australia’

By Matt McDonald

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Book review: The Great Successor

Book Review: The Great Successor: The Divinely Perfect Destiny of Brilliant Comrade Kim Jong-un, Sun of the 21st Century, by Anna Fifield (Hachette, 2019) Anna Fifield’s The Great Successor is a wonderful narrative, weaving together Kim Jong-un’s childhood (and adulthood) basketball

By Nazanin Zadeh-Cummings

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Episode 3 of Rules Based Audio, “The Propaganda Department”, out now

Episode 3 of Rules Based Audio, the new Lowy Institute podcast is out today. 'The Propaganda Department' is a story in two parts about media, censorship and politics in China; and my guests are Chris Buckley from the New York Times’ Beijing bureau, and James Griffiths from CNN Hong

By Kelsey Munro

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Public holiday: Queen’s Birthday weekend

Monday is a public holiday for the Queen’s Birthday long-weekend in (most of) Australia. Normal publishing will resume on Tuesday

By The Interpreter

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Episode 2 of Rules Based Audio, “The Terrorist’s Wife” out now

Episode 2 of the Lowy Institute’s brand new podcast, Rules Based Audio, is out today. In The Terrorist’s Wife – the role of women in jihad, Lowy Research Fellow Lydia Khalil discusses women who join Islamist extremist groups and lays out the risks involved if we continue to make gendered

By Kelsey Munro

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Book review: unruly waters shape South Asia’s history

Book Review: Unruly Waters: How Mountains, Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History, by Sunil Amrith (Penguin, 2018) As Sunil Amrith explains in this new book, South Asia is not the only Asian region with a water problem. The whole continent has issues. Asia is

By Ruth Gamble

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Rules Based Audio: The new Lowy Institute podcast

Today the Lowy Institute is launching a new half-hour podcast, Rules Based Audio. Each fortnight, I’ll be talking to experts and leading thinkers from Australia and around the world, going deep into the complex forces shaping global politics. In our first episode, out today, I discuss the future

By Kelsey Munro

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Belt and Road: colonialism with Chinese characteristics

Although China’s top-ranking diplomat Yang Jiechi has repeatedly assured the world that his country’s supreme foreign policy project, the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), “does not play little geopolitical games”, many governments believe this is exactly what it does. The second BRI

By Anthony Kleven

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Film review: On Her Shoulders

On Her Shoulders, a documentary film by Alexandria Bombach, follows young genocide survivor Nadia Murad in her global cause against sexual violence for which she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2018. Women and girls in her community were subjected to widespread and systematic sexual

By Pishko Shamsi

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Adapting to climate change: the priority for Australia

Adaptation to climate change was for a long time considered as an abstract issue for the future, something that would need to be worked out later by someone else. Adaptation, in short, is a process of preparing to live with a changing climate where most of our definitions of typical weather and

By Johanna Nalau

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Culture cringe: Laughter links Australia and Asia

The Lowy Institute collects valuable data on how Australians view Asia, but equally important is how Asians see Australia, even if at times it makes for uncomfortable reading. Australia’s future depends crucially on the decisions Asians make: for example, on where to study, visit, live, buy and

By Melissa Conley Tyler

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The Interpreter is taking a break for Easter

The Interpreter team is taking a break for Easter, but we will be back to normal on Tuesday 23 April.

By The Interpreter

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Can technology save ASEAN’s food supplies from climate change?

Climate change is one of the world’s most pressing challenges, and one which impacts humanity as a whole. A recent United Nations study indicates that decreasing biodiversity in our food supply is augmenting the peril posed by climate change and a growing population: nearly a quarter of wild food

By Frederick Kuo

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Book Review: Utopia For Realists

Book Review: Utopia For Realists, And How We Can Get There, by Rutger Bregman (Bloomsbury, 2017) Rutger Bregman shot to public fame calling out billionaires at this year’s World Economic Forum meeting in Davos. “1500 private jets flying in here to hear Sir David Attenborough speak about

By Paul Ronalds

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Remembering Rwanda: small mercy from the horror of Kibeho

What you don’t expect to see when you arrive at Kibeho are the eucalyptus trees. When Belgium ruled Rwanda, gum trees were planted across the colony to provide firewood. A small country in central Africa, Rwanda is mainly populated by two ethnic groups: the minority Tutsi and the majority Hutu.

By John Connor

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The strategic consequence of the Chagos Islands legal dispute

At the end of last month, the African archipelago nation of Mauritius secured an important legal victory in its territorial and maritime disputes against its former coloniser, the United Kingdom. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) produce an advisory opinion that rejected the UK’s claims

By Bec Strating

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Film Review: The Wandering Earth

In a recent visit to Australia, I was treated to Barrie Kosky’s audacious staging of The Magic Flute. I hoped it could offer me a break from writing, speaking, and thinking about contemporary China, but something rather odd happened instead. As Mozart’s opera unfolded, the libretto summoned me

By Bruno Maçães

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Book Review: A Partnership Transformed

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By John West

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Book review: Winners take all

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By Stephen Grenville

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Public holiday: Australia Day

Monday is a public holiday for Australia Day, and posting will be light on The Interpreter. Normal publishing will resume on Tuesday. Photo via Twitter user ccdoh1

By The Interpreter

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Just how green is the Belt and Road?

China is frequently hailed as a leader in international efforts to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, playing a pivotal role in negotiating the Paris Agreement, and pledging that carbon emissions will peak by 2030 and decline rapidly thereafter. The country has quickly become one of the

By Kumuda Simpson

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Book Review: the Clinton fiction

Review: The President is Missing, by Bill Clinton and James Patterson (Aldred A. Knopf, 2018) Former US President Bill Clinton is a man of singular gifts – a highly intelligent policy wonk with an unmatched capacity to connect with voters through mastery of what we are obliged these days to

By Sam Roggeveen

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Book review: Protecting the international order from Trump trauma

Book review: America vs the West, by Kori Schake (Lowy Institute Paper, Penguin, 2018) In a chaotic spectacle that is shaking the world, the Trump administration is putting a wrecking ball to the American-led international order. For 70 years, the United States has been the leader and

By G. John Ikenberry

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Book review: Grappling with the legacy of Barack Obama

Book review: The World as It Is: Inside the Obama White House, by Ben Rhodes (Random House, 2018). The slew of books that find their way to the shelves once a president has departed are often cagey, self-interested and read suspiciously like job applications. Ben Rhodes tries hard to avoid

By Alastair Davis

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We’re having a break: light publishing over the New Year

Summertime in Australia! It’s been a fascinating year and The Interpreter will be publishing a series in the coming fortnight highlighting some of our best articles from 2018. We’re having a brief holiday starting today across the Christmas and New Year and will dive back in with regular

By The Interpreter

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The new US Africa strategy is not about Africa. It’s about China

President Donald Trump’s national security advisor John Bolton outlined the US administration’s new Africa strategy in a speech last week at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC. The main tenets of the strategy, including the prioritisation of trade and

By Cornelia Tremann

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Russian gas will not stop China’s air pollution

As Beijing clamps down on air pollution, it is seeking to replace coal power plants with cleaner natural gas, especially for heating during winter. Consequently, China has intensified relations with Russia, one of the world’s leading gas exporters, to expand energy ties. But although upping gas

By Dmitriy Frolovskiy

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America builds on development aid

In the biggest reform of US foreign aid policy in recent history, the US Senate this month passed the Better Utilization of Investment Leading to Development, or the BUILD Act. This legislation, signed into law by President Donald Trump on 5 October, will create the new US International

By Cornelia Tremann

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Vietnam’s quandary: red or green?

A hand-crafted map on the wall of the Vietnam Academy of Agriculture Sciences (VAAS) neatly captures the country’s strategic vulnerabilities as it emerges as a dynamic new regional player. The map is fashioned out of grains of rice to demonstrate Vietnam’s agricultural production prowess, but it

By Greg Earl

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What to do about a warming planet

If global temperatures increase by 2 degrees and sail on past it, the ability to learn how to survive under such conditions becomes exponentially harder. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released a special report on Monday explaining the science around what

By Kumuda Simpson

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China’s aid: the image boost

Mounting accusations of Chinese debt traps, trade imbalances, and neocolonialism in Africa made for a heady backdrop to this month’s meeting of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. China’s Xi Jinping made clear he was having none of it. In his keynote speech to African leaders gathered in

By Cornelia Tremann

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Climate change, at the frontlines

When Pacific island leaders gathered in Nauru this month, they issued a security declaration affirming climate change as the “single greatest threat” to the region. That climate change is a threat to Pacific islands is in some ways obvious; indeed the climate change wording in the “Boe

By Wesley Morgan

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China’s arms trade: a rival for global influence?

Against the backdrop of the recent China-Africa Defence and Security Forum, numerous articles have been written questioning the rationale behind the conference and the potential ramifications of a closer Sino-African relationship. The fall in export of Russian made weapons to Africa

By Nan Tian

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