From Russia with unrequited love

Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has assiduously courted Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting with him more than a dozen times in four years. This month he hosted Putin in Tokyo and in his hometown of …

MH370: more clues, but no more money

The team searching for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 in the vastness of the Indian Ocean off Western Australia is working with the slenderest of clues painstakingly drawn from minute fragments of evidence. (The Australian …

Saving the centre

There is no doubt about the waves of discontent and anger sweeping Western politics. The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union after four decades of membership, jeopardizing all the intricate trading and political …

Where to next for the JCLEC?

For thirteen years, the Jakarta Centre for Law Enforcement Cooperation (JCLEC) has served as a regional rally point for much needed counterterrorism capacity development and cooperation. Since its inception in 2004 with strong bilateral support …

The new year and the new populism

The word ‘populism’ was everywhere in 2016. Political leaders claiming to speak for the people have achieved significant victories in Europe, Asia, and, with the election of Donald Trump, the United States. Populism first described …

Cyber wrap

This week we continue our look back at some of the year’s biggest cyber stories in our final cyber wrap for 2016! China finally adopted its controversial new cybersecurity law on 7 November, much to …

Digital land power: the Australian Army’s cyber future

Last month, Prime Minister Turnbull revealed that Australia is undertaking offensive cyber operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria. That followed on from the first acknowledgement that Australia possesses offensive cyber capabilities at the launch …

Xi Jinping’s year of living dangerously

It might seem ludicrous to suggest that Chinese President Xi Jinping, the country’s most powerful leader since Mao, will be in danger in 2017. But looks can be deceiving, and his consolidation of power may …

When the going gets tough…

…the tough get going—trite, perhaps, but appropriate in our current circumstances. 2016 ends in a much darker place than it started. The sense of reluctant resignation with which the year began has morphed into doubt …

The emergence of a post-fact world

One of the more striking developments of 2016 and its highly unusual politics was the emergence of a ‘post-fact’ world, in which virtually all authoritative information sources were called into question and challenged by contrary …

Australia’s Great War in the air

In January 1911, the Australian government announced its intention to form a flying corps to support the Army. Over the next few years men were recruited, an airbase established at Point Cook near Melbourne, and …