‘God and the people are the source of all power … I have taken it, and damn it, I will keep it forever’, declared Haiti’s François ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier in 1963. And so he did, …
Southeast Asia is a wondrous experiment in comparative politics. Perhaps a galactic professor peers down, testing a spectrum of political systems, from the Malay Muslim monarchy of Brunei to the world’s largest Muslim democracy in …
One of the questions frequently asked about Australia’s closest neighbour, Papua New Guinea, is whether a military, or other, coup is possible. Over the 40-plus years of my association with PNG, my view has been …
Australian democracy, Peter Hartcher observed in his post in The Strategist on ‘The real China choice’, ‘is a precious asset’. He’s right. Indeed, our constitution guarantees that the House of Representatives and the Senate must be ‘directly chosen’ …
As Felipe Fernández-Armesto points out in his 2019 Out of our minds: what we think and how we came to think it, ideas about how humans tell truth from falsity are among the oldest and …