Asia

Having a deep interest in power politics is still not the norm in Australia. Yet, an increasing number of its population appears genuinely concerned about what a more aggressive and autocratic China means for Australia and for themselves. Intensifying media coverage of the friction in bilateral

The world has turned a blind eye to the sheer human misery surrounding Afghanistan ever since the Taliban returned to power in August 2021. While several regional countries and institutions have held conferences to discuss ways to avert the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan, these talks are

Over the course of barely a week, the normally placid Kazakhstan, best known in the West for being the unwilling object of humour in the Borat films (and perhaps also for being home to approximately 15 per cent of all Bitcoin mining), has endured a maelstrom. Events began on 2 January with

The presidency of South Korea’s Moon Jae-in will be bookended by Winter Olympics – one defined by hope, the other despair. North Korea has confirmed it will not participate in the Beijing Winter Olympics because of the coronavirus and what it calls the “hostile policies” of the United States

Like Australia in the Pacific, India has been pursuing its own Indian Ocean island step-up, largely driven by concerns about China’s growing influence in the region. This has included increased bilateral aid, investment, and security assistance to the island states. India is also trying to develop

Shared power grated with the generals. A little over a decade ago, Myanmar’s military, known as the Tatmadaw, introduced a quasi-democratic constitution, which eventually saw the National League for Democracy form government. But on 1 February this year the military imprisoned State Counsellor

Thirty-six hours before Filipino journalist Maria Ressa was presented with her Nobel Peace Prize in Norway, another journalist in the Philippines was murdered. On 8 December, Jess Malabanan was shot in the head in his home while watching TV with his wife in Samar province. Malabanan was hiding

A couple of months back, 70-year-old housewife Masi Zainab asked a charismatic local political leader, Maulana Hidayat-ur-Rehman Baloch, to help mount a protest for the rights of the citizens of Gwadar, a port city in southwestern Pakistan. Within weeks, Masi Zainab was marching with thousands of

It has been a tumultuous 2021 for India: floods, fires, plague and pollution, but also healthy economic growth figures, a successful vaccination campaign, a UN Security Council non-permanent seat, and more visibility on the world stage in non-political ways. India also had an eleventh-hour soft

The world is being transformed by the Internet of Things (the IoT) as ever more devices and activities are linked through the internet and endowed with computing power. This transformation brings an exponential rise in the security challenges inherent in digital connections, especially connections

China’s President Xi Jinping’s concept of “common prosperity” is slowly being internationalised. The most obvious manifestation of this came last month when Xi framed the Belt and Road (BRI) as a vehicle for achieving global common prosperity. While it is far from clear at this stage how

In 2016, the live-action film adaptation of the popular videogame Warcraft took a dismal $24 million in its opening weekend in the United States, revenue that dropped a further 73 per cent the next weekend to a meagre $6.5 million for a film that cost $160 million to make. It was a widespread flop,

The Philippines national election looms in May 2022. Sitting President Rodrigo Duterte is running to become a senator, while his daughter is campaigning to be vice-president to Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr, the offspring of another strongman. Current senator and Duterte’s closest ally

It has been just over a year since Myanmar emphatically re-elected Aung San Suu Kyi’s National League for Democracy as the dominant partner in the country’s quasi-civilian government. Next February, it will be a year since the armed forces, or Tatmadaw, ignored that result and seized power

Unease about so-called “grey zone” tactics is increasingly in vogue. From a position of relative obscurity, the term has surged onto the official agenda. There was no mention of “grey zone” in Australia’s 2016 Defence White Paper, but it appears 11 times in the 2020 Defence Strategic

Covid-19 has loomed large over everything again this year and the new Omicron variant is a warning that there is still plenty of fight left in the virus. But the pandemic is ultimately an economic and geopolitical story as well as a health threat. Donations of vaccines and the economic impacts of

From 29–30 November, the eighth edition of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) was held in Dakar, Senegal, bringing together the foreign ministers and high-level attendees from African countries and China. This year’s theme was to “Deepen China-Africa Partnership and Promote

Ukraine and Taiwan are now the major focal points in the geopolitical arena, testing the diplomacy of the United States but also other nations – India as much as any. Where India-China relations have soured in recent years, in some ways making India’s response to the Taiwan issue more

Veteran US official Kurt Campbell has long championed more American engagement in Asia and is credited as the architect of Barack Obama’s 2015 “Pivot”. He is often referred to as President Joe Biden’s “Asia Tsar” and has been influential in shaping the “Quad” grouping and the recent

Under the 2020 Doha Agreement, the US withdrawal of forces from Afghanistan was conditional on Taliban security assurances that Afghan territory would not be used as a launch pad by al-Qaeda or Islamic State for attacks against the United States. Similar accords seeking security promises from

For years, North Korea’s human rights situation has been in the spotlight of activists who pile voluminous report upon report, while the North Korean government repeatedly rejects the criticism as political, based on lies or lacking understanding of realities on the ground. Pyongyang

Two weeks of negotiations in Glasgow meant that COP26 resulted in a resolution – of sorts. Nations agreed to resume next year with stronger 2030 emissions reduction targets in a global bid to try to alleviate the worst consequences of the climate disaster. It wasn’t the achievement that was

According to the Indonesia Ocean Justice Initiative, between 2018 and January 2021, a large number of Chinese vessels “deactivated” their AIS transponders – the automatic identification systems used to track ships at sea – and engaged in illegal marine scientific research while cruising