Europe

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Filling the gaps in ASEAN and EU cybercrime cooperation

The recent takedown of a major hacking network has demonstrated the importance of international cooperation in fighting cybercrime. Defined as criminal activity that either targets or uses a computer network or an electronic device, primarily but not always for financial profit, cybercrime has been

By Eugenio Benincasa

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The US and the next leader of the OECD

Although it may not regularly make headlines, the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) is an important multilateral institution. With its standard-setting capability, the organisation’s 300 committees and 3300-member secretariat have carved unique policy niches on trade,

By Daniel F. Runde

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Russia-US relations in 2021: Key things to watch out for

Vladimir Putin is a master of keeping his political counterparts on their toes. After being among the last world leaders to congratulate Joe Biden on his victory in the United States Presidential elections, Putin had another surprise for the new administration – the withdrawal from the Open Skies

By Alexey Muraviev , Nina Markovic Khaze

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The Diego Garcia dispute hits cyberspace

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

By James Mortensen, Samuel Bashfield

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A very British crisis

Returning to the country of one’s birth is a common experience for many Australians. In the more than 45 years since I first arrived in Australia, though, I have never been more astounded and appalled by what has happened to Britain in my absence, or more grateful that I no longer live there. I

By Mark Beeson

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She won’t be right with “Australian-style” Brexit

As if 2020 has not been challenging enough, the United Kingdom is currently facing the prospect of ending its Brexit transition period on 31 December without a trade deal with the European Union. As post-Brexit negotiations on a UK–EU deal have continued without a breakthrough, the claim that the

By Stephen Minas

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Learning from an island in a pandemic

Through a quirk in circumstances, I presently find myself sheltering from the pandemic in Iceland. I wouldn’t consider myself stranded like other overseas Australians. I am here due to personal necessity and because the country is a relatively safe place. While the recent success of my home city

By Grant Wyeth

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A missed opportunity for the International Criminal Court

While Australia is facing its own war crimes allegations in relation to Afghanistan, the UK is the focus of allegations with respect to Iraq. The trials of UK nationals for war crimes committed in Iraq would have been a positive development for the International Criminal Court (

By Shannon Maree Torrens

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Russia and China team up on the Indian Ocean

Two recent naval exercises demonstrate the potential for Russia-China cooperation in the Indian Ocean, and how the two present a much greater threat to a continued US role and influence in the region than either would individually. Last year, South Africa hosted a maritime exercise with

By Oriana Skylar Mastro

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Artefacts paving France’s return to Africa

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

By Charmaine Manuel

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The UK’s unwelcome foreign aid cut

The recent move to cut billions of pounds from the United Kingdom’s foreign aid budget was long feared by advocates. As result, one minister has flagged her resignation, and others have made threats to cross the floor. The reduction of the UK’s aid spend from 0.7% to 0.5% of gross national

By Philip Citowicki

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COVIDcast: Tom Tugendhat on forging a “Global Britain” in the midst of Brexit and a pandemic

In this episode of COVIDcast, Ben Bland, a research fellow at the Lowy Institute, sat down with Tom Tugendhat MP to discuss the UK’s COVID-19 crisis

By Ben Bland

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Russia’s red star in the Red Sea

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

By Alexey Muraviev

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The outlines of a European policy on the Indo-Pacific

The Netherlands recently published its first official strategy paper for the Indo-Pacific, just ten weeks after Germany had brought out its own. The two countries are now part of a club of three in Europe, after France led the way in 2018. In the diplomatic world, this feels like lightning speed

By Lisa Louis

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A Biden presidency and US-Russia relations

Moscow’s muted reaction to Joe Biden’s election victory is unsurprising, and speaks volumes. The Kremlin is likely bracing itself for more confrontation with Washington, as US policy towards Russia hardens. That’s saying something. Since Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and revelations

By Ian Hill

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Beijing’s bad books: Australia can learn from Norway and South Korea

The latest complaints from China against Australia, neatly bundled into a series of 14 perceived disputes, makes painfully clear how ties between the two countries are straining. Yet Australia is not the only country to have felt the wrath of China’s coercive diplomacy.

By Henry Storey

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Nagorno-Karabakh: Peace – for now

Six weeks of renewed fighting between Azerbaijan and Armenia over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh ended last week after Russia brokered a trilateral agreement with the warring parties. Baku is trumpeting its victory on the field of battle and at the negotiating table, while Yerevan is

By Ian Hill

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Why Russia will not return the Kuril Islands to Japan

The decades-old dispute between Russia and Japan over the status of the Kuril Islands is far from over. Tokyo, which refers to the islands as the Northern Territories, still insists on a peace treaty with Moscow that would result in Russia’s return of at least two out of four islands to Japan,

By Nikola Mikovic

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Jihadist attacks in Nice: The Tunisian connection

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

By Leila Ben Mcharek

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A backlash against the Women, Peace and Security agenda?

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

By Patricia Salas Sanchez, Nuri Widiastuti Veronika, Irine Hiraswari Gayatri, Jacqui True

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The Three Seas Initiative: A European answer to China’s Belt and Road?

A new infrastructure connectivity initiative in Central Europe is the latest stage for a geopolitical contest. A diverse group of European Union member states in the traditional “buffer zone” between Western Europe and the East have long suffered lagging living standards and weaker economies.

By David Morris

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Russia’s troubled periphery

Unrest is roiling Russia’s near abroad, from its western flanks in Europe to the “’Stans” of Central Asia on China’s doorstep. For all their local particulars, these nations share a common historical legacy which continues to undermine stability in various ways. In Belarus,

By Ian Hill

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The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict: Increasingly deadly and destabilising

The re-emergence of conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan in September 2020 over the contested region of Nagorno-Karabakh has taken a much more deadly and destabilising turn than in previous recent outbreaks. A seemingly intractable conflict, dating back to well before the Soviet occupation of the

By Marianne Hanson

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Kyrgyzstan’s turmoil and the competition for Central Asia

Kyrgyzstan, a former Soviet republic seen as Russia’s most loyal ally in Central Asia, has been rocked by unrest after a disputed parliamentary election held on 4 October. Moscow’s reactions to the Kyrgyz crisis have so far been relatively ambivalent, even though the nation hosts a Russian

By Nikola Mikovic

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New Caledonia: A vote lost, yet independence advocates claim a win

On Sunday, nearly 181,000 voters from New Caledonia, a French archipelago colonised in 1853 and just 1,500 kilometres off the cost of Australia, were called to the polls to answer whether or not they wanted “New Caledonia to achieve full sovereignty and become independent”. This was the second

By Alexandre Dayant

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COVIDcast: Yanis Varoufakis on Europe and the future of capitalism

In this episode of COVIDcast, Lowy Institute Research Fellow Alexandre Dayant sat down with Professor Yanis Varoufakis to discuss Europe and the future of capitalism. Yanis is currently a member of the Hellenic Parliament and served as Greece’s minister of finance during the government debt crisis

By Alexandre Dayant

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Francis Fukuyama in Minsk

Thirty years ago, Francis Fukuyama sprang to international prominence by suggesting that history might be at an end. Ever since, lesser academic lights have queued up to tell anyone who would listen why he was wrong. Less thought has been given, however, to what Fukuyama was actually right about,

By Mark Beeson

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Trump’s gambit in the Balkans

Twenty-five years after brokering the Dayton Peace Accords, which effectively ended the Bosnian conflict, Europe’s bloodiest war since the Second World War, Washington is once again acting as a de facto security guarantor in the Western Balkans. This comes despite more than seven years of (ongoing

By Nina Markovic Khaze, Perparim Xhaferi

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Protests and power struggles in Russia’s Far East

Rallies in Russia’s Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk have been overshadowed by the protests in Belarus, as well as the alleged poisoning of opposition figure Alexei Navalny. Although anti-Kremlin protesters in the city of 600,000 still hold weekly demonstrations, demanding Russian authorities return

By Nikola Mikovic

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The “Australian solution” won’t fix Johnson’s Europe problem

Three main points show that Boris Johnson’s “Australian solution” – what we might call a hard-Brexit with loss of access to the single European market and not even a free trade agreement – will put the UK on a slippery slope to economic disaster and political oblivion. The first and most

By Daniel Woker

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No breakthrough in sight for EU-China leaders’ meeting

2020 was supposed to be a transformational year in China’s relations with the European Union. Next to the annual bilateral summit, an extraordinary gathering of all 27 EU heads of government and China’s leader Xi Jinping scheduled for September 14 in Leipzig was

By Nora Schlenzig

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Tackling environmental security threats in the Indian Ocean

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

By David Brewster

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Islamic State’s new battleground – the courts

In the aftermath of Islamic State’s defeat, it was anticipated that fighters and other members of the group would appeal to the very court system of a liberal democracy whose laws they rejected and whose way of ordering society they sought to supplant when they joined the terrorist group. And in

By Rodger Shanahan

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Pandemic democracy

How will Covid-19 affect electoral democracy in Australia and around the world? The pandemic has starkly revealed two fundamental aspects of successful democracy: the extent of a given society’s trust between its citizens and their government, and the capacity of those same governments to

By Benjamin Reilly

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How Russia benefited from Belarus’s turmoil

Mass protests and nationwide strikes in Belarus did not result in the overthrow of President Alexander Lukashenko, but they have pushed the Eastern European country deeper into Russia’s geopolitical orbit. Moscow and Minsk have reportedly agreed on resuming Russia’s energy supplies to Belarus,

By Nikola Mikovic

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A diplomatic breakdown over “snapback” tests the UN

After the United States experienced a rebuff at the United Nations last week – with almost the entire membership of the Security Council rejecting its attempt to re-impose UN sanctions on Iran – US officials warned that the dispute could lead to a major crisis in the Council, damaging the

By Richard Gowan

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Why Navalny matters

European leaders and institutions reacted promptly to the shocking plight of the Russian pro-democracy campaigner Aleksei Navalny, as he lay in a coma in an Omsk hospital and local officials tried to obstruct his evacuation to Germany. The same could not be said of Vladimir Putin. During the two

By Robert Horvath

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Europe’s big bonds and the prospect of a boon for Australia

Recently concluded negotiations for a new seven-year budget of the European Union, which excluded Britain for the first time in five decades, lasted more than two years and took five arduous days last month to wrap up in Brussels. But the result fundamentally changes and extends the role of the

By Remy Davison, Nina Markovic Khaze

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COVIDcast: Salvaging the liberal international order

In this episode of COVIDcast, Ben Scott, Lowy Institute Director of the Rules Based Order Project, sat down with Bobo Lo to discuss Bobo’s new Lowy Institute Analysis: “Global Order in the Shadow of the Coronavirus: China, Russia and the West”.

By Ben Scott

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The Director's Chair: Fiona Hill reflects on her journey from Bishop Auckland to the White House

In this episode of The Director’s Chair, Michael Fullilove speaks with Brookings Institution scholar, and former Russia adviser to President Donald Trump, Dr Fiona Hill

By Michael Fullilove

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Western liberalism’s crisis is self-inflicted

Originally published in The Australian

By Bobo Lo

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Europe, united in recovery – for now

It took four days and a “historical” summit for the heads of states and governments of Europe to finally agree on the recovery plan that should help the European Union face the devastating consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic. Celebrated by a recovery in local stocks, the agreement last week

By Alexandre Dayant

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Global Order in the Shadow of the Coronavirus: China, Russia and the West

It’s time to rethink global governance and its priorities

By Bobo Lo

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Five Eyes: Blurring the lines between intelligence and policy

The public aura around the decades-old “Five Eyes” intelligence sharing partnership between Australia, the US, UK, Canada, New Zealand has expanded rapidly since the name was first publicly acknowledged. In 2014, an Australian prime minister publicly referred to the “Five Eyes” for the

By Ben Scott

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Turkey: Not a team player

Turkey is increasingly becoming the piece of the NATO puzzle that just won’t fit. President Recep Erdoğan’s particular brand of Turkish nationalist populism has earned him criticism from most NATO members at one time or another. Turkey’s plans for European Union membership seem increasingly

By Rodger Shanahan

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Is Huawei in the UK a canary in the coalmine?

It is not a coincidence that Britain’s turnaround on using Huawei for its 5G infrastructure happened at the height of the pandemic. Covid-19 brutally brought back the realisation that international value chains are only as strong as their weakest link. This new awareness made plain that

By Daniel Woker

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The obstacles to Syrian aid

On Saturday last week, following weeks of lobbying by humanitarian agencies and difficult diplomatic negotiations, the UN Security Council renewed its authorisation for the UN and its partners to provide humanitarian assistance in north-western Syria from across the Turkish border. The final

By Rebecca Barber

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Decolonise Diego Garcia: Why America should not fear Mauritius

The United States military base on Diego Garcia has a problem: it is housed inside an unlawful jurisdiction, the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT). According to the African Union, UN General Assembly and a recent advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice, BIOT is a colonial holdover

By Peter Harris

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Another independence referendum looms in New Caledonia

New Caledonia will vote again on whether to remain within the French republic on 4 October 2020. At the last such referendum, in November 2018, the result was 56.67% against independence and 43.33% in favour, with most indigenous Kanaks voting in favour and most non-Kanaks against, including a

By Jon Fraenkel, Anthony Tutugoro

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Australia’s Russia problem (and how to solve it)

The 2020 Defence Strategic Update goes some way to preparing Australia to compete in a new multipolar, Indo-Pacific–anchored strategic environment. But a notable absence from the document is Russia. This matters. Australians too often speak of Moscow’s irrelevance and weakness since the end of

By Elizabeth Buchanan

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