By the Lowy Institute's G20 Fellow Tristram Sainsbury and Research Associate Hannah Wurf
The 2015 G20 Leaders' Summit will be remembered for taking place in the aftermath of the brutal attacks in Paris, as leaders scrabbled to show unity and collective action.
In coverage of the summit, every
Malcolm Turnbull's visit to Jakarta this week did not signal any drastic changes for the direction of the Australia-Indonesia relationship, but it did leave relations considerably warmer than before. So warm, in fact, that both the prime minister and his Indonesian counterpart were forced to remove
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi and British Prime Minister David Cameron last week (Photo:Getty Images)
A week after the crash of a Russian airliner carrying 224 passengers in the Sinai desert its official cause is yet to be established. Evidence is increasingly pointing to foul play or
The G20’s tenth leaders' summit will take place in Antalya, Turkey at the end of this week. Predictions about what will eventuate from the Summit vary from John Kirton’s declaration that it promises significant success to Matt Goodman’s cautioning against expectations of a substantial summit
The first tactical victory emerging from Russia’s intervention in Syria came not on the al-Ghab plain in Syria’s Hama province or around Syria’s divided commercial capital of Aleppo. Rather it came at the end of last month in the peaceful surrounds of Vienna. It was there
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan after his election victory (Photo: Yasin Bulbul/Getty Images)
The result of the 1 November election in Turkey is clear but the country's future is not.
The character of the new government, its treatment of Turkey's Kurdish minority, and its relations with
The Turkish presidency of the G20 is scheduled to host an astounding 86 meetings in 2015. That's an average of more than one and a half per week and it's a lot more than the then-record 60-odd meetings held in 2014. This year's official tally also underestimates the total number
G20 engagement group representatives from Business (B20), Civil Society (C20), Labour (L20), Think Tanks (T20), Women (W20), and Youth (Y20) have contributed to the 18th issue of the G20 Monitor. The representatives address how their groups have contributed to the G20 process in 2015, their
Later today, Indonesian President Joko Widodo will become only the latest Asian leader to arrive at the White House for consultations with President Barack Obama. But Obama’s talks with Jokowi, as the president of the world's third largest democracy is known, will be quite different from his
A few days ago a suggestion was made on Crikey that DFAT, Australia's Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, should be scrapped. I was tempted to ignore it, because as far as I can tell, the author, Jason Murphy, based his call largely on the fact that he just doesn't like free trade agreements
China's Belt and Road initiative – a vast array of promised Chinese investments in transport, energy and communications across Eurasia and Africa – is emerging as one of the key foreign policy priorities of Xi Jinping's presidency.
President Xi Jinping and then President of Sri Lanka Mahinda
A thousand pages on corporate tax shenanigans is not normally the sort of thing that captures the public imagination. But amid the technical detail of international tax rule changes proposed by the OECD lie some of the most fundamental governance developments of recent years.
The aim of the OECD-
Ben Bernanke was a member of the US Federal Reserve Board in the tumultuous period from 2002 until 2014 and Chairman from 2006 to 2014. His version of this period is told in The Courage to Act, his 600-page meeting-by-meeting account. This degree of detail would overload a reader who just wanted to
G20 energy and resources ministers concluded the first-ever G20 Energy Ministerial in Istanbul over the weekend. Their communique is an initial response to the call from G20 leaders at last November's Brisbane summit to meet and progress nine agreed principles on energy collaboration.
With
Hollywood sci-fi epic The Martian, which opened in cinemas yesterday, is a gripping, solid piece of cinema with some realistic grounding in science and spaceflight. True, there are convenient scientific omissions, but overall this film is closer to the truth than most space movies. I recommend it
It's leaders' week at the UN. The 70th Session of the General Assembly is open for business under the Presidency of Mogens Lykketoft of Denmark. General-Secretary Ban Ki-Moon is presiding over his penultimate session; next year he will be replaced by an 'Eastern European woman,' if Russia's
By the Lowy Institute's G20 Fellow Tristram Sainsbury and Research Associate Casper Wuite.
Chatham House's Paola Subacchi recently asked why the G20 has not addressed the Syrian refugee crisis. She acknowledges that refugee issues have not historically been within the G20's bailiwick. However, she
Foreign Minister Julie Bishop has just announced that Australia will bid for a seat on the UN Security Council in 2029-30.
That's 15 years from the end of our last Security Council seat (2013-14). But it compares against the 27 years between our fourth and fifth outings at the Security Council.
Having a Catholic Pope and the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China descend on Washington at almost exactly the same time helped illustrate something important about diplomacy. When staging a high-level state visit, there is a simple choice: emphasise either the head or the heart. This
Last Sunday saw another twist to the seemingly endless game EU governments are playing with each other over the refugee crisis. Germany abruptly decided to re-introduce border controls to curb the stream of migrants attracted to the country which has shown by far the most sympathy to refugees, the
When the rest of the world dealt with Australia in the past, it was familiar figures that emerged from the VIP planes and who stretched out their experienced hands. For over a decade during the Howard years, Australia not only had the same prime minister, but also the same foreign affairs minister,
As I wrote the other week, the Arab world, and the Gulf States in particular, have been happy to bat away any criticism of their complete refusal to resettle any refugees from Syria while leaving the West to deal with the tide of human misery.
Protests have been held in Europe debating the pros
A recent British drone strike on British citizens in Syria raises troubling legal questions about the use of military force in purported self-defence overseas. In late August, Britain targeted an ISIS member, Reyaad Khan, in Raqqa, collaterally killing two other ISIS members, including British
By Ron Walker, currently a visiting fellow at the Asia Pacific College of Diplomacy at ANU. Ron is a former DFAT officer who worked for 20 years in Australia's nuclear diplomacy. Among the positions he occupied were the first Head of the Nuclear Safeguards Branch and Chairman of the Board of
Global financial markets are on tenterhooks waiting for the US Federal Reserve to decide when to start raising the Fed funds rate – the short-term interest rate which sets the datum for many other interest rates. The media have reported this in portentous tones, exploring every possible downside
The Australian Government has finally announced that it will increase its humanitarian intake by 12,000 places in the wake of the Syrian crisis. Amid the cacophony over which refugees are most in need of refuge, and the unhelpful 'Muslim versus Christian' discourse, there is a community that has
The G20 has become a key international forum since it was set up in 1999. When Australia began its presidency of the 2014 summit in Brisbane, many commentators suggested that Australia’s chairing of the G20 would reinvigorate it. This timely book looks at what that meeting achieved and what has
Following a community outcry over the plight of asylum seekers in Europe, the Australian Government has announced that it will resettle 12,000 Syrian and Iraqi refugees. This will be in addition to the annual refugee and humanitarian intake of 13,750. Prime Minister Tony Abbott has described the
Parliament's Joint Standing Committee on Treaties (JSCOT) presented its report on the Australia India nuclear cooperation Agreement on 8 September after ten of months deliberation. JSCOT's advice must be 'taken into account' though not necessarily acted upon.
The Kudankulam nuclear power plant in
A new engagement group was launched in Ankara on Sunday with the aim of encouraging the G20 to bring more women into the global economy. The launch of the Women 20 (W20) was a prominent event, with the Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davuto?lu, IMF Managing Director Christine Lagarde and OECD
The staggering dimensions of the migrant flow into Europe prompts me to offer a note on the Cambodian refugee crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which I played a small part. I am not suggesting that what happened 35 years ago offers any answer to current challenges.
Rather, the
At a discussion in Washington DC this spring, I was quizzed with a degree of annoyance on the multiple messages coming out of New Delhi with respect to India’s position on a global agreement to combat climate change. In the same discussion there was also an exasperated inquisition on why Indian
First, the good news. We have enough fossil fuel to survive until the century's end. Today's proven reserves of coal, oil and gas combined is about 83 years (at current usage rates), so Spaceship Earth could make 2100 – the exact date that IPCC scientists have set for mankind's plan to moderate
Growth is certainly slower and its structure is changing, but is the outlook for China's economy quite as awful as global share markets seem to think?
Now the world's biggest economy (using the IMF's purchasing power parity measure), China matters vastly more for world markets than it did a
In an attempt to better manage the migration wave to, and through, borderless Europe, the EU Commission is proposing policies on three fronts. The negotiations in the EU Council will not be easy: they involve some very reluctant governments, especially those from Eastern Europe.
The first and
Well over a million political refugees and economic migrants from Europe’s Southern and Eastern ‘near abroad’ are this year making their way to, and through, borderless Europe. They are hoping to find safety and a decent living in a handful of countries in Europe's North-West.
Precision
The crisis over garbage collection in Lebanon continues to pile up. This weekend thousands of Lebanese gathered again in downtown Beirut to denounce politicians for their failure to resolve this problem and the myriad others that Lebanon faces. These include, but are not limited to: constant water
The humanitarian tragedy unfolding daily in Europe has forced the West to again try and redefine its obligations to those who have been made vulnerable as a result of conflict in the Middle East, particularly the Syrian civil war.
But it may also have stirred a desire to question why the burden
By Yanmei Xie, International Crisis Group’s Senior China Analyst, and Rachel Vandenbrink, graduate student at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University.
China’s unsuccessful invitation to Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe to attend the 70th anniversary celebrations of the
There's a rule in economics called Goodhart's law: when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful measure. If a government chases a particular economic variable, then it becomes influenced by policy, and so loses its meaningfulness as an input. 'Information value' is lost in the
Over the weekend an Egypt court found Al-Jazeera journalists Peter Greste, Mohammed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed guilty on charges of operating in Egypt without a press licence and of ‘spreading false news’. Greste and Fahmy were given sentences of three years in prison; Mohamed was given three years
Over the last few weeks, global financial markets have once again demonstrated their predilection for over-reacting to ephemeral news. For their part, the media are always happy to pad out the 24-hour news cycle with a breaking crisis. If it's transient, so much the better: you can report a fresh
I started my job at the Federal Reserve three weeks before Lehman Brothers declared bankruptcy.
I wish I had kept a diary of my initial months at the Fed, so I could recall clearly what we thought was happening each day. I do remember there was a discrete point where suddenly everything felt like
In March 2011, the Syrian people started their national uprising, motivated by the Arab Spring and following decades of oppression under the dynastic Assad regime.
The peaceful uprising lasted for an entire year. The Syrian regime confronted it with violence and directed its security forces, and
The Marrakesh Accords, the Bali Roadmap, the Cancun Agreements, the Durban Outcomes, the Doha Climate Gateway, the Lima Call for Climate Action – the grand names given to decisions taken under the UN's Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) stand in contrast to the meagre progress made on
The 17th issue of the G20 Monitor examines the progress made by the 2015 Turkish G20 Presidency and explores potential priority areas for the 2016 Chinese Presidency.
Photo: Flickr/Juraj Patekar
Arianto Patunru and Sjamsu Rahardja's recent insightful Lowy Institute Analysis, Trade Protectionism in Indonesia: Bad Times and Bad Policy, invokes 'Sadli's Law', named for early New Order technocrat Mohammad Sadli.
Perhaps Indonesianists' most well-loved aphorism, it holds that 'bad times may
In this Analysis, Lowy Institute Research Fellow Tristram Sainsbury examines the evolving global economic leadership roles of the United States and China