Global Issues

For all the back-and-forth Hugh White has generated with his latest book, How to Defend Australia, in a national preoccupation with the China question, little serious discussion has been devoted to how to defend Australia’s southern front and cope with China’s increasing Antarctic footprint.

If only a minister of the Morrison government would be as forthright in identifying climate change as a massive destabilising force in Australia’s region as the Chief of the Defence Force Angus Campbell has been. In a private speech in Bowral in June, General Campbell is reported to have sounded

As the one year anniversary of the ongoing Ebola epidemic in the Democratic Republic of Congo’s North Kivu province draws near, the World Health Organisation chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has sounded the global alarm about this most recent outbreak of the deadly virus. Over 2500 cases and

The 2019 Lowy Poll found that 62% of Australians rank cyberattacks as a threat to Australia’s vital interests. This leaves cyberattacks second only to climate change as the threat Australians are most concerned about. It is interesting to note that the poll question focused solely on

Once confident predictions that the world’s population will reach 11 billion by the end of this century are beginning to be debunked. It is now appears more likely that the global population will hit a ceiling before reaching nine billion by mid-century, and then begin to decline. This tapering

China has become more and more active in Antarctica in recent years – both in research and in the international framework of agreements known as the Antarctic Treaty System that has successfully seen the frozen continent devoted to peace and science for decades. China is

The recent G20 energy and environment ministers meeting in Osaka delivered an “implementation framework” for reducing the rapidly increasing levels of plastic waste choking the world’s seas and oceans. This year’s framework declaration echoes concern already expressed at the 2017 G20 meeting

The recent discussion on cyber security has been focused on offensive cyber capability and the threat to critical infrastructure. But in the last several months, an equally troubling trend has come to the fore. Internet shutdowns and deliberate disruptions have quickly become the policy instrument

A rap-style music video to promote the Osaka G20 leaders’ summit to be held on 28–29 June contains the lyrics “Let’s talk! Let’s dance! Here is Osaka wonderful city! Let’s conversation! Hard communication! Come on!”. The promotional video was produced by an Osaka-based group made up

We intuitively know the volume of digital information yet the increasing numbers are still staggering. In 2013, 90% of all the data in the world had been generated in the preceding two years. Forecasts suggest that by 2020, there will be as many bits in the digital universe as there are stars in the

Data, debt and plastic dumping The prospect that China and the US are now going to use next week’s Group of 20 nations summit in Osaka to extend their trade negotiations rather than take them to the precipice may give some new life to the rest of the agenda.  Japan’s Prime Minister

When US President Donald Trump and former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull held their infamous, protocol-smashing phone call in the president’s first week in office in January 2017, largely lost in the international headlines about the exchange was the actual topic of conversation. Now,

Episode 2 of the Lowy Institute’s brand new podcast, Rules Based Audio, is out today. In The Terrorist’s Wife – the role of women in jihad, Lowy Research Fellow Lydia Khalil discusses women who join Islamist extremist groups and lays out the risks involved if we continue to make gendered

Book Review: Unruly Waters: How Mountains, Rivers and Monsoons Have Shaped South Asia’s History, by Sunil Amrith (Penguin, 2018) As Sunil Amrith explains in this new book, South Asia is not the only Asian region with a water problem. The whole continent has issues. Asia is

Nearly five years since an international call went out for a greater global effort to combat the threat of so-called “superbugs”, what is better described as antimicrobial resistance (AMR) continues to pose a substantial danger to Australia’s health security. A recent national survey has

Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte is notorious for exhibiting an unconventional diplomatic style and in recent weeks, ahead of local elections, he has picked a new foe. Duterte has been trash-talking the Canadian government – quite literally – insisting that containers of rubbish sent from

To mark Mother’s Day on Sunday, The Interpreter invited contributors to write about their mothers who shaped world politics or were shaped by it. Too often the “immigration debate” focuses on numbers, questions of infrastructure and congestion, and at its worst a sense of threat to “

Are the boats back? Once again a reliable fear of “uncontrolled” immigration has been invoked in an Australian federal election. This time current Prime Minister Scott Morrison has framed “border control” as a question of “congestion-busting” in major cities – and instead of the usual

The month of April is littered with reminders of how cruel the world can be and should motivate us to be vigilant about the potential for atrocity crimes in our own time. 24 April marks the start of the Armenian Genocide when, in 1915, hundreds of Armenian community leaders and intellectuals were

Influence operations in the digital age are not merely propaganda with new tools. They represent an evolved form of manipulation which present actors with endless possibilities – both benign and malignant. While the origins of this new form are semi-accidental, it has nonetheless opened up

Climate change is one of the world’s most pressing challenges, and one which impacts humanity as a whole. A recent United Nations study indicates that decreasing biodiversity in our food supply is augmenting the peril posed by climate change and a growing population: nearly a quarter of wild food

From Bitcoin to YouTube, the internet has greatly altered the way humans behave and interact. This is particularly the case in China – the largest online community in the world where everything from online payments to shopping has been pioneered and taken up with gusto. While foreign policy may be

The fifth generation of cellular network technology promises much higher performance in terms of data throughput, speed, and lower latency. This will unlock a regime of new digital technologies that have been developing on the sidelines for some time. Scholars contributing to the neuroscience in

Australia is experiencing a remarkable renewable energy transition. The pipeline for new wind and solar photovoltaic (PV) electricity systems is 6-7 Gigawatts (GW) per year for the period 2019-21. This equates to 250 Watts per person per year compared with about 50 Watts per person per year for the