Global Issues
Climate change and shifting alliances
In 2009 the first democratically elected President of the Maldives, Mohamed Nasheed, held an underwater cabinet meeting. The stunt was crafted to draw international attention to…
Employment as protection: complementary pathways for refugees
Conflicts in the Middle East and Africa are causing dramatic increases in internally displaced people and refugees across the world. According to estimates from UNHCR for…
“Presumably, we shall have to call her a Stateswoman”
The first woman to become a prime minister was appointed in Sri Lanka in 1960. One might have expected this to pave the way for generations of Sri Lankan women to pursue…
The lack of appeal in Nauru
The decision to terminate a long-standing arrangement that saw the Australian High Court act as a partial appellate court for Nauru, as reported last week, has heightened…
Migration and border policy links: Israel’s UNHCR backflip, Pacific seasonal workers, more
At The New York Times, a data-rich interactive examines the myth that greater immigration levels lead to higer rates of crime. In December 2017, the Nauruan Government…
Facebook’s May day
Facebook has now spent almost two years careening from public relations disaster to public relations disaster. Fake news, election meddling, radicalisation, and the relatively…
The sky is falling again: should we worry?
China’s first space station is coming home, but not in the way China originally planned.
The Tiangong-1 space laboratory was launched in 2011 and hosted two crews of Chinese…
Migration and border policy links: “chain migration” discourse, labour mobility, and more
The Council of Foreign Relations has created an excellent backgrounder to the immigration debate in the US, covering everything from how Americans feel about immigration to the…
Resettlement in PNG was never a viable option
In mid-2015 I was approached to work as a claims assistance provider at the Manus Regional Processing Centre. Initially, I was hesitant because I did not want to be part…
Migration and border policy links: climate displacement, Israel deportations, and more
In The New Yorker, Bernard Avishai claims that “the absence in Israeli law of an inclusively democratic conception of citizenship, let alone democratic criteria for immigration”…