Global Issues
New Zealand's UN Security Council debut: Peace in the Middle East
One of Australia's last acts on the UN Security Council was to vote against a resolution being brought by the Palestinian Authority.
Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister of Israel…
Indonesia leads on petrol subsidies, but will others follow?
The fall in the world oil price has created the opportunity to eliminate petroleum subsidies in a number of Southeast Asian countries. These subsidies have been the long-standing…
No, the IMF did not cause the Ebola crisis
Headlines blaming the IMF for the Ebola crisis are something you may expect in the tabloid press. However, a robust debate on the role of the IMF in the spread of Ebola was…
Is China fragile?
The Black Swan, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, is a parable for unanticipated risk: the possibility of 'unknown unknown' events that no-one sees coming.
In a new essay, The Calm…
Cambodia's controversial dam seems set to go ahead
What is happening with Cambodia's Lower Se San 2 dam?
Elliot Brennan's citation of a Bangkok Post report of Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen's speech at the opening of the Stung…
The need for civil resistance to terrorism
More than three million people took to the streets of French cities last weekend in a unprecedented public response to an act of politically motivated violence.
It made me think…
What I got wrong in 2014, and what I got right
January should be called pundit accountability month. On websites such as this, we make all sorts of predictions and forecasts, or we identify structural trends or leadership…
The role of think tanks in a fragmenting global system
Last month I spent time in a tank thinking about think tanks. Admittedly it was a very architecturally interesting tank at The Graduate Institute Geneva, which this year hosted…
City limits: How big will China's megacities get?
Chinese urbanisation will be a globally consequential trend in the 21st century. The path policymakers follow is of profound importance.
A noisy debate about city planning has…
Oil drops 50%, world shrugs
What does the fall in the price of oil do for global economic growth?
If the price of oil had swiftly risen by 50%, economic commentators would be calling this an economic…