Throughout the Christmas-New Year break, The Interpreter will be featuring some of its best pieces from 2014. More to come between now and January 12 when The Interpreter will be back for 2015.
Japanese collective self-defence: Abe's changes won't help, by Hugh White, 4 July.
Clearly Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has deep personal and political motives for wanting to change Japan's strategic posture, 'escape from the postwar regime' and make Japan a normal country. But he has only been able to push this week's changes through because many Japanese who reject Abe's revisionist nationalism have lost faith in the post-war strategic posture. They can see that relying on the US has worked well for decades, but is failing now as strategic circumstances change.
The question is whether collective self-defence will work any better to keep Japan secure in these new circumstances? I don't think it will.
MH17 crash site: A police-led approach is the right solution, by James Brown, 25 July.
The crash site is in an active combat zone, and as the OSCE reminded us only days ago, there are more than 100 separate armed groups surrounding the self-styled Donetsk People's Republic. No intervention will be able to proceed without explicit guarantees from both the Ukrainian and Russian governments that they will exercise their influence to limit the activities of military forces in the vicinity of the crash site. Even then, there would still remain the possibility of rogue actors in the area. For that reason, whatever international force is sent should be armed for their personal safety.
Yet the crash site is located only a short distance from the Russian border, and for that reason it would be far too provocative to deploy international military forces in any strength to secure the international investigation effort. If Putin were to allow the deployment of NATO military assets within 30km of the Russian border, this would open him to severe domestic political criticism. Already there are some suggestions that Putin is under domestic presure for appearing to have bowed to foreign leaders. Too much provocation and Russia will respond with a show of force of some type, perhaps including additional deployments of military units to the border with Ukraine.
So the best solution will be an armed international police force with a limited mandate to secure the crash site and protect investigators
Obama's intervention: Iraq is not Syria, by Rodher Shanahan, 8 August.
There will of course be accusations that Obama is a hypocrite for intervening in Iraq but not Syria. That argument is simplistic and wrong. If the US is obliged to intervene militarily everywhere there is a humanitarian need, it would never stop intervening. Obama said as much in his speech. He is one of the few US leaders to understand the limits of American power.
Moreover, the situation in Syria is far more complex. To have assisted one side would have meant breaching a nation's sovereignty (no big deal) and potentially assisting the very Islamist forces that pose a security threat to the region and the West (a very big deal). The intervention in Iraq requires Obama to do neither of those things, so the calculus is completely different.
Violence against women in PNG: How men are getting away with murder, by Jo Chandler, 29 August.
The first instinct of a journalist trying to communicate a crisis is to quantify it — to bundle it up in statistics. But the data on violence in PNG is scarce, and it is inevitably scrubbed clean of identity and humanity. The reality, by contrast, is raw, overwhelming, unfathomable, complex.
So you might describe the scores of walking wounded waiting for triage outside highlands hospitals every morning, oftentimes the bashed and basher sitting together, waiting their turn. Or you might try to capture the vulnerability of girls and women when they venture out of home, and how it shackles their movements and their prospects in city and village alike. Yet these narratives fall short when they depict PNG women as merely helpless and scared. They are also tough, funny, resourceful, cunning, resilient.
But perhaps the trickiest thing to communicate is just how formidable the landscape is for women wanting access to justice. So many obstacles. The remoteness. The poverty of resources, of cash. The lack of roads, personnel, and vehicles to respond to emergencies. The shortcomings of police capacity and culture. The brutality, often inspired by hard-wired notions of payback and supercharged by modern blights of bitterness and booze. The failure of agents of the state to honour their ethics and their obligations, and to uphold the law.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user G20 Australia 2014.