Pacific Outlier

Gender Parity & the 2015 Canadian Federal Cabinet: Trudeau’s first history-making moment. Today Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his Cabinet and made history by assembling a cabinet that unprecedentedly contains an equal number of men and women. It is a significant achievement that this has come to pass, despite the traditional “merit matters most” … Continue reading Matthew Kerby and Jennifer Curtin | Gender Parity & the Canadian Cabinet

29 October 2015 On 26 October 2015 a US warship deliberately cruised close to one of China’s new artificial islands dredged up from shallow waters of the South China Sea. Beijing immediately objected and called the transit ‘deliberate provocation’ and accused the US of ‘threatening Chinese sovereignty and security interests’ in the region. Does the … Continue reading Stephen Hoadley | South China Sea Tensions: the US Dilemma

At the German Federal Election on 22 September, 2013, two parties failed to pass the five-percent threshold of the electoral system by a very narrow margin. While one of them (the Free Democratic Party FDP) had continuously sent representatives to the national parliament since its foundation in 1949 and failed for the first time, the … Continue reading Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck | From Single-Issue to Right-Wing Populist Party? The Surprising Success of the “Alternative for Germany (AfD)”

The mourning period after the terrorist event is often depoliticized. Scrutiny of the processes which made America vulnerable to 9/11 were sidelined, as Derrida argues, because of the spectacle of mourning that followed the devastation. The spectre of cold war complicities with mujahideen in Afghanistan, the ineptness of our spy agencies under Bush, the banal … Continue reading Paul Gordon Kramer | Resistance and Mourning after the Ankara Bombings

On September 11 2001, the United-States suffered an attack by the Sunni extremist group Al Qaeda which claimed almost 3000 civilian victims. The “9-11” terrorist attacks precipitated the United States into launching a ‘Global War on Terror’ (GWoT), which, 14 years later few would argue was a resounding success. The Americans first got rid of … Continue reading Nicolas Pirsoul | The ironic turn of the ‘Global War on Terror’

Sri Lanka in 2015 and the (post) post-war regime A lot has changed in Sri Lanka since the start of the year. Or has it? Only time will tell. In short, on 8 January 2015 presidential elections were held in Sri Lanka. It is believed that the then-incumbent president Mahinda Rajapaksa had called the elections … Continue reading Gilberto Algar-Faria | The UN and Sri Lanka in Testing Times

The above cartoon by Iotti summarizes the situation in Brazilian politics at the moment. The angry guy holds a sign that reads: “For the return of the military government! Dictatorship now!” The concerned lady holds a sign that reads: “For more History classes for these people!” These two characters are indicative of colliding poles in … Continue reading Marcelo Mendes de Souza | Democracy and Revisionism in Brazil: What is behind the Recent “Fora Dilma” [Dilma out] Protests?

In recent weeks there has been a flurry of reports detailing the catastrophic humanitarian situation in Yemen. In his 19th August report to the Security Council on the situation in the country, the UN’s Under-Secretary for Humanitarian Affairs, Stephen O’Brien, described the ‘scale of human suffering’ as ‘almost incomprehensible’, with ‘four out of five Yemenis … Continue reading Jeremy Moses | Who is responsible for protecting civilians in Yemen?

The Prime Minister has failed to respond to widespread concerns over New Zealand’s inaction on refugees. For more than a year, Key has claimed that now is not the time to increase our annual quota of 750 places because it has been in place for almost 30 years. Now he’s scrambling for a way to … Continue reading Murdoch Stephens | National’s refugee policies exclude most needy