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Standing up the the strong men
Nicholas Farrelly | June 14, 2022The threat posed by authoritarian states demands a robust response from the world’s democracies and we must not allow their victims to fight on alone.
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Choose freedom
Justin Bassi | June 13, 2022The first Shangri-La Dialogue since 2019 is a chance for world leaders and ministers to discuss urgent and long-term international security questions, and underlined the need for the free world to stand up against authoritarian challenges.
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Wild honey
Clementine Fujimura | June 10, 2022Russian poet Anna Akhmatova wrote that “wild honey smells of freedom” but Vladimir Putin has followed in the dark footsteps of Josef Stalin and other Soviet leaders in ruthlessly suppressing any opposition to his dictatorial rule, forcing artists to choose between leaving the country, silence, imprisonment or death.
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Big brother is back
John Keane | June 4, 2022The collapse of Soviet communism seemed to herald victory for democracy over despotism, but the rise of new surveillance states powered by the digital communication which once threatened to defeat them is a threat to us all.
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The case for hope
Katrina Lee-Koo | June 3, 2022Although global prospects appear bleak, with the return of war to Europe and a growing climate crisis, there remains a case for optimism across a range of social and political issues.
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Putin forces the world to take sides
Tanja Börzel | May 26, 2022Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s growing aggression in Asia and the Pacific may soon force the rest of the world to take sides in an ideological, economic and perhaps military confrontation between freedom and tyranny.
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The battle for ideas will shape new global order
Stephen Nagy | May 25, 2022The world has a choice to make between the freedom and democracy offered by the West and the aggressive authoritarianism of Russia and China.
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Monitoring labour exploitation in the Asia-Pacific
Sallie Yea | May 12, 2022The exploitation of workers is at an all-time high. However, traditional concepts of slavery combined with gendered expectations means that many victims of labour exploitation will not receive the support they need.
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Disturbing the peace
Peter Jennings | May 7, 2022The increasing threat which Russian and China pose to their neighbours will only ramp up the threat to world peace in 2022.
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The death of the Mekong delta
Thong Anh Tran | May 3, 2022Millions of people depend on Vietnam’s mighty Mekong Delta, but upstream water extraction and dam building by China and other states is reducing flows to a relative trickle.
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Why Europe’s far right sticks with Putin
Toby Greene | May 2, 2022European leftists instinctively sided with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, but now it’s far right populists in the USA, France, Hungary and elsewhere who excuse Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and oppose help for that embattled country.
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I came, I saw, I vetoed
Emma McClean | May 2, 2022The United Nations is supposed to offer a forum to uphold international law, but the vetos wielded by authoritarian states on the Security Council has rendered it impotent to tackle crises like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.