CANBERRA: Despite the United Nations Security Council's belated endorsement of UN Special Envoy Kofi Annan's peacemaking mission in Syria, confidence that Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad will cooperate in any serious or sustained way remains low, (...)
CANBERRA: Last month, the Doomsday Clock's hands were moved a minute closer to midnight by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, the respected global organization that for decades has tracked the risk of a nuclear-weapons catastrophe, whether (...)
NEW YORK: Ten months ago, the United Nations Security Council, with no dissent, authorized the use of “all necessary measures” to protect civilians at imminent risk of massacre in Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi's Libya. Those lives were saved — and, if (...)
CANBERRA: Václav Havel, the Czech playwright and dissident turned president, and North Korean despot Kim Jong-il might have lived on different planets, for all their common commitment to human dignity, rights, and democracy. When they died just a (...)
CANBERRA: For grand strategy buffs, this has been quite a month, with several events looking like the kind of turning points that will consume future historians. Capturing the most media attention has been Europe's eroding credibility, with its (...)
NEW YORK: Good news not only sells less well than bad news, but also often seems harder to believe. Reaction to Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker's majestic new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, is a case in point.
In 800 meticulously (...)
MELBOURNE: Shortly before Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's assassination by a right-wing Jewish extremist in November 1995, I met him in Tel Aviv. I was visiting Israel as Australia's foreign minister to argue the case for rapid implementation (...)
MELBOURNE: At a time when the horrific events in Norway remind us how much murderous bigotry there still is in the world, perhaps a story from the other side of it can restore a little optimism that some positive, historically significant, changes (...)
CANBERRA: As a British court weighs whether Julian Assange should be extradited to Sweden, and American prosecutors weigh the criminal charges they will file against Private Bradley Manning, the alleged major source for the disclosures by Assange's (...)
LONDON: One of the most dispiriting features of today's international debates is that the threat to humanity posed by the world's 23,000 nuclear weapons — and by those who would build more of them, or be only too willing to use them — has been (...)
MELBOURNE: All the world hates a hypocrite. When states preach virtues they do not practice, or set lower hurdles for allies, trading partners, or co-religionists than they do for others, irritation and non-cooperation are the least they can expect. (...)
MELBOURNE: The international military intervention in Libya is not about bombing for democracy or for Col. Muammar El-Qaddafi's head — let alone keeping oil prices down or profits up. Legally, morally, politically, and militarily, it has only one (...)
MELBOURNE: Is Iran really hell-bent on becoming a nuclear-armed state? Or will it settle for nuclear capability, able to make weapons but choosing not to? Does the difference matter?
Few international questions involve higher stakes than these. (...)
MELBOURNE: People sometimes forget that the boy who cried wolf ended up being eaten. True, nobody has been killed by a nuclear weapon since the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 65 years ago this month. And, with Cold War tensions long past, it is (...)
A nuclear weapons free world is within grasp if concerted action is taken at all levels, write Gareth Evans and Yoriko Kawaguchi
The Middle East has long been a testing ground for achieving the ultimate goals of peace. In 1978, Egyptian president (...)
The recent rise of racism in Turkey claimed its most prominent victim last week, with the murder of a well-known Turkish-Armenian journalist. Gareth Evans reports from Istanbul
Last Friday Hrant Dink, the 52 year-old editor of the bilingual (...)