Australian concepts of sovereignty have always been qualified. First came the British settlers and invaders in 1788. They are pregnant with the sovereignty of the British Crown, bringing convicts, the sadistic screws, and forced labour to a garrison of penal experiments and brutality. The native populations are treated as nothing more than spares, opportunistic chances, […]
As the WHO concludes its 76th assembly, the Pandemic Treaty continues to be a hotly contested topic, with supporters claiming it will prevent future pandemics and critics warning it will end national sovereignty. “I think we’ll get an accord in place if everyone realizes that our window before this next pandemic, this next health threat, Read More...
“The only way to save Haiti is to put it under UN control,” noted a recent Globe and Mail headline. Robert Rotberg, founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Program on Intrastate Conflict, demonstrates a scarcity of imagination and knowledge in making his colonialist appeal. Highlighting an openly colonial streak in Canadian politics, prominent voices […]
Someone needs to explain to me why wanting clean drinking water makes you an activist, and why proposing to destroy water with chemical warfare doesnt make a corporation a terrorist. –Winona LaDuke, “Canadian Oil Companies Trample on Our Rights” by Winona LaDuke, progressive.org. June 18, 2013. Water is life. We are the people who live […]
In the 1980s people carried protest signs saying “US out of Nicaragua!” and El Salvador, and Grenada, and then many others. I also saw signs saying “US out of my uterus!” While the problems may seem to be quite different — the first ones are international and the last is very personal — they really […]
In a blog entry, reflecting on the G20 Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Bali, Indonesia on July 7-8, the High Representative of the European Union, Josep Borrell, seems to have accepted the painful truth that the West is losing what he termed “the global battle of narratives”. “The global battle of narratives is in full swing and, […]
The Russia-Ukraine war has quickly turned into a global conflict. One of the likely outcomes of this war is the very redefinition of the current world order, which has been in effect, at least since the collapse of the Soviet Union over three decades ago. Indeed, there is a growing sense that a new global […]
This was my presentation at a Chongyang Institute’s organized international webinar on 6 May 2022 on the topic of “Seeking Peace and Promoting Development”. The Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies is a think tank attached to the Renmin University of Beijing. ***** In today’s world of regional conflicts, technological upgrading, epidemic stalemate and system reform, […]
The hysteria in Canberra and Washington over the Sino-Solomon Islands security pact has shown, again, how irrelevant the individual affairs of Pacific Island states are in the chess game of geopolitics. The one thing conspicuously missing has been the issue of climate change, near and dear to those whose lands are gradually being inundated by […]
