Dive into the archives.
- The Fighter’s Guard: Australia and the ‘Arc of Instability’
[It’s Oceania Day again, brought to you by the Strategist. We had some technical difficulties bringing you the post, but better late than never. – YH]
Back so soon? Australian troops patrolling in Honiara, Solomon Islands, April 2006.
It’s easy to understand why Canberra worries about the island arc to Australia’s north – Indonesia, New Guinea, and Melanesia. [...]
- Cursed by riches: Melanesian resource wars
Lihir gold mine, Papua New Guinea
A history of conflict
As has been explored in previous Oceania Day posts, conflict in Oceania – particularly in Melanesia – is often related to resources. The prime example is Bougainville, where in 1989 – in a scene straight out of John Robb’s Brave New War – angry landowners toppled [...]
- The watery frontier
Greed, pollution, piracy, terrorism, storms, flags of convenience. From the first day out of drydock to the day they are dismantled (or sink, or left to die), the undervalued cargo ship plies dangerous waters. The oceans are untamed and likely untamable according to William Langewiesche in his 2004 book The Outlaw Sea. The ocean covers [...]
- Defining security
What is “security”? In the post-Cold War era the term has become vague. During the epic battle between the USSR and “The West” security was defined by the military policies of the great powers in a complex balancing equation of tanks, missiles and submarines. After the fall of the Wall security began to take on [...]
- Fanning the Embers: China and Instability in Oceania
Razed buildings in Honiara, Solomon Islands, April 2006.
Much of the debate about China’s rise in Oceania focuses on strategic considerations. Will Oceania become an arena of strategic competition between the US and China? How will China’s rise affect the interests of longstanding Pacific players, such as the US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan? But what [...]
- But What Kind of Multilateralism?
A century ago, nationalism led to the breakup of the imperial world order and World War II dismantled the remaining few empires. Since then, the nation-state system was forced upon much of the world, and more specifically, decolonized parts unready and unable to handle it. Integral to this system was the sovereignty to which [...]
- The classic Game of Global Domination
Being a milcol guy in a pacifist country like Japan can get you into some interesting conversations. the other week one of my new coworkers asked me what I thought of Japan’s North Korea policy, and why the US wasn’t doing more about Pyongyang. In the end he was looking for an explanation why the [...]
- Mapping piracy
The International Maritime Bureau has a live piracy map (based on the Google Maps API) which plots attacks and attempted attacks reported to the IMB Piracy Reporting Centre. Each marker details type of attack, date and vessel type. The archives go back to 2005. The maps give you a good sense of the problem areas, [...]
- More security sources
Not that we all don’t have enough to read, but I stumbled on a wealth of North East Asian security articles in English on the Korean Institute for Defense Analyses website. They produce the quarterly Korean Journal of Defense Analysis which covers all sorts of topic related to NE Asia. All articles since 1999 are [...]
- Foreign oil and defence policy in Japan
Duck of Minerva team-member Bill Petti of asked me about my thesis recently. I directed him to an initial stab I made in a post on Japanese dependency on foreign oil. I have since gone through the proposal stages and pared down the topic to something doable. It is widely recognized that Japanese foreign/defence policy [...]
