China’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) continues to draw criticism and disapproval. Its sceptics brand it as China’s Marshall Plan, or as a ‘neo-imperial project’. To ensure the initiative’s success, China should heed some […]
The rumblings of a currency crisis in emerging markets is only getting louder. Argentina’s Central Bank raised interest rates to 40 per cent to protect its peso in May 2018. When this did little to help, Argentina […]
The arrest of members of Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), an organisation linked to al-Qaeda, in Singapore in 2001 sent shock waves across the national security landscape. This portentous incident signalled both the need for Singapore to […]
Southeast Asian countries’ historically high defence budgets are the sum of various national considerations: financial self-sufficiency, territorial control, expansion of capabilities, peacetime missions and the development of the local defence industry. The threat of China […]
The eighth Singapore-Malaysia Leaders’ Retreat held in Singapore on January 14 and 15 2018 witnessed a milestone in bilateral ties. Leaders of both countries signed an agreement to build a rapid transit system linking Johor […]
The leadership of the Indonesian military is in flux. In the last three months of 2017, then commander General Gatot Nurmantyo executed two reshuffles of senior officers: one on October 27 and the other on […]
The ‘blue economy’ concept — a model of sustainable development concerned with the use of the coastal and marine ecosystem — gained prominence in Indonesia as one of the main components of President Joko (Jokowi) […]
The February 18, 2017 rallies for and against the bill to amend the 1965 Criminal Jurisdiction Act, known as RUU 355, have opened yet another political and social schism in Malaysian society. RUU 355 began […]
Women’s roles in terrorist networks in Indonesia have until now been dictated by kinship ties through marriage, involving facilitating logistics and finance for terrorist acts. But there is a growing trend of women taking on […]
The murder of Kim Jong-nam, the estranged eldest brother of North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong-un, in Kuala Lumpur International Airport (KLIA) should come as no surprise to those familiar with the violent ways of […]
On October 9, 2016, 200 armed attackers from the Aqa Mul Mujahidin — an organisation with links to the Rohingya Solidarity Organisation (RSO) — carried out a surprise attack on Myanmar police at the Maungdaw […]
On Monday September 5, former Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad did the unthinkable. He turned up at the High Court for Anwar Ibrahim’s filing of an interim injunction to stop the enforcement of the newly-passed […]