Setting things straight.
Seeing that, in order to discredit the figures and achieve moral superiority while attempting to deflect attention away from the military assault on Rafa, Israel supporters in NZ have seized on reports...
View ArticleMedia Link: AVFA on the implications of US elections.
In this week’s “A View from Afar” podcast Selwyn Manning and spoke about the upcoming US elections and what the possibility of another Trump presidency means for the US role in world affairs. We also...
View ArticleThoughts about contemporary troubles.
This will be s short post. It stems from observations I made elsewhere about what might be characterised as some macro and micro aspects of contemporary collective violence events. Here goes. The...
View ArticleAn unexpected honour.
One can take many things as a badge of honour but this was somewhat unexpected. Must have been something that I said. See line 3: https://mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1959715/
View ArticleStill the 5 Eyes Achilles Heel?
The National Cyber Security Centre (NZSC), a unit in the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) dedicated to cyber-security, has released a Review of its response to the 2021 email hacking of...
View ArticleChoosing the lesser evil.
(With Kate Nicholls) Presidential elections were held in Venezuela on July 28th, delivering an apparent victory for the Opposition headed by Edmundo Gonzalez of the Unitary Democratic Platform (PUD)...
View ArticleMedia Link: “A View from Afar” on deterrence versus de-escalation.
In this week’s “A View from Afar” podcast Selwyn Manning and I return to the airwaves to discuss whether deterrence is still a useful concept in international relations and, if so, whether it applies...
View ArticleExcerpting “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies.”
In the late 2000s-early 2010s I was researching and writing a book titled “Security Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Chile, New Zealand and Portugal.” The book was a cross-regional Small-N...
View ArticleSecurity Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt One.
This project analyzes security politics in three peripheral democracies (Chile, New Zealand, Portugal) during the 30 years after the end of the Cold War. It argues that changes in the geopolitical...
View ArticleSecurity Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt Two.
A question of size. Small size generally means large vulnerability. The perception of threat is broader and often more immediate for small countries. The feeling of comparative weakness, of exposure to...
View ArticleSecurity Politics in Peripheral Democracies: Excerpt Three.
The notion of geopolitical “periphery.” The concept of periphery used here refers strictly to what can be called the geopolitical periphery. Being on the geopolitical periphery is an analytic virtue...
View ArticleSecurity Politics in Peripheral Democracies; Excerpt Four.
Internal versus external security. Regardless of who rules, large countries can afford to separate external and internal security functions (even if internal control functions predominate under...
View ArticleMedia Link: “AVFA” on the politics of desperation.
In this podcast Selwyn Manning and I talk about what appears to be a particular type of end-game in the long transition to systemic realignment in international affairs, in which the move to a new...
View ArticleMedia Link: ” A View from Afar” on multidimensional hybrid warfare and the...
This week’s “A View from Afar” podcast addresses the issue of multidimensional hybrid warfare using the Israeli pager attacks in Lebanon as a starting point before moving on to discuss the failures of...
View ArticleMedia Link: AVFA on Israel going rogue.
In this episode of the “A view from Afar” podcast Selwyn Manning and I discuss Israel’s expansion of its war in Lebanon as part of a “six front” strategy that it thinks it can win, focusing on the...
View ArticleMedia Link: “A View from Afar” on the lame duck window of opportunity.
In the last episode of this year Selwyn Manning and I discuss the rebel assault on Aleppo in Syria and tit-for-tat missile exchanges between Russia and Ukraine as illustrative of foreign actor attempts...
View ArticleAbout Syria.
I have been thinking about Syria and coverage of the fall of the Assad regime, and to be honest I believe that there is something missing from the picture being painted, at least in NZ. Although I am...
View ArticleA turn to the Big Stick.
This is from the 36th Parallel social media account (as brief food for thought). We know that Trump is ahistorical at best but he seems to think that he is Teddy Roosevelt and can use the threat of...
View ArticleA reminder about soft power.
Waste and fraud certainly exist in foreign aid programs, but rightwing celebration of USAID’s dismantling shows profound ignorance of the value of soft power (as opposed to hard power) in projecting US...
View ArticleAbout that PLAN flotilla in the Tasman Sea.
Here are some thoughts about the hysteria surrounding a Chinese Peoples Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) flotilla conducting freedom of navigation exercises in the Tasman Sea, including live fire drills. 1)...
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