Democratic Transition in the Congo

By treating the Congo as something to govern rather than something to own, Joseph Kabila has already differentiated himself from his predecessors. The most important thing he can do for his country now, is to leave quietly when his time is up.

Why the Armenian Genocide Matters!

As long as the Armenian genocide remains forgotten, and as long as justice is allowed to be contingent upon the cooperation and goodwill of the perpetrators, we must accept that we are creating an international culture of impunity: an environment where human rights and moral responsibility can be taken à la carte, and an environment that rather than protecting against genocide, actually cultivates it.

WikiLeaks: Losing Its Religion

Whether you like them or hate them, WikiLeaks stood for something important – after publishing the stolen Sony emails they have shown that this is no longer the case.

Our Failure to Think Morally about Radicalisation

We are simply too accustomed to the idea of self-hatred, and too accepting of blame for the violence of others. When someone attacks us, our first instinct is to think that we must have brought it on ourselves, that we must have done something provocative. So we accept the self-professed narratives of those who wish us harm, and we buy into their claims of grievance, rather than viewing their violence as it should be: unjustified, self-created, and mitigated by nothing.

Sympathising with Monsters – The David Hicks Case

It is a strange moment when you begin to feel compassion for someone whom you otherwise consider to be a moral monster. We ordinarily prefer our moral decision-making to be a fairly easy and straightforward process, yet such moments make this impossible. This is certainly the case when it comes to considering the now-exonerated, former Guantanamo Bay prisoner, David Hicks. The nature of his incarceration, the plea-deal he signed, the artificial legal case against him, all demand from us a semblance of sympathy – sympathy, that his support for terrorism makes unbearable.

Tony Abbott – A Terrible Week

Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott began this week under attack from his own political party. To try and assuage those Liberal members who wanted him removed, he presented himself as a “chastened” man: “I’ve listened, I’ve learned and I’ve changed”. As this week comes to an end, very few of his colleagues are likely to still believe him.

The Climate of Moral Responsibility

Imagine yourself as a murderer: as someone who, both unprovoked, and with foresight, has just brutally killed your neighbour. There ought to be little doubt as to what moral responsibility you bear for this crime. Anything short of turning yourself into the police, admitting guilt, and accepting a criminal punishment that corresponds to the severity of the harm you have caused, would be a moral injustice.

Putting Shin Dong-hyuk’s Lies into Context

New material on North Korea rarely lives up to the basic standards for newspaper publishing. However, because there is so little information that meets such a standard, and because North Korea itself holds such a high level of public intrigue, the tendency is to accept a lower standard of truth. And, perhaps there is no way around this situation. North Korea are not about to start issuing visas to foreign researchers, with the promise of unrestricted access to both sensitive information and local communities.

The Rise of Chinese Humanitarianism

The decision over whether China would be an integrated member of the international community had been made for them. All future Chinese humanitarian efforts would now be judged, not by previous Chinese behaviour, nor by decades’ old conflicts, but rather by the present-day compassion that other nations had shown them.

Curing Ebola with Thomas Pogge

For all the harm that has been caused, and for all the harm that it is still likely to be caused in the near future, the current Ebola pandemic in Western Africa is merely a symptom of a much larger structural injustice concerning the global manufacture of pharmaceuticals – For this, Thomas Pogge has a solution.

The Inequality Fallacy Behind the G20 Protests

The G20 is far from being an ideal organization. And its protesters have plenty to be concerned about. But the fear that globalization is increasing global economic inequality, and thereby harming the global poor, should not be one of these concerns.

Fear of Offense: Pakistan’s Blasphemy Laws

This fear of religious offense indicates an insecurity on behalf of Pakistan’s religious establishment. And it is here that the laws begin to make some intrinsic sense. Blasphemy in Pakistan has been conflated to the sort of deeply existential, and agency-removing threat, as that of shouting ‘fire’ in a theatre. A belief that if blasphemy were to be allowed to continue unchecked, then it would precipitate the collapse of Pakistani society – this is what religious immaturity looks like.

Friends Without Benefits: The US-Turkish Alliance

At a time when humanitarian intervention was developing into a normative standard above and beyond a legal principle, highlighted by the “illegal but legitimate” intervention in Kosovo, Turkey was afforded a privileged position of international immunity. While behaving in a manner that ordinarily ought to have defined itself as an outlier nation and a candidate for international military intervention, Turkey not only managed to avoid such attention, but also to remain as an ally in both name and substance to most of the international community. This appears to be a contradiction in nature that Turkey has failed to grow out of.

The Academic Starvation of North Korean Scholars

Due to the nature of the subject matter, North Korean academia is plagued by an ongoing deficit of substantive and indicative detail. However, operating within an academic environment starved of information does not justify a regression into speculation in order to fill the knowledge gaps. Nor does it justify the public comments of academics who are devoid of specific insight on current events, yet nonetheless believe that through vacant and superficial statements, they can catch onto the coat tails of tabloid speculation and increase their own public profile. North Korean scholars need to embrace the fact that not all new events within North Korea require their voice – that their silence does not tacitly de-validate their existence.

Political Sleepwalking

Rather than supplying Tony Abbott and the Coalition with a first-hand cautionary tale, it seems that the failure of their predecessors merely left the current government with a false sense of accomplishment: a permeating sense of hubris masking a vacuous political environment. Two more years of the status quo will leave the Coalition exactly where the Labor Party found itself at the last election – void of political capital, with a public that refuses to be re-engaged, and heading toward a heavy electoral defeat.

The Rise of Kurdistan

Explained by Harvard professor Michael Ignatieff in his seminal analysis of nationalism ‘Blood and Belonging’, “statelessness is a state of mind, and it is akin to homelessness”. Statelessness for Kurdistan has meant an existence denied of self-identity, and a life devoid of security. It is ahistorical to imagine that Kurdish national belonging can in any way be satisfied without a corresponding, and internationally, recognised state. Despite the coming the events, what is guaranteed is that Kurdish nationalism will not diminish, and sooner or later will need to be fulfilled by statehood – the rise of Islamic State, and the associated confluence of events seems to be just the moment for that fulfilment.

Recognising the real enemy in Gaza

Although the Israeli military offensive in Gaza has been enormously destructive, and has inflicted intolerably high levels of human suffering, Israel has also gone to considerable effort to avoid civilian casualties through a series of multifaceted early-warning mechanisms for the residents of Gaza - much of which have become a source of derision and satire in the international media. Though, if we are comfortable in criticising Israel for causing civilian deaths, then it is only reasonable and intellectually honest to credit Israel where and when they seek to avoid causing civilian deaths.

Another Balkans Unfolding in Africa?

Our emotional attachment to other human beings diminishes as our concentric circles of identity and belonging also diminish. As such, the Central African Republic is just too far removed from our moral horizons to evoke meaningful sympathy. As natural as this might seem, it is a stance that delineates moral concern in no less an arbitrary manner than the Seleka or Anti-balaka. It legitimises chance of birth as a barrier to moral obligation, it narrows sympathy to commonality and circumstance, it destroys all hope of a truly cosmopolitan human ethic – it means that, insofar as they occur in the Central African Republic, mass atrocities and immeasurable human suffering are easy to ignore.

Embracing the Arrogance of Kevin Rudd

If this sort of successful personality does not flourish in politics, if these individuals that drive the private sector are not to be found driving our country - then it is our failing, not theirs. It is to our detriment that we cannot climb above the trivial and the petty, that we cannot discern the message from the medium. Kevin Rudd was a rare political mind, the like of which is no longer noticeably present in the Australian parliament. If all we can remember him for is his personality, then we are creating a barrier for future political talent, pushing young professionals into alternative career paths where they can be judged on results, rather than likability. By vilifying the arrogance of Kevin Rudd, we are tacitly devaluing the qualities of courage, determination and independent thought – we are setting a dangerous standard for Australian politics.

We must stop defending Islam

Our politicians must stop acting liking over-protective parents, jumping blindly to the defence of Islam – and by doing so, inflicting more harm than good. When a parent instinctively defends a child, it’s a psychological response to a feeling that the child is incapable of self-defending or too young for personal growth. And as such, our response to Islamic terrorism is all too often an insult to the faith itself – a faith that needs to, and is more than capable of, defending itself.