Speaking at the Australian National University’s annual Australia 360 event last Tuesday, a panel of academics broke down Australia’s key regional relationships, starting in Southeast Asia.
The 2017 QS World University Rankings has seen Politics and International Studies at ANU move from 8th place in the world to 6th place. It is the third year in a row that ANU has been ranked among the top ten for these subjects.
Pacifism, in its most familiar form, is the view that waging war is never morally justified—call this the pacifism-of-acts. This is to be carefully distinguished from what we might call the pacifism-of-institutions. The latter position is not characterised by an absolute objection to waging war with the military resources that we have amassed. It is characterised, rather, by an objection to the amassing of those resources to begin with.
Does acquisition of nuclear weapons by security rivals increase their level of conventional militarised conflict? Some recent theoretical and quantitative work has supported the ‘stability-instability paradox’, the proposition that while nuclear weapons deter nuclear war, they may also provide the conditions for nuclear-armed rivals to increase conventional military conflict with each other. However, other quantitative analysis and qualitative studies of the India–Pakistan dyad have delivered more equivocal assessments.
In this Centre of Gravity paper, Professor Emeritus Rosemary Foot, Senior Research Fellow in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford, outlines the evoluti