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1732. Iraqi-Russian Relations amidst US Security-Focused Engagement
- Author:
- Abbas Kadhim
- Publication Date:
- 10-2019
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Atlantic Council
- Abstract:
- Iraq has a long and complicated history with the United States, and security and military engagements have been the primary driver of the relationship. Iraq’s relations with Russia, on the other hand, have been more transactional and economically-oriented. At a time when there are signs of US disengagement from the Middle East and North Africa while Russian and Chinese activities in the region are increasing, it is useful to trace the past US and Russian strategies in Iraq and assess how the United States could better tailor its strategy toward Iraq in the future in order to achieve durable outcomes that would bring benefits to both sides such as a responsive government, a thriving economy, and security. This chapter is part of an edited volume that gathers analysis on the policy choices pursued by Washington and Moscow in the MENA region and develops case studies of the two powers’ policies in the countries beset by major crises.
- Topic:
- Security, Foreign Policy, Defense Policy, and Bilateral Relations
- Political Geography:
- Russia, Iraq, Eurasia, Middle East, North America, and United States of America
1733. Ocean horizons: Strengthening maritime security in Indo-Pacific island states
- Author:
- Anthony Bergin, David Brewster, and Aakriti Bachhawat
- Publication Date:
- 12-2019
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
- Abstract:
- The report examines how Pacific island countries (PICs) and Indian Ocean island states (IO island states) are managing and prioritising their maritime security challenges. These islands, which we call the ‘Indo-Pacific island states’, face an intricate offshore tapestry. In particular, this report suggests that most of the maritime threats and risks facing the Indo-Pacific island states are increasing. That’s in part because of the general lack of effective maritime security identified in this report. The report describes the current geopolitical environment of the Indo-Pacific island states and how we should understand maritime security in the context of island states. It examines the core maritime security concerns of the PICs and IO island states and considers points of commonality and divergence in island state perspectives on maritime security and major-power competition. The report provides key recommendations for Indo-Pacific island states and for countries, such as Australia and its partners, that wish to more effectively engage with the island states on maritime security.
- Topic:
- Security, Foreign Policy, Defense Policy, National Security, and Maritime
- Political Geography:
- Australia, Asia-Pacific, and Indian Ocean
1734. Augmenting maritime domain awareness in southeast Asia: Boosting national capabilities in the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia
- Author:
- Peter Chalk
- Publication Date:
- 12-2019
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
- Abstract:
- Promoting maritime domain awareness (MDA) has become an increasingly high priority area for many Southeast Asian states. The rising salience of a regional maritime ‘disorder’ that’s increasingly being shaped by the influence of so-called ‘grey area’ phenomena, combined with a growing awareness that these non-state challenges can be dealt with only through a whole-of-government approach, has prompted several regional countries to create multiagency operational fusion centres (FCs) to mitigate these dangers. Foremost among those initiatives have been the Philippine National Coast Watch Center (NCWC, established in 2012), the Thai Maritime Enforcement Command Centre (MECC, set up in 2019) and the Indonesian Sea Security Coordination Centre (Baden Keamanan Laut Prebublik Indonesia, BAKAMLA, formed in 2014). While the specific drivers for the creation of these organisations has differed according to the conditional contexts of the three countries concerned, they have all faced a similar set of challenges that has stymied progress in providing a truly coordinated approach to maritime security (MARSEC) threats.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, National Security, Maritime, and Defense Industry
- Political Geography:
- Indonesia, Philippines, Thailand, and Southeast Asia
1735. Rethinking Taiwan policy: History, politics, ideology
- Author:
- Mark Harrison
- Publication Date:
- 12-2019
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
- Abstract:
- The issue of Taiwan has long been one of the most intractable and multilayered in regional political, defence, foreign affairs, trade and security policy. Taiwan is claimed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as part of its territory, and, under its official title of the Republic of China (ROC), Taiwan is limited by Beijing to a marginal position in the international system. Political relations between Taipei and Beijing are fractious, but the Taiwan Strait is at the same time a critical link in global supply chains, carrying hundreds of billions of dollars of cross-strait trade in goods and services and investments every year. Hanging over this political and economic relationship is the constant threat of military action from Beijing. Taiwan policy in Australia and internationally is structured around the ‘resolution’ of the Taiwan issue, either through a negotiated settlement or through large-scale military action by the PRC. Australia should reassess its understanding of the Taiwan issue so as to identify alternative scenarios and calibrate its responses accordingly.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Politics, Territorial Disputes, History, and Ideology
- Political Geography:
- China, Taiwan, and Asia
1736. Mapping more of China's tech giants: AI and surveillance
- Author:
- Danielle Cave, Fergus Ryan, and Vicky Xiuzhong Xu
- Publication Date:
- 11-2019
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
- Abstract:
- ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre has updated the public database that maps the global expansion of key Chinese technology companies. This update adds a further 11 companies and organisations: iFlytek, Megvii, ByteDance (which owns TikTok), SenseTime, YITU, CloudWalk, DJI, Meiya Pico, Dahua, Uniview and BeiDou. Our public database now maps 23 companies and organisations and is visualised through our interactive website, Mapping China’s Technology Giants. The website seeks to give policymakers, academics, journalists, government officials and other interested readers a more holistic picture of the increasingly global reach of China’s tech giants. The response to phase 1 of this project—it quickly became one of ASPI’s most read products—suggests that the current lack of transparency about some of these companies’ operations and governance arrangements has created a gap this database is helping to fill. This update adds companies working mainly in the artificial intelligence (AI) and surveillance tech sectors. SenseTime, for example, is one of the world’s most valuable AI start-ups. iFlytek is a partially state-owned speech recognition company. Meiya Pico is a digital forensics and security company that created media headlines in 2019 because of its monitoring mobile app MFSocket.1 In addition, we’ve added DJI, which specialises in drone technologies, and BeiDou, which isn’t a company but the Chinese Government’s satellite navigation system. We also added ByteDance—an internet technology company perhaps best known internationally for its video app, TikTok, which is popular with teenagers around the world. TikTok is also attracting public and media scrutiny in the US over national security implications, the use of US citizens’ data and allegations of censorship, including shadow banning (the down-ranking of particular topics via the app’s algorithm so users don’t see certain topics in their feed). Company overviews now include a summary of their activities in Xinjiang.2 For some companies, including ByteDance and Huawei, we are including evidence of their work in Xinjiang that has not being reported publicly before. For most of these companies, the surveillance technologies and techniques being rolled out abroad—often funded by loans from the Export–Import Bank of China (China Eximbank)3—have long been used on Chinese citizens, and especially on the Uyghur and other minority populations in Xinjiang, where an estimated 1.5 million people are being arbitrarily held in detention centres.4 Some of these companies have actively and repeatedly obscured their work in Xinjiang, including in hearings with foreign parliamentary committees. This project now includes evidence and analysis of those activities in order to foster greater transparency about their engagement in human rights abuses or ethically questionable activities in the same way Western firms are held to account by Western media and civil society actors, as they should be. In this report, we include a number of case studies in which we delve deeper into parts of the dataset. This includes case studies on TikTok as a vector for censorship and surveillance, BeiDou’s satellite and space race and CloudWalk’s various AI, biometric data and facial recognition partnerships with the Zimbabwean Government. We also include a case study on Meiya Pico’s work with China’s Public Security Ministry on Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) aid projects in Southeast Asia and Central Asia. Those projects include the construction of digital forensics labs and cyber capacity training, including for police forces across Asia. We have also investigated the role that foreign investment plays in the global expansion of some of these companies, particularly in China’s surveillance and public security sector.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Cybersecurity, Surveillance, Artificial Intelligence, and Emerging Technology
- Political Geography:
- China and Asia-Pacific
1737. Australia-Afghanistan relations: Reflections on a half-century
- Author:
- William Maley
- Publication Date:
- 09-2019
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)
- Abstract:
- It is now fifty years since diplomatic relations were formally established between the Commonwealth of Australia and the Kingdom of Afghanistan. Superficially, the two countries might seem to have little in common. Nonetheless, there is more to unite Australians and Afghans than one might think at first glance. Even before the Australian colonies federated, Afghans made their way to Australia to provide transport by camel in Australia’s inland. By the time of the 2016 census 46,800 Afghans were living in Australia. And since 2001, more than 25,000 members of the Australian Defence Force have served in Afghanistan. Recent years have brought Australia and Afghanistan far closer to each other than ever before in their history. Professor William Maley explores some of the key dimensions of the development of this relationship. Since 2001, the state-to-state relationship has developed additional dimensions – diplomatic, military, developmental, and humanitarian – which have been augmented by significant people-to-people ties despite all the difficulties that surround travel between the two countries. Yet for all this, what ultimately binds the two countries together is that Australia has a strong interest in seeing the transition in Afghanistan that was inaugurated in 2001 – a complex mixture of statebuilding, institutional development, economic change, civil society activism, and enhancement of human rights and freedoms – continue down the broad path that was laid out at that time. A failure in Afghanistan is likely to involve serious adverse strategic consequences for Australia.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Diplomacy, History, and Bilateral Relations
- Political Geography:
- Afghanistan, South Asia, Australia, and Australia/Pacific
1738. Disrupted: The Migration Issue
- Author:
- Katie Washington
- Publication Date:
- 03-2019
- Content Type:
- Special Report
- Institution:
- Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy
- Abstract:
- This issue focuses on the theme of Immigration, Refugees & Trafficking, which was chosen by our members and supporters. Our contributors challenge the problematic, and often racist, Western-centric approaches to immigration, refugees, and trafficking, and unpack the complex connections between gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality that are embedded in the lived realities of the people impacted directly and heavy-handedly by current foreign policy on the issue. It brings together the voices of academics, practitioners, students, and individuals who are currently living in “perpetual wait” waiting for asylum claims to be formalised. Alongside our written contributions, you will find artwork and poetry engaging with this theme. A feminist foreign policy brings all voices to the table, through whichever medium they choose to express themselves, challenging the academic and un -inclusive paradigm it is embedded in. However, the views and opinions expressed in this issue represent the respective contributors and not CFFP as an organisation; our goal is simply providing a platform for those voices, particularly those that have previously been marginalised, for open discussion and debate. After much consideration, we have recently made several changes to Disrupted, namely transitioning from a print-journal to a digital journal. You will still be able to purchase copies of the journal at our events, but to improve accessibility, we have decided to manage Disrupted primarily online. This means that we can focus our efforts on reaching more people, readers and contributors, and ensuring we are providing a much-needed feminist critique to foreign policy. Thank you for supporting this publication. Disrupted is a volunteer-run CFFP UK project and in alignment with our overarching organisational goals, we are proud to lead the way in making foreign policy more feminist, more transparent, and more intersectional. With your support, we’re amplifying a different and more nuanced conversation that can better inform policy decisions and begin to alleviate global inequality. We hope you enjoy and learn from this journal, but we also urge you to consider contributing to our next issue. From articles to artwork, we are always looking for new contributors and we are eager to hear (and see) new voices and fresh perspectives.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Gender Issues, Migration, Women, and Feminism
- Political Geography:
- Global Focus
1739. The New-Old Elites and their Relations with the EU: The Cases of Egypt and Tunisia
- Author:
- Cengiz Günay
- Publication Date:
- 04-2019
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Austrian Institute for International Affairs (OIIP)
- Abstract:
- Tunisia and Egypt are two countries that have experienced the fall of longstanding authoritarian leaders. Transitions in both countries then took entirely different directions. This paper deals with the question of whether and how political change in the two countries has affected their foreign policy-making towards the European Union (EU). Building on a liberal international relations (IR) perspective and elite theory, the paper focuses on the politically relevant elites (PRE). PRE shape discourses and influence decision-making processes. Building on the assumption that the composition and discourses of the PRE influence policies and positions towards the EU, the paper analyses the structure of the elites and their disputes over power resources.
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, Democratization, European Union, and Elites
- Political Geography:
- Europe, North Africa, Egypt, Tunisia, and Mediterranean
1740. The Baltic Sea Region after the Ukraine Crisis and Trump: A Russian perspective
- Author:
- Alexander Sergunin
- Publication Date:
- 06-2019
- Content Type:
- Working Paper
- Institution:
- Danish Institute for International Studies (DIIS)
- Abstract:
- This DIIS Report identifies Russian national interests in the BSR (Baltic Sea Region) and discusses whether there are continuities and changes in these interests in the post-Crimea era. The Russian discourse on the BSR is explored, including Russian foreign policy schools and official foreign policy and national security doctrines. Different aspects of Moscow’s BSR strategy - political, economic, sub-regional, environmental and military - are examined. The chances for Russia’s participation in the BSR multilateral cooperative framework are assessed. This DIIS Report authored by Alexander Sergunin, professor at St. Petersburg State University, is an outgrowth of a defence and security project on 'The Baltic Sea Region after Crimea and Trump' with Sergunin and Hans Mouritzen, senior researcher at DIIS, as participants (see also DIIS Working Paper 2019:1).
- Topic:
- Foreign Policy, National Security, and Geopolitics
- Political Geography:
- Russia, Eurasia, Crimea, and Baltic Sea