By Robbin Laird There are dates that carry weight beyond the events that fall on them, and September 11 is one of them. For anyone born in the last sixty years, the date needs no elaboration: it means the destruction of the Twin Towers, the wounding of the Pentagon, the…
The first installment in this series on General Pasquale Preziosa’s foreword to The Unfinished Pillar takes up the argument that gives the book its title and its sharpest edge. The unfinished character of the European pillar, Preziosa argues, was never primarily an institutional story. It is a story about the…
By Robbin Laird There are books whose relevance to the moment of publication is a matter of good timing, and there are books whose relevance was built in from the start because the argument they’re built on never stopped being tested. The Unfinished Pillar belongs to the second category. The…
Our newly published book, The Australian, Brazilian, and Chinese Dynamic: An Inquiry into the Evolving Global Order, argues that Australia and Brazil are authentic Global South actors, commodity-exporting democracies shaped over centuries by colonial extraction and structural dependence, a category entirely different from authoritarian powers such as China Russia which…
By Robbin Laird When the Valdai Discussion Club opens its twenty-third annual meeting on September 28, it will not be on the Black Sea coast. Invitations initially named Sochi, but organizers told participants in late August that the meeting was moving to the Moscow region, and two sources told the…
Maritime domain awareness, the ability to know what is happening at sea and to understand what it means, has been redefined over the past three decades. The concept itself has not changed much on paper: the International Maritime Organization still defines it as the effective understanding of anything associated with…
Energy security is a key challenge facing Australia as an island continent at the bottom of the Asia Pacific region. According to the Australian Defence Minister. “It is an area of enabling capability within Defence that has been significantly underfunded in recent years, and it is one which this white…
Recently, our partner defenceWeb looked at the evolving challenges of maritime defense and security seen from South Africa.
