Category Regional

Toolkit for a Successful Movement: Digital Tools in Taiwan’s Sunflower Movement

In 2014, hundreds of thousands took to the streets of Taipei to protest the Cross-Strait Services Agreement—a free trade agreement between Taiwan and Beijing—believing it would give the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) too much political and economic control over the island. The protesters wielded social media and the internet to communicate, inform and mobilize. These tools did not work in a vacuum, however, and understanding their interactions with conventional media and offline associations becomes crucial. This paper demonstrates how, through one-way and interactive communications, the participants of the Sunflower Movement used digital tools to realize their demands.

Indonesia’s Global Maritime Fulcrum: Confronting Maritime Irregular Warfare’s Twin Threats in the South China Sea and Maritime Southeast Asia

This paper examines Indonesia’s Global Maritime Fulcrum (GMF) initiative, and its present and future importance, primarily in combating the threat of maritime irregular warfare (MIW) in Southeast Asia. Specifically, it references the rise of grey-zone operations in the South China Sea, particularly by China.

How a Population of 4.2 Billion Could Impact Africa by 2100: The Possible Economic, Demographic, and Geopolitical Outcomes

Since the United Nations released the 2017 edition of its annual World Population Prospects report that predicted a surge in the population of Africa as early as 2050, African leaders and development economists have debated how the continent should prepare. This article analyzes Africa's looming demographic explosion and its likely consequences to help provide the foundational knowledge required for African leaders to make informed policy decisions.

On The Taming of Free Speech

In the 1920s, the ACLU brought civil liberties to the forefront of political discussion. Despite the Bill of Rights being in place, the inability of the judiciary to act on civil liberties caused constraints on the relationship between the state and its citizens. As a result, civil liberties had limited effects on society. As an example of the shifts in civil liberties, Weinrib focuses on the creation of the ACLU as an offshoot of the American Union Against Militarism (AUAM) with an agenda to press the U.S. government for the expansion of civil liberties during WWI. In doing so, the author illustrates the conflict between citizens and the state over civil liberties and the aim of the AUAM to create a balance between social interests and to promote civil liberties.

Confucius Corrects The Communist Party

The return of Confucius as a notable figure in the Chinese government's public presentation has been the subject of substantive scholarly discussion. Unlike much of this work, however, the present paper engages two questions difficult to assess within pure academia: how does the government fare when judged from a traditional perspective it now uses to justify its own actions, and what effects, if any, would closer adherence to that tradition have on modern governance?

Women in Afghanistan: The Forgotten Objective

The US decision to focus on civil rights and institutions as a part of an overall counter-insurgency strategy was not a mistake. The suggestion that the United States has no obligation to address women’s rights in the negotiation process because “such rights have never existed in most of Afghanistan” is an insult to the thousands of women that have sacrificed for the American ideals of freedom and equality pushed by the Allies since 2001.