Author : East Asia Forum

Since the turn of the 21st century, the Asia-Pacific region has become central to Indian strategic thinking. The Act East policy, unveiled by the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi...

Australia’s 2016 Defence White Paper (DWP) directs Australia’s strategic attention towards maritime Southeast Asia. While the 2009 and 2013 Defence White Papers also focused on this region, the 2016...

In February 1987, a pair of junior American diplomats arrived in pre-democratic Mongolia to lay the groundwork for establishing a US embassy — no simple task in Ulaanbaatar, the...

South Korea is undergoing rapid demographic ageing. Only 551,000 Koreans or 2.9 percent of the population were aged 65 or above when the Korean War broke out in 1950....

Vietnam will hold its parliamentary election in May 2016. The three key positions of president, prime minister and chairperson of the National Assembly will all be elected. However, perhaps...

The Hobbesian tones of Australia’s new Defence White Paper of 2016 (DWP16) have been noted already and most have come to see the concepts and capability proposals outlined in...

The unthinkable is happening in Malaysian politics. Former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad and his jailed former deputy Anwar Ibrahim have joined hands in a seemingly impossible alliance to unseat...

It has been more than 20 years since former Australia Prime Minister Paul Keating declared that ‘no country is more important to Australia than Indonesia. If we fail to...

South Asia is one of the least economically integrated regions in the world. At 5 percent, trade shares among South Asian neighbours are lower than trade shares among Sub-Saharan...

In recent years, Southeast Asia has experienced what are, if viewed in historical perspective, three ‘miracles’: economic growth, the disappearance of mass atrocities, and efforts to promote regional peace...