Young Global Scholars Group

In his address to the Munich security conference (his first international speech as president), President Biden told European leaders the US wants to “earn back our position of trusted leadership.” In a clean break from the isolationist policies of his predecessor,...

How is the emerging global community to deal with alleged war crimes, within the context of contemporary international law and national political integrity?   This is one of the more critical questions of the early 21st century. War crimes are many, and...

The weak-kneed efforts at strengthening global security in recent decades are desperately in need of a reset. Nowhere is this more palpably obvious than in Afghanistan, along of course with Syria, Yemen and Libya. But let me focus on Afghanistan, which is my country...

Extremism, in all its forms – political, religious, ethnic, gender, generational – is, in short, an extreme version of a belief system. It can be promoted peacefully, and within the normal bounds of freedom of speech.  And it can, of course, spill over into hate...

In 2018 Cambridge Analytica harvested millions of Facebook profiles, including 64,000 New Zealanders for political campaign purposes, using the information without consent. The scandal illustrated how big data can put the right to privacy at risk.   This may have...

The best conflict is one that doesn’t happen. This blog argues that the best global approach (short of a full-fledged military intervention) to prevent a potential conflict from developing into all-out conflict is early intervention. The blog analyses a counterfactual...

The United Nations (UN) is a key actor in the international sphere, and plays an integral role in the maintenance of peace and security across the world. One of the key mechanisms for doing so are its peacekeeping operations, which see peacekeepers inserted into some...