Week 48: Northern Exposure
A dash up to Timor–Leste to deliver a couple of talks, and the humidity testing my clothing resolve.
I happen to find myself in Dili, Timor-Leste, this weekend until Wednesday. I made a last minute dash up here to fill in for my boss at Asia-Pacific Development, Diplomacy and Defence Dialogue to present at the Regional Consultative Group on Humanitarian Civil-Military Coordination, a forum that is focused on disaster response within Asia. I’ll be presenting our options paper Shape a Shared Future with Timor-Leste, and also discuss the idea of “all tools of statecraft” which is a governing perspective of our organisation, and language (and a lens) that has recently been adopted by the Australian government (for which we will take some credit).
Alongside this, I’ll also stop by The Asia Foundation to present some of the responses to the options paper, and to thank them very much. The Asia Foundation were instrumental in organising the basis of the paper, which were consultations with a number of civil society groups in Timor-Leste on what they saw as the priorities and vision for Timor-Leste’s development.
Having arrived Saturday afternoon, I’ve had a little bit of time to do some exploring, although entering into the wet season the weather is rather inhospitable. Both in terms of the heat and humidity, and the afternoon storms that have arrived like clockwork each day I have been here. My insistence on wearing jeans regardless of the temperature probably isn’t helpful in the tropics, yet my legs haven’t seen the sunlight this century and I think it’s too late to start now.
Late this afternoon I tested the limits of my commitment to jeans when a colleague and I climbed up to the Estátua do Cristo Rei de Díli. Although similar to Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro, this statue was not a legacy of Portuguese rule, but rather a gift from the Indonesian government in 1996. It was intended to commemorate 20 years of Indonesian control of Timor-Leste, and maybe sooth wounds caused by a brutal military crackdown on protests earlier that decade. It didn’t work, however, as three years later Timor-Leste voted by close to 80% to seek independence.
This Week’s Reading
Australia-Philippines Launch Joint Naval Patrol In South China Sea
Grant Wyeth – The Diplomat
“Beijing seems determined to bully its way into fully realising its illegitimate claims. This would present an unacceptable loss of sovereignty for the Philippines, and a grave threat to Australia’s economic interests. Given the great number of other countries that have both sovereignty and interests threatened by China’s behaviour, there is the need for heightened naval coordination within the region.
How far China gets in expanding its control over the South China Sea is reliant on how countries like Australia and the Philippines – and, ultimately, the United States – recognises and responds to China’s provocative and illegal actions.
Unfortunately, Beijing largely understands the world through the lens of dominance and submission. The idea of mutually beneficial rules like UNCLOS, or other cooperative actions, is something the Chinese Communist Party struggles to comprehend, instead seeing these things as weakness. Therefore the only effective response from other countries is a demonstration of not being cowered.”
India: Time to Put the Pacific in Indo-Pacific
Grant Wyeth – The Diplomat
“Pacific Island countries – given their geographies – are also often deeply invested in maritime norms around fishing and safety. Although small in landmass, these countries have large exclusive economic zones (EEZs). For India to advance its influence in these areas globally, strong relationships with Pacific Islands are vital. It is Pacific Island countries that are often at the forefront of combating illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, while a current reliance on outdated vessels in the region makes maritime safety a primary concern.
As India’s global reach expands, an understanding of Pacific Island countries as “large ocean states” rather than “small island” ones should place these countries more in New Delhi’s radar. This perspective makes these countries central to many of the current challenges of our era – particularly climate change and maritime security. India’s engagement in the Pacific will also be a demonstration of what kind of great power it seeks to be. States like those in the Pacific are reliant on larger states to commit to the responsibility of mutually beneficial rules and norms. Advancing these rules and norms would buy New Delhi a great deal of goodwill in the Pacific.”
Whatever Your View Of The Israel-Hamas War, Rape Is Rape. To Trivialise It Is To Diminish Ourselves
Gaby Hinsliff – The Guardian
“Rape is a war crime as old as war itself, and yet still often invisible thanks to the stigma surrounding survivors, the practical challenges of gathering evidence under fire, and bleakly, sometimes also the lack of survivors. But in recent years we have at least got better at recognising a pattern deserving of investigation. So when tales of Islamic State fighters raping and enslaving Yazidi women began to surface, or when horrific stories started filtering out from women in occupied Ukraine last year, I don’t remember too many sceptics demanding to see video proof. Nor do I recall many victim support workers responding as the director of the Sexual Assault Centre at the University of Alberta in Canada did after 7 October, by signing an open letter condemning genocide in Gaza that criticised a Canadian politician for repeating “the unverified accusation that Palestinians were guilty of sexual violence”. Only in this conflict have some normally proud progressives seemingly gone out of their way to show they don’t always #BelieveWomen, after all.
But all that said, this isn’t some ghoulish competition, nor a zero-sum game where any empathy shown to dead Israelis somehow leaves less available for Palestinians. Collectively, our international institutions must be capable of keeping more than one wrong in mind at once…A war crime is a war crime, regardless of who committed it. And rape is rape, even when perpetrated against someone you secretly don’t want to think of as a victim.”
Welcome To Our New ‘Bespoke Realities’
David French – New York Times
“The market is very, very happy to provide us with all the misinformation we like. Algorithms recognise our preferences and serve up the next video or article that echoes or amplifies the themes of the first story we clicked. Media outlets and politicians notice the online trends and serve up their own content that sometimes deliberately and sometimes mistakenly reinforces false narratives and constructs alternative realities.
Then, as consumers interact with one another in these like-minded online spaces, they not only form new communities, they also begin shared journeys of discovery that construct, brick by brick, their new political, social and religious realities.
As DiResta writes in her upcoming book, “Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality,” “Bespoke realities are made for — and by — the individual.” Americans experience a “choose-your-own-adventure epistemology: some news outlet somewhere has written the story you want to believe, some influencer is touting the diet you want to live by or demonising the group you also hate.”
In a media ecosystem so large and full of nooks so precisely tuned to your biases and desires, you can always find evidence, real or imagined, to validate your priors. Just as important, you’re also protected from receiving any information that might cause you to question those priors.”
A Trump Dictatorship Is Increasingly Inevitable. We Should Stop Pretending
Robert Kagan – The Washington Post
“If Trump does win the election, he will immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office. Not only will he wield the awesome powers of the American executive — powers that, as conservatives used to complain, have grown over the decades — but he will do so with the fewest constraints of any president, fewer even than in his own first term.
What limits those powers? The most obvious answer is the institutions of justice — all of which Trump, by his very election, will have defied and revealed as impotent. A court system that could not control Trump as a private individual is not going to control him better when he is president of the United States and appointing his own attorney general and all the other top officials at the Justice Department. Think of the power of a man who gets himself elected president despite indictments, courtroom appearances and perhaps even conviction? Would he even obey a directive of the Supreme Court? Or would he instead ask how many armored divisions the chief justice has?”
Tenzin Dorjee & Gyal Lo – Foreign Affairs
“Writing in the 1990s, a chorus of influential Chinese intellectuals blamed the Soviet Union’s disintegration on Moscow’s failure to Russify the cultural and linguistic identities of its autonomous republics. They insisted that China should draw an important lesson from the fragmentation of the multilingual and multicultural Soviet Union, warning that special accommodation for minority nationalities impeded China’s nation-building project. These ideas gained currency with the rise of Xi Jinping in 2012. Under Xi, China has taken a darker and more uncompromising view of the cultural diversity within its borders. Authorities have taken aim not just at those espousing separatist ideologies but also at the separate identities of Tibetans and Uyghurs, the two major ethnic groups with the strongest historical and legal claims to national self-determination. Beijing has rarely let dissent go unpunished, but now it is even criminalising difference.”
I’ll leave you this week with a gorgeous song by a Los Angeles based artist called Anenon (Brian Allen Simon). Combining a bubbling synth with a plaintive saxophone.