In the wake of terror attacks that rocked the city of Surabaya in May 2018, Indonesia’s parliament has unanimously passed an amendment to its antiterrorism law. Initially proposed in 2016, the law was put on hold after the parliament members could not agree on what constitutes terrorism. President Joko Widodo (Jokowi) had threatened to issue… Read More Why Indonesia Needs More Than Just A Tougher Anti Terror Law
On January 24, 2018, Francis Fukuyama, a world-renowned political scientist, spoke to some few hundred students, faculty and public audience at the University of British Columbia (UBC). The talk was part of the Liu Institute’s Phil Lind Initiative. I had the opportunity to attend the event and here are highlights from the event. What is… Read More Reflection on Fukuyama: the Unravelling of the Liberal World Order and the Rise of Populism
Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Russian Federation has implemented an array of economic reforms that transformed the country from a centrally planned economy to a market-based economy. With a population of over 144 million and a GDP per-capita of $24,026, Russia is a significant actor in the global economy (World… Read More A Brief Look at Russia’s Economic Profile
(Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met today with Indonesian President Joko Widodo on the margins of the G20 Summit in Turkey – source: Prime Minister’s Office of Canada archive) Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s visit to China is an important foreign policy move, but there is one country in the Asia Pacific that Canada should not ignore.… Read More The Underwhelming Canada-Indonesia Relationship
China is poised to become the world’s largest economy and foreign aid donor. As the Trump administration is planning to cut back its foreign aid budget, China is expanding its global development footprint. As a recipient of foreign aid just a few decades ago, China’s growing presence in other countries is astonishing. The latest report on … Read More Understanding China’s Foreign Aid
What is the Rohingya Crisis? The ongoing violence that is taking place in Myanmar has turned into the world’s fastest-developing refugee crisis. More than 420,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled to Bangladesh in the last three weeks, 240,000 of them are children. In his public statement, one UN official called this crisis “ethnic cleansing.” The situation… Read More ASEAN and the Myanmar Conundrum
In the past few decades, scholars and policy experts around the world have invested significant amount of time and resources in finding solutions to water scarcity and lack of sanitation. Globally, there are 1.2 billion people who do not have access to clean water and approximately 2.5 billion people do not have access to proper… Read More Why Canadians must learn about Global Water Scarcity
Luthfi Dhofier 