Sectarian violence: the threat to Australia

The NSC’s seventh Occasional Paper discussed the threat to Australia from Islamic extremism and returned foreign fighters. Religiously motivated violence has stood as one of Australia’s primary national security concerns for more than a decade. Religious intolerance has led to the deaths of...

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Cyber security: mapping the ethical terrain

In the NSC’s sixth Occasional Paper, the authors demonstrate that managing the risks of cyber security involves trade-offs: between security and privacy; individual rights and the good of a society; and between the types of burdens placed on particular groups in order to protect others. Cyber-...

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Framing the Policy Analysis of OECD and Australian VET Interaction: Two Heuristics of Policy Transfer.

This article considers the recent refurbishment of Australian Vocational Education and Training (VET) policy and highlights the substantial, though unacknowledged, influence of OECD ideas thereupon. It claims that this case study strengthens policy transfer analysts’ understanding of the role of...

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Indonesia at home and abroad - Economics, politics, and security

This series of NSC Issue Briefs investigated the prospects, challenges and opportunities associated with Indonesia’s ascent in the political-security, economic and socio-cultural spheres. As Indonesia’s economy grows, it is increasingly referenced as a rising middle power and there is mounting...

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Terrorism, Ticking Time-Bombs, and Torture: A Philosophical Analysis

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The Greatest Success of British Diplomacy in Southeast Asia in Recent Years? British Diplomacy and the end of Confrontation, 1965-1966

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Unmanned Drones and the Ethics of War

This new Handbook offers a comprehensive overview of contemporary extensions and alternatives to the just war tradition in the field of the ethics of war. The modern history of just war has typically assumed the primacy of four particular elements: jus ad bellum, jus in bello, the state actor, and...

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The South China Sea and Australia’s regional security environment

The NSC’s fifth Occasional Paper is a collection of articles from a research project on the South China Sea disputes undertaken by the NSC in 2013. The South China Sea has been an ongoing maritime dispute for over six decades and in recent years has become one of East Asia’s most dangerous...

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Ethics, Airpower and Coercive Diplomacy

The content of these conference proceedings provides a perspective on the contemporary international security environment through an analysis of the recent events in the Middle East associated with the ‘Arab Spring’ and, more specifically, the use of air power in Libya with the general coercive...

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The end of courage? How drones are undermining military virtue

Uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs or “drones”) can be used to locate and kill an enemy on the other side of the world. An American sitting in the United States, for example, can “fly” a Predator drone over Pakistan. Using the camera mounted on the drone to identify a human target on the ground, the...

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