Bringing guns back to the Solomons, Alpers argues, would reverse a life-saving regional trend begun in Bougainville, and seen most recently in East Timor, where the first Australian peacekeeping commander declared: 'We will be disarming everybody in Dili'. Moreover, across 20 Pacific nations, and now in East Timor, the most destructive firearms used in crime...

Fiji has now experienced four coups in the past 20 years, after two military takeovers in quick succession in 1987 and one civilian-led coup in 2000. Many commentators believe that Fiji is now in the grip of a dangerous 'coup cycle' that needs to be broken if the country is to have any hope of...

The implications for national security which flow from policy outcomes in the Indigenous domain in Australia, particularly in remote Australia, are more significant than generally recognised. Negative impacts for Australian national security derive from the longstanding economic and social disadvantage faced by Indigenous citizens and the apparent incapacity of governments to both address the disadvantage...

Christian Enemark writes that the expansion of interest and investment in biotechnology in East Asia is being driven mainly by infectious disease challenges, economic interests, and security concerns about biological weapons. A key challenge will be to ensure strict biosafety measures extend to all new laboratories - it would be tragically ironic if a leaky...

After disastrous leakages of government guns in Fiji, the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, Australia led the charge to help island nations lock up their small arms, building secure state armouries across the region. But of late, regional implementation of the UN Programme of Action has lagged.