Australia's current role in Afghanistan is the latest experience in a long history of involvement in counterinsurgency conflicts or 'small wars'. Such commitments may begin as wars of choice, but history suggests they can turn into wars of necessity, and their costs and political impact can be large. In this Lowy Institute Paper, Mark O’Neill...

The quest for democracy shouldn’t obscure the real lessons of Iraq, argues Clive Hamilton.

This e-Brief provides an overview of US-Iraq relations since the Gulf War and the US case for "regime change" against Saddam Hussein. US domestic and international reactions and related issues are highlighted with useful links to key documents and statements.

War is so obviously a bad thing that pacifism, which is defined by its hostility to war, would seem, on the face of it, to be a morally attractive position. Yet recent philosophical discussions of pacifism have tended to be unsympathetic, if not downright dismissive. In this paper Andrew Alexandra aims to demonstrate that pacifism...

This 1981 report provides a rare frank, detailed, comprehensive and accessible account of the major national security questions facing Australia, at a time when such discussions were often confined to closed bureaucracies.