Category: Media Commentary
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Kishore’s Qatar Kerfuffle: Reviewing the 2017 “Small States” Controversy
In 2017, Kishore Mahbubani used the Qatar-GCC conflict to argue that small states should act as small states to ensure their prosperity and survival. Four years later, we’ll revisit the debate that occurred around that article, with newly available hindsight on the Qatar-GCC conflict.
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Said and Unsaid: An Interpretation of PM Lee’s International Relations
This essay will make an interpretation of how Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong views International Relations through his August 2021 Aspen Security Forum speech and subsequent Q&A.
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To Boldly Go: the Geopolitics of Space Colonization
Space travel. The stuff of dreams, fantasy, and hope. But what would the consequences be when we start colonising the stars?
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Final Pandemic: the Geopolitics of Zombie Outbreaks
This essay will explore how an outbreak of zombies would play out from a geopolitical perspective. Would international communication and cooperation be possible? Could zombies be weaponized? How could the balance of power be changed? Answering these three questions allows us to identify fault lines in our present international structure, giving us a better understanding…
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Abdicating Murder to the Machines: the Politics of Autonomous Killer Robots
This essay shall examine the near-future phenomenon of autonomous killer robots, explore its implications for defence policy, and detail what an “autonomous lethality” revolution could look like using some of the possibilities explored in science fiction.
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Europa Universalis IV: Mechanics and Sources of Political Development
Europa Universalis has a long and storied history among grand strategy gamers. In it, you take a country of your choosing from 1444 to 1821, building it from whatever condition you find it in, to whatever you choose: A mighty Empire, a Merchant Republic, or anything in between. For such a long historical timespan, there…
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DotA: Conceptualizing Tactical and Operational Dynamics of war
Gaming has had a long history in relation to the exploration and teaching of military concepts. While extremely old games such as chess and its global variants have tangential or thematic relationships to war, the first game designed to deliberately represent military concepts was the Prussian Kriegsspiel, a map-based game with two teams and an…
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Sid Meier’s Civilization: Geopolitical Realism vs Constructivism
Sid Meier’s Civilization is a turn-based strategy game about controlling a Civilization from the dawn of history to the modern and future age, incorporating ideas of military conquest, cultural imperialism and economic base building. It is a “4X” game, a term that broadly refers to the core actions of Explore, Expand, Exploit and Exterminate. While…
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