Outer space infrastructure forms the foundation of modern civilian and military life. From a civilian perspective, the industry is valued at nearly $360 billion and enables everything from ATM transactions to navigation. From a military perspective, global reliance on space assets is even more alarming. Space infrastructure supports virtually all warfighting efforts, including intelligence, surveillance,…

The dust has barely settled on the battlefields and the ink has hardly dried on the recent ceasefire agreement, but the clear winner of the brief, but bloody, conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh is already apparent: great power politics. Certainly, political and military victory clearly belong to Azerbaijan. Their…

As the United States was embroiled in debates about Donald Trump’s supreme court nominee, tensions ran high in Brazil where Bolsonaro nominated a judge to the Supreme Federal Court (the ‘Supremo Tribunal Federal’ also known as the STF). However, while Trump’s pick, Judge Amy Coney Barrett, was criticized for her hard-liner conservatism, Bolsonaro’s, Judge Kássio…

On October 22nd 2020, the Constitutional Tribunal of Poland (‘Tribunal’) restricted the legality of abortions in Poland. Citing harm to the foetus and irreversible birth effects, the Tribunal held that abortions are unconstitutional in nature. This ruling is the result of a request submitted by a group of 119 members of the parliament to the…

In September, more than half of Australia’s environmental scientists working for the federal and state governments reported that they had been “prohibited from communicating scientific information” to the general public. Research on climate change, the extinction of animal species and pollution was all being suppressed. Despite the potential for scientific research to shape national elections,…