Rules Based Audio

By Lowy InstituteNews

Rules Based Audio episodes

November 11, 2022 Ali Wyne on great power competition, the United States and China
What does great power competition mean, and where did the concept come from? In this episode of Rules Based Audio, Ben Scott speaks to author and analyst Ali Wyne about great power competition. They discuss whether it is a useful way of thinking about the world, and whether it can help foreign policymakers when they are deciding what to do.

Ali Wyne is a senior analyst with Eurasia Group's Global Macro practice, where he focuses on US-China relations and great-power competition. He is the author, most recently, of America’s Great-Power Opportunity: Revitalising US Foreign Policy to Meet the Challenges of Strategic Competition.
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38 min
August 23, 2022 AUKUS – Are Australian nuclear submarines a dangerous precedent?
Ben Scott talks to Maria Rost Rublee, an Associate Professor of Politics & International Relations at Monash University, and Alan Kuperman, an Associate Professor in the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin, about Australia's plan to acquire nuclear powered submarines, and what that means for nuclear non-proliferation.
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33 min
July 27, 2022 The scramble for information control over Africa
There has been increasing concern that Russia and China are using state-owned media companies, social media campaigns and proxy actors to manipulate public discourse in the global south.

In this episode, Sasha Fegan discusses the influence of disinformation in the media landscape in Africa.

Her guests will talk about how Russia and China calibrate their messaging to different nation states, and how Chinese state-owned media in Africa is replicating and reinforcing Russian narratives around Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Idayat Hassan, is a lawyer, development expert and director of the Center for Democracy and Development in Abuja, Nigeria.

Dani Madrid-Morales, is a lecturer in the Department of Journalism Studies at The University of Sheffield. He is an expert on Africa-China mediated relations, particularly in Kenya and South Africa. His latest book is Disinformation in the Global South.
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33 min
June 21, 2022 What are we getting wrong about online manipulation?
In this episode of Rules Based Audio, Sasha Fegan talks to Carl Miller about online manipulation, disinformation, misinformation and inauthentic behaviour.

We know it is proliferating, and we know it has a corrosive impact on trust and democratic institutions. But are liberal democracies responding in the right ways? Is the solution technical? Educational? Or is it legislative?

Carl Miller is the Research Director at the Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at UK think tank Demos.

Sasha Fegan is a Research Associate in the Australia’s Security and the Rules-Based Order Project at the Lowy Institute.
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38 min
April 01, 2022 Ukraine and the future of the Rules Based Order
Ben Scott discusses the war in Ukraine and international law with Professor Fleur Johns and Dr Eve Massingham. They talk about the laws of war, economic sanctions, cyber operations, neutrality, international humanitarian law, and war crimes.

Professor Fleur Johns is Professor in the Faculty of Law and Justice at the University of New South Wales in Sydney and Visiting Professor at the University of Gothenburg Sweden. She is the author of four books and her fifth, #Help: The Digital Transformation of Humanitarianism and the Remaking of Global Order, will be published this year by Oxford University Press.

Dr Eve Massingham is a Senior Research Fellow with the School of Law at The University of Queensland where she focuses on how the law constrains and enables autonomous functions of military platforms, systems and weapons. She has also worked for the International Red Cross and served as an Australian Army Reserve Officer. Dr Massingham is the co-editor of Ensuring Respect for International Humanitarian Law (Routledge, 2020).

Read more about this episode at https://www.lowyinstitute.org/publications/rules-based-audio-ukraine-and-future-rules-based-order
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31 min
February 28, 2022 Mick Ryan on Russian military strategy in Ukraine
The Russian invasion of Ukraine continues to surprise Western analysts, many of whom thought President Vladimir Putin’s incendiary rhetoric and troop build-up along Ukraine’s border were a bluff.

In recent days the surprises have kept coming – despite Russia’s encirclement of Kyiv, its air and ground forces appear to have been far less successful than expected. Likewise, Russia’s much-feared skills in information operations have been no match for Ukraine’s deft control of the propaganda narrative. In turn, this has helped harden Western resolve against Russia and inspired Sweden and Finland to pursue NATO membership.

What is Putin’s endgame and how serious is his threat of nuclear escalation?

In this episode of Rules Based Audio, Sasha Fegan speaks to Major General Mick Ryan about Russia’s military strategy in Ukraine, and his new book War Transformed: The Future of Twenty-First-Century Great Power Competition and Conflict.
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28 min
October 28, 2021 In Conversation with Hilary Charlesworth
Ben Scott talks to Professor Hilary Charlesworth. Professor Charlesworth is a distinguished international lawyer who has been nominated for election to the International Court of Justice. The election will take place at the United Nations in New York on 5 November. Professor Charlesworth has served as a judge ad hoc on the court twice before. She is a Laureate Professor at the Melbourne University Law School and a Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University. In this conversation with Ben Scott, Professor Charlesworth discusses the role of the court and her candidacy.
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33 min
September 17, 2021 In Conversation with Shirley Scott
In this episode of Rules Based Audio, Ben Scott talks to Professor Shirley Scott, Professor of International Law and International Relations at UNSW, Canberra. She is the immediate past president of the Asian Society of International Law and was the first Australian to hold that position. Shirley has pioneered an understanding of international law as ideology and is the author of many books as well as the influential 2018 essay, The Decline of International Law as a Normative Ideal. They discuss the complex relationships between the rules-based order, international law, power and ideology.
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29 min
August 19, 2021 In Conversation with John Ikenberry
In an increasingly contested world, basic questions about how the world works, and how it should work, are being asked anew. In Rules Based Audio we will be posing those questions to some of the world’s leading thinkers and practitioners. This podcast series is part of the Lowy Institute’s Rules-Based Order project.

In this episode of Rules Based Audio, Ben Scott talks to John Ikenberry, Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. Amongst foreign policy thinkers, practitioners and students, John’s name is synonymous with liberal internationalism. He is the author of eight books, all exploring the idea of liberal internationalism, the concept of the liberal world order and America’s place in it. His latest book is A World Safe for Democracy: Liberal Internationalism and the Crises of Global Order.
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36 min
December 16, 2019 Exporting Digital Authoritarianism, with Alina Polyakova
Digital authoritarianism is the use of digital technology by authoritarian regimes to monitor, manipulate and control both domestic and foreign populations. China and Russia are at the forefront, representing two distinct but related models. There are many dimensions to it, from the recent revelations China is developing facial recognition technology to sort people by ethnicity, to Russia’s attempts to create a sovereign Russian internet.

Digital authoritarianism is reshaping the power balance between democracies and illiberal states. What can democracies do to level the playing field, without sacrificing core democratic values?

My guest on this episode of Rules Based Audio, Dr Alina Polyakova, is the founding director of the Project on Global Democracy and Emerging Technology at the Brookings Institution. And she is the co-author of a recent paper, ‘Exporting Digital Authoritarianism’, published by Brookings.

She argues that the west must start conceiving of the democratic digital domain as an asset in this contest, one that must be be protected and defended – but also one that’s more resilient than we think.

Rules Based Audio is a half-hour, fortnightly podcast covering stories from the cracks and faultlines in the global order, hosted by Kelsey Munro and powered by the Lowy Institute. This is our last episode for 2019 and my last episode as host. Rules Based Audio will be back in 2020. Thanks for listening!
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32 min

About Rules Based Audio

From the publisher's feed

Welcome to Rules Based Audio, a Lowy Institute podcast. In this series we explore the rules based order, a concept that is ever more prominent in debates about how the world works and how it should…