Having run the diplomatic equivalent of a cross-country marathon, there was concern that negotiations on the New Urban Agenda might trip at the final hurdle. Three days of talks were needed, with negotiations continuing long into the night before agreement was reached on Saturday night in New York.

The agenda is a non-binding international...

There are more displaced people in the world than ever before. And humanitarian crises across the globe are often in unreachable and volatile places. For example, the United Nations estimates more than 5.47 million internally displaced Syrians...

There are some rather remarkable aspects of the increasingly heated debate about China’s influence in Australia.

First, the idea that China actually has any “soft power” to exert is actually rather surprising. Soft power, after all, is something that has generally been associated with our cousins in the US, not in...