While increasing tensions in the Indo-Pacific stemming from fears over the PRC’s increasingly threatening posture towards Taiwan, the global economic disorder generated by Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine and approval ratings plummeting for the Kishida administration may preoccupy the Japanese government for the time being, it is highly likely that Japan's Afghanistan policy will be of largely economic, and less geopolitical nature.

The combination of human trafficking and forced labour in Malawi continues to go hand in hand, often overlooked by corporate entities that remain entirely complacent. National implementations aimed to protect victims of these offences have consistently fallen short of genuine protection, bottlenecked by poor training, knowledge and the inconsistent application of key legislation designed to mitigate such damaging crimes.

In 2022, NGO ‘Action on Armed Violence’ (AOAV) released a summary report on the damage explosive weapons caused to civilian life and infrastructure between 2012-2022. During this period, 238,892 civilians were killed or injured in populated areas.

While both sides have outlined proposals for a peace treaty in 1998 and again in 2019, any hope for an agreement over the Kuril Islands was dashed following the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

By forcing a topic to be discussed through consultations whenever a NATO member state feels threatened, Article 4 opens the door for diplomacy, during which decisions can be made that prevent NATO from being pulled into a conflict.

Pakistan, the world’s fifth most populous country, is facing the devastating effects of global warming, but with most parts of the world choosing to ignore the disaster.

The right to life is embodied in international, domestic and regional documents. It protects the right of an individual to be free from arbitrary deprivation of life. However, the term 'arbitrary' ensures us that the right to life is not absolute and can be derogated from.

Throughout the summer of 2022, the military regime in Mali took a series of steps under the influence of Russia to isolate itself from its international military and political partners. This decline in access to hard power was counteracted by the introduction of the Russian private military company the Wagner Group, with its alleged heavy ties to the Kremlin.

The European Union must show it can monitor how legal frameworks and institutions function in practice, and maintain pressure on a member state to implement long-lasting democratic reforms – this will send an important message about upholding the rule of law to all European Union member states, and even the candidate ones.

What sort of trajectory have contemporary Japan-Haiti relations followed, and which factors have defined their development?