Thoughts on security, terrorism and human rights, with a focus on Australia. Authored by Andrew Zammit.
Michael Burgess, Director-General of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), recently said that while Australia’s National Terrorism Threat Level remained at “Probable”, we were now at “the upper level of probable” and that “the environment is a lot hotter”. Such Continue reading
In late March, Levi West and I published an article in West Point s Combating Terrorism Center Sentinel on the Bondi terrorist attack of 14 December 2025: an act of antisemitic mass murder and the first Islamic State inspired mass casualty terror attack on Australian Continue reading
Recently, three agency heads within Australia s national intelligence community (NIC) had made public statements on Australia s threat environment, all highlighting the interplay between international events and local security challenges. Regular readers of this blog may know that I tend to Continue reading
Henry Farrell has a new article in the Annual Review of Political Science, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. The central idea is that: Political scientists might engage AI by investigating its relationship to governance. How does AI affect Continue reading
There’s no shortage of valuable commentary on Israel’s devastating military attacks on Iran, Iran’s far less devastating response, and the potential for wider war. Rather than seek to add directly to this commentary, I want to share some resources that Continue reading
As I haven’t posted here in a while, this is a quick update about some recent research contributions and commentary. Research on terrorism in transnational mobilisation On 15 September 2024 I had an article published in Studies in Conflict Continue reading
Hew Strachan has often argued that the field of strategic studies tends to use the term “strategy” quite differently to how Carl von Clausewitz did. Strachan’s argument is that in Clausewitz’s time “strategy” was concerned with the art of winning Continue reading
Last November the Australian Journal of Defence and Strategic Studies published a review I wrote of Antulio J Echevarria II s excellent book War’s Logic: Strategic Thought and the American Way of War. However, the review can be quite hard to Continue reading
I’m generally sceptical of claims that Australian intelligence agencies have gained undue influence over policy, such as when Paul Keating claimed that the “nutters” running the agencies were responsible for the deterioration in Australia-China relations. I can remember when the Continue reading
The Journal of Threat Assessment and Management has published a new systematic literature review of violent extremism threat and risk assessment tools, authored by Anna Clesle, Jonas Knäble, and Martin Rettenberger. The main takeaway is that the Terrorist Radicalisation Assessment Continue reading