PODCAST
Asia Rising
by Asia Rising
Asia Rising, the podcast of La Trobe Asia which takes a critical look at the key issues facing Asia's states and societies.
Episodes
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Tibet and Identity
China’s new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress is presented by Beijing as a policy of development and equality. For Tibetans, it represents something very different. In this episode, , joins host Dr Ruth Gamble to discuss what the law means in practice for Tibetan language, culture, and...
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On the Frontlines of the South China Sea
The waters of the South China Sea - including areas the Philippines refers to as the West Philippine Sea - are at the centre of some of the Indo-Pacific’s most important maritime disputes. These waters bring together competing territorial and maritime claims, strategic interests, and the rights…
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From Moscow to the Pacific
Few diplomatic careers span Moscow during the invasion of Ukraine, the remote islands of the Pacific, and Canberra. Germany's Ambassador to Australia, Beate Grzeski, has lived all three - and the thread connecting them says something about how the world is changing. In this episode, Ambassador...
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Misinformation and the Origins of COVID-19
Few events in recent history have generated as much confusion, controversy, and misinformation as the COVID-19 pandemic. Five years on, the origins of COVID remain contested, and the lessons of how that debate played out carry hard implications for global health security for years to come. Guest:...
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The Indian Ocean Region in a Contested World
The Indian Ocean Region (IOR) is fast becoming one of the world's most contested global commons. Home to critical sea lanes, energy and trade corridors, and a growing contest for influence among major and middle powers, traditional security challenges are growing and competing. The region is...
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Gender-Based Violence: A Global Security Issue
Security policy has traditionally been built around the state: its borders, its military capability, its ability to deter external threats. Gender-based violence rarely features, despite being one of the most persistent and predictable forms of harm in the world, in peacetime and exacerbated…
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China's Ageing Crisis and the Role of AI
China is ageing faster than almost any other country in history. Decades of the one-child policy, rising life expectancy, and rapid urbanisation have produced a demographic shift of enormous scale — and with it, a growing burden of age-related conditions that health systems were not designed to...
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Pacific Climate Mobility: Pathways to new Partnerships
For Pacific Island communities, climate change is not a future threat, but a present reality. Intensifying El Niño events, displacement, and compounding security challenges are reshaping the region, even as global attention has been diverted by energy crises and fossil fuel disruption. Climate...
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Cyber Accountability in Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia is one of the fastest-growing digital regions in the world, with an economy projected to exceed $300 billion in gross merchandise value and over 200 million internet users. But that digital growth is outpacing the legal frameworks, institutional capacity, and cybersecurity...
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Australia's Submarine Cable Challenge
"The seabed is becoming a battlefield," Deputy Prime Minister and Defence Minister Richard Marles warned at the Shangri-La Dialogue in May, and "we have been slow – collectively slow – to recognise [submarine cables] as the strategic targets they have become." Some 16 privately operated submarine...
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Screening South Asia: Cultural Bridge, Critical Lens
South Asian cinema shapes how millions of people around the world encounter the region’s cultures, languages, and identities. For many, film provides a gateway to South Asian languages and literature, and to cultural conversations that cross national, regional, and diasporic borders. But what…
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Creeping Censorship in Asian Media
From digital regulation and political pressure to economic influence and self-censorship, media freedom in Asia is being shaped by a range of subtle and evolving constraints. Rather than outright bans on reporting, many observers point to a process of "creeping censorship"—the gradual narrowing…
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Australia's Submarine Cable Security
Almost every email you send, every video you stream, and every financial transaction you make travels not through satellites, but through a vast network of cables lying on the ocean floor. Submarine cables are the invisible capillaries of the global internet — and increasingly, they are at the...
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The Real Costs of AUKUS
The AUKUS agreement between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom is set to reshape Australia's military and strategic future through the acquisition of nuclear-powered submarines. But the implications of AUKUS extend far beyond defence, with significant consequences for…
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US Engagement With Pacific Island Nations
The United States has, over recent years, significantly deepened its engagement with Pacific Island nations — reopening embassies, renewing funding compacts, and positioning itself as a committed partner in a region of growing strategic importance. Since the return of the Trump administration in...
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The Continued Repression of Uyghurs
An escalating crisis faces the Uyghur in China. The newly enacted Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress legalises forced assimilation, erases linguistic rights, and expands state surveillance. It provides a permanent legal framework for the ongoing campaign of mass re-education camps,...
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Pragmatic China and Multilateral Organisations
Over the past decade, China has launched a remarkable number of multilateral initiatives — from the Belt and Road to BRICS to a suite of so-called Global Initiatives covering development, security, and civilisation. Western analysts have tended to read these as evidence of a Chinese project to...
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Navigating Conflict in a Contested World
In an increasingly contested global environment, the international community faces growing pressure to respond to current and emerging wars and instability across the full conflict spectrum: from prevention, to managing active conflict, to post-conflict reconstruction. Effective conflict…
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When Engineers Shape Asia
Over the past two decades, China and India have undergone one of the most dramatic expansions of engineering education in human history. In 2020 alone, India awarded 1.5 million science and engineering degrees, and China awarded 2 million. In China, engineering now makes up a third of all...
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Preserving Tibetan Culture and Knowledge
Tibet's story is one of the most profound of the modern era — a civilisation forced into exile, carrying its language, philosophy, and sacred texts across the Himalayas in an act of collective survival. Preserving that heritage, while also engaging the modern world, has become one of the defining...
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Ethnic Unity and Assimilation in China
China's new Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress mandates Mandarin as the language of education, encourages the breakup of minority-majority neighbourhoods, and criminalises expressions of ethnic separatism — including by Chinese citizens living abroad. Critics say it formalises a...
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The Dragon's Emerging Order: Sino-centric Multilateralism and Global Responses (Book Launch)
China’s rise is often framed as a challenge to the Western-led international order, with attention focused on how Beijing works within — and pushes back against — liberal institutions. Yet a more consequential shift is underway. China is increasingly shaping global politics through new,...
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Healthy Ageing in Asia-Pacific
Across the Asia-Pacific, people are living longer than ever before. From rapidly ageing societies in Northeast Asia to younger but fast-transitioning populations in South and Southeast Asia, countries across the region are confronting the social and economic implications of longer lives. These...
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How the Media Shapes Territory in Asia
Traditional security debates focus on maps, borders, naval deployments, and treaties. But increasingly, territory in Asia is also constructed through narratives, media coverage, digital platforms, and public emotion. Journalists are not just observers — they help shape how territory, sovereignty,...
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Book Launch: Asian Crucible: Globalization, Geopolitics and the Contest for the Future
Asia’s modern resurgence has transformed the global economy, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty through globalization, supply chains and market integration. Yet this success has also generated new geopolitical rivalries and nationalist tensions, placing the region at a critical…
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Land and Identity in Nagaland
The far north-eastern Indian state of Nagaland has a distinct history, and the Naga communities who call it home face a range of complex dilemmas. Preserving cultural rights and traditions within the framework of the Indian state presents ongoing challenges — particularly in relation to the...
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Who Won? Trade Wars and Australia
The global trading system is under growing strain. Security risks are increasing, free trade is in decline, and a new economic order is emerging in which nations increasingly view trade as a tool for gaining strategic and political advantage. Long-standing assumptions about openness, efficiency,...
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Enhancing Australia-Korea Cooperation in Contested Asia
Despite differing geographies and security pressures, Australia and the Republic of Korea face shared challenges arising from intensifying strategic competition and growing regional uncertainty. Both countries have an opportunity for a closer collaboration to promote regional stability and help...
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America and Trump's Asia Strategy in 2025
The United States — and indeed the world — is now one year into Donald Trump’s second presidency. While many developments were foreshadowed during his first term, 2025 has nevertheless been an eventful year, marked by decisions and dynamics that have had wide-ranging global consequences. Guests:...
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Blue Security in the Indo-Pacific
The Indo-Pacific is often described as a maritime region, but the oceans here are far more than geography. They are trade corridors, food sources, energy highways, and increasingly, sites of strategic competition. How states think about security at sea—what some now call blue security—is becoming...
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Is Russia Turning East?
Russia has long imagined itself as a great power looking westward while sitting firmly in the east. That tension—between geography and identity, ambition and capability—shapes the way it approaches Asia. Guest: Dr Ian Storey (Senior Fellow at the ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute, Singapore)
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China's Evolving Role in Latin America
China’s presence in Latin America has expanded rapidly over the past two decades, reshaping the region’s economies, politics, and strategic landscape. From major infrastructure projects and digital ecosystems to shifting patterns of trade, finance, and influence, Beijing’s role is becoming both...
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Putin's Asia Strategy
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has upended global geopolitics — and its ripple effects have reached deep into Southeast Asia. How has the Kremlin’s “pivot to Asia” evolved under Vladimir Putin and has Russia been able to advance its economic and geopolitical interests in Southeast Asia?...
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Conflict Prevention in the Indo-Pacific
Across the Indo-Pacific rising geopolitical tensions, democratic backsliding, and climate-related instability are increasing the risk of violent conflict. Yet far less attention — and funding — is devoted to preventing crises before they occur. Early-warning, multi-track diplomacy, locally…
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How Ancient India Transformed the World
For more than a thousand years, India stood at the heart of the ancient world — a confident exporter of ideas, art, religion, science, and philosophy that travelled from the Red Sea to the Pacific. In his new book, "The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World", respected historian…
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China's Rapid Nuclear Expansion
Over the past decade, China has moved from maintaining a relatively modest nuclear deterrent of around 300 warheads to constructing hundreds of new missile silos and expanding toward a projected 1,000 warheads by the 2030s. This is happening alongside breakthroughs in nuclear energy and…
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Women in Leadership: Asia-Australia
Join La Trobe Asia, in partnership with Asia Society Australia, Kubernein Initiative and Girls Run the World, at our 'Women in Leadership: Asia-Australia' event, featuring Ambika Vishwanath, Dr Premesha Saha, Dr Avery Poole and Asha Clementi. How have our speakers’ lived experiences impacted how...
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Emotional Backlash and Refugee Protection
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Rohingya refugees in Malaysia faced a surge of hostility. Online campaigns portrayed them as disease carriers, social burdens, and even threats to national security. This backlash didn’t just stop at refugees themselves—it expanded to target the organisations,...
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Australia-Korea Maritime Cooperation
South Korea has unique security challenges when compared to many of its neighbours. Like many it lives in the shadow of giants like China and Russia, but the ever-present threat of North Korea is less than 50km from its capital, Seoul. While its alliance with the United States remains important…
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Taiwan's Foreign Relation Challenge
Taiwan sits at the heart of the Indo-Pacific, a vibrant democracy and global technology hub whose future has major implications for regional stability. Its position is complicated by the “one China” policy and growing strategic competition, making Taiwan’s international relationships more…
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Hu Yaobang, China's Communist Reformer
When Hu Yaobang died in April 1989, throngs of mourners converged on the Martyrs' Monument in Tiananmen Square to pay their respects. Following Hu's 1987 ouster by party elders, Chinese propaganda officials had sought to tarnish his reputation and dim his memory, yet his death galvanized the...
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The Future of Aid in the Asia-Pacific
2025 has been a challenging year for international development. The abrupt dismantling of USAID by the United States’ Trump Administration, sucking $40 billion out of the aid system, as well as significant cuts in development budgets by the United Kingdom and European donors has massively reduced...
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Asia Disrupted: Trump's First Six Months
The United States has undergone profound changes in President Donald Trump’s second term, and these are affecting the world. America appears to be rejecting the very international system it helped create, with destabilising tariffs ushering in a new era of economic nationalism that threatens to...
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Seoul and the Power of Protest
The past year has been eventful for South Korea. They've faced security dilemmas, tensions with with North Korea, an impeachment, and an important election - all events and issues that have made headlines around the world. But if this is the view from outside of the country, what does it look…
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India-Australia Climate Resilience Partnership in the Pacific Islands
The 18 countries and territories across the Pacific are some of the most vulnerable to growing risks emerging from climate changes, especially the small island states. Despite contributing less than 0.03% to global greenhouse gas emissions, the islands face devastating consequences, from sea…
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Who Will Succeed the Dalai Lama?
Many happy returns to the Dalai Lama who has just turned 90, but the reality that many are facing is that there may soon be a dispute over succession. The Dalai Lama’s supporters will choose their own reincarnated leader, but the Chinese government has long made it clear that the successor will...
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South Korea's Security Challenge
South Korea faces a number of security challenges, living in the shadow of states such as China and Russia, and with its capital Seoul around 50km from the border it shares with North Korea. In times of contestation and with a new government in place it has the chance to reexamine its priorities...
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Australia-India Critical Mining Cooperation
The Australian government has released a new roadmap aiming to bolster critical minerals co-operation between Australia and India. Crucial to the economy and productivity, the mineral trade, the plan aims to drive research and trade in both countries, but can the plan also address resource…
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Book Launch: Rivers of the Asian Highlands
High in the Himalayas the waters of Asia’s eight largest rivers intersect. The rivers of the Asian Highlands are central to the world’s weather systems and activities in their water catchments have shaped the human past and will shape the future. These rivers support more than three billion…
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Great Power Contestation in the Asia-Pacific
The Asia-Pacific is an area of great power contestation, of an intense rivalry between major powers, particularly the United States and China. How influence and dominance intersect in the Asia Pacific has major implications for the politics, economies and militaries of the countries in the…
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ABOUT THIS SHOW
Asia Rising, the podcast of La Trobe Asia which takes a critical look at the key issues facing Asia's states and societies.
HOSTED BY
Asia Rising
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How many episodes does Asia Rising have?
Asia Rising currently has 430 episodes available on PodParley. New episodes are automatically indexed when they're published to the podcast feed.
What is Asia Rising about?
Asia Rising, the podcast of La Trobe Asia which takes a critical look at the key issues facing Asia's states and societies.
How often does Asia Rising release new episodes?
Asia Rising publishes regularly with 430 episodes available. Check the episode list for the typical release schedule.
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Who hosts Asia Rising?
Asia Rising is created and hosted by Asia Rising.
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