UNSW Canberra Podcasts

Religious and cultural minorities struggle to be accommodated in diverse societies because our institutions commonly favour the majority way of life. So for minorities to practice their ways of life, they may seem to need minority rights. Multiculturalists, for example, argue that male Sikhs should have exemptions from compulsory headwear requirements and that Muslim women should be allowed to wea...

Armageddon and OKRA: Australian air power in the Middle East a century apart  In 1918, Australian led air power helped defeat an Ottoman army during the Battle of Armageddon in Palestine. One hundred years later, Australian air power was again operating in the Middle East during Operation OKRA.   A century seems a long time in the contemporary world. But these two points in time – Armageddon and O...

In this episode on Navigating Uncertainty, members of the Future of Operations Research Group; Katja Theodorakis, Karine Pontbriand and Rhiannon Neilsen, discuss the impact of cyberspace on the future of warfare, introducing their most recent research project on the role of the military in protecting critical infrastructure from cyberattacks.

Is the Paris agreement on climate change likely to fail? And can new treaty concepts help support it to prevent catastrophic climate change? Professor Anthony Burke talks with Professor Shirley Scott about a new proposal for a Coal Elimination Treaty.

In this episode of Navigating Uncertainty, Professor Dave Kilcullen and PhD candidate Katja Theodorakis continue their discussion and predictions for the future of conflict. Discussing the 'Fog of Truth' - Unpacking Information Warfare, the panel explores the mental models that underpin our thinking about future conflict and examines propaganda, resistance narratives and influence campaigns across...

How will COVID-19 change the way we respond to future threats? Join Professor David Kilcullen and Katja Theodorakis, a Higher Degree by Research scholar, for this first part of a two-part conversation about how we navigate the future of conflict, technology and the ‘human element’  through the COVID-19 paradigm. These two episodes are sponsored by the Future Operations Research Group (FORGe) based...

Australian’s trust in our democracy has halved over the last decade, in part due to growing concerns about corporate influence.   In a new study, Dr Lindy Edwards of UNSW Canberra sets out to examine whether Australia’s ten most powerful companies get what they want when they engage with government, and if so, why?

A post-military defence institution is one that performs the core functions currently entrusted to armed forces—including national defence against external aggression—but that relies on an assortment of non-violent means and methods. Recent research suggests that this can be a viable alternative to the military, in the sense of being comparably effective, but that is not all. A post-military defen...

In this, the second podcast in the Navigating Uncertainty series, Professor Peter Stanley of UNSW Canberra explores the challenges of understanding the Santal Rebellion of 1855, a small war distant in time, space and culture. Few outside India have heard of the Santal rebellion of 1855, but it was the second-largest uprising against the rule of the East India Company after the great mutiny-rebelli...

Seventeen years ago, the International Criminal Court swore in its first Prosecutor, but since then it has spent more than 1.5 billion euros and convicted only four people of international crimes. Is the ICC broken - and can it be fixed? In the first episode of 'Navigating Uncertainty', Douglas Guilfoyle, Associate Professor of International and Security Law at UNSW Canberra, is interviewed by Pro...

In this episode of Password123 we go meta. We sit down with Patrick Gray, the host of leading information security podcast Risky Business to delve deep into the world of Infosec and talk about why surfing the web and sharks have something in common. Patrick Gray worked in the information security industry before becoming a journalist, initially taking a role at ZDnet and then moving into freelance...

What would happen if the world began to run out of food? How does cyber security play a role in global food supply? We sit down with renowned author John Birmingham to discuss his new book 'Zero Day Code', set in a world where dwindling global food supplies are under increasing pressure from worsening droughts, floods and extreme weather events. John Birmingham worked as a researcher for the Austr...

In this episode we sit down with Elsa Kania to discuss her work on Chinese defence innovation, including the modernisation of cyber forces in the military. We also found time to delve into 5G and get Elsa’s take on the situation in Australia. Elsa Kania is an Adjunct Fellow with the Center for a New American Security’s Technology and National Security Program. Her research interests include Chines...

Following on from his report at DEFCON, we touch base again with Edward Farrell to dive deeper into his holistic approach to life, the universe and hacking (well, almost)everything. Farrell is an independent information security consultant who specialises in penetration testing and incident response. In addition to starting up his own security practice, Mercury ISS, he is an avid participant in th...

As 5-Eyes partners, Australia and Canada have a lot in common. With the appointment of former Canadian High Commissioner Vice Admiral Paul Maddison (Ret’d) as the inaugural director of the UNSW Defence Research Institute, there is one more thing our two nations share. Not long after he started in the role, we sat down with Vice Admiral Maddison to hear how he came to lead the Defence Research Inst...

Social media manipulation is a real threat. In the context of the Australian election in May, we sat down with Andrew Hughes to discuss how social media can be influential and how it will continue to play a major part in elections. Andrew Hughes is a lecturer in marketing in the Research School of Management at the Australian National University, where he teaches marketing at both undergraduate an...

In this episode we sit down with PW Singer, considered one of the world’s leading experts on changes in 21st century warfare, for a discussion touching on everything from social media to blurring the line of fiction vs non-fiction. PW Singer has been named by the Smithsonian as one of the nation’s 100 leading innovators, by Defense News as one of the 100 most influential people in defense issues,...

In this episode Edward Farrell provides a realtime review of DEFCON27. Edward, tired but - cyber inspired – called in from Los Angeles International Airport(LAX) before flying home to Australia. DEFCON is the world’s largest hacker conference, or ‘con’. Jeff Moss(Dark Tangent) started DEFCON in 1993. DEFCON is also one of the world’s longest running hacker cons. Only Europe’s Chaos Communication C...

The season boots up with James Griffiths discussing cyber-sovereignty and his new book 'The Great Firewall of China'. https://www.jamestgriffiths.com/book 'Password123' is a UNSW Canberra Cyber podcast. Presenter, Tom Sear discusses infosec, cyberwarfare, and faceless hoodie hacker culture with a range of selected guests.