"In the face of love, everyone is equal. I am Tsai Ing-wen, and I support marriage equality.” In a short 15-second campaign video, Tsai became a symbol of progressive change in a region tainted by repression of queer rights. She and her party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), later won the 2016 elections, taking the presidency and a majority in the legislature. Marriage equality was imminent.

What is feminism? For many, the imagined idea of what feminism looks like is strongly associated with the more publicised feminist movements of the West. However, feminism is a global phenomenon encompassing a diverse range of ideals, campaigns and pathways towards women’s empowerment and greater equality between genders.

On Monday evening, 14 August 2017, the ANU College of Asia Pacific Student Society hosted a panel discussing how feminism has manifested itself within the Asia and Pacific region.

For the first time in centuries the most powerful nation on Earth is going to be non-Western, and this has terrified policymakers from Canberra to Washington.
The almost existential panic which has characterised the response has combined an incredible capacity for self delusion with an almost impressive degree of arrogance that even our Colonial forbears would be staggered by.
Bit players like Australia have mindlessly “reaffirmed” support for the US alliance, as if it was ever in doubt, while the US itself has pursued a “Pivot to Asia” that has about as much substance as a stereotypical American meal.
Neither of these speech acts do anything to change the facts on the ground.

Why a Chinese Communist Party newspaper attacked “Paper Cat” Australia and Netizens are trolling an Olympic athlete.

Simon Fenske reviews an art exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia. You can catch it from the 7th August to 1st November!

This week we caught up with Dr Nicholas Farrelly, a fellow at the Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, to discuss his academic career and life as a former ANU student. Nicholas is the director of the ANU Myanmar Research Centre and convenor of the PhB program in the College of Asia and the Pacific. Nicholas also runs the Asia Pacific Week internship course and supervises various honours, masters and PHD students at ANU.

In Monsoon's new series we will be sitting down with academics from College of Asia and the Pacific to discuss their life as an academic and to get to know them a bit better. This week we sat down with Professor Hugh White for an engaging discussion about his experiences as a student, working for the government and to talk about his academic work.

Emma Roberts documents an eye-opening week in the Baliem Valley of Papua, Indonesia. What she encountered was a place where Melanesian culture is strong but the lives of the locals are also dominated by mosques and Indomie; a place where people live in regions impenetrable by transportation but continue to travel long distances on foot with big smiles on their faces; a place where life is tough but resilience is tougher.

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Alice Dawkins tells the story of the brilliant career of esteemed Australian journalist David Jenkins.