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Sri Lanka’s Easter Sunday Massacre: Lessons for the International Community Book Review

By |2024-03-28T15:39:43-10:00March 28th, 2024|

Book review by Dr. Lumpy Lumbaca In his deeply unsettling yet meticulously researched book, Sri Lanka's Easter Sunday Massacre: Lessons for the International Community, Dr. Rohan Gunaratna peels back the layers of horror that unfolded on Easter Sunday, 2019, in Sri Lanka. Published by Penguin Books, this isn't just a recounting of the attacks; it's a chilling exploration of the radicalization process, a stark warning for the international community, and a poignant reflection on the resilience of the Sri Lankan people. Gunaratna, a recognized expert on counterterrorism, leverages his extensive experience to provide unparalleled access to the attackers' mindset. Through [...]

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SARS-CoV-2 Mutations, Variants, and National Security

By |2021-05-07T08:34:56-10:00May 8th, 2021|

By Deon Canyon, Sebastian Kevany and Michael S. Baker * Mutations are caused by random, spontaneous errors in the RNA-based genetic code of viruses that occur as the virus replicates within a host. The process of continually emerging, small mutations is called antigenic drift. In influenza and Covid, these mutations are often noticeable by observing changes in viral surface proteins, otherwise known as antigens. The human immune system identifies and reacts to foreign antigens by producing antibodies that target the infection. Most vaccines work by presenting a harmless version of the foreign antigen to train the immune system to be [...]

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An International Public Health and Virus Surveillance Network for National Security

By |2021-05-06T11:02:18-10:00May 6th, 2021|

By Deon Canyon, Sebastian Kevany and Michael S. Baker* Introduction The monitoring and surveillance of novel and variant, emergent and resurgent, infectious viral diseases is a core need for global health and national security. The United States has not, to date, put a priority on the funding and resourcing of private and public laboratories to identify and monitor Covid variants and mutations. While the U.K. sequences 10% of its positive cases, the U.S. currently only inspects around 0.3-1.5% of positive tests for the presence of viral mutations, which is lower than Gambia, Senegal and even Latvia. This created a “gaping [...]

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The Nexus Between the COVID-19 Pandemic, International Relations, and International Security

By |2020-05-26T15:46:02-10:00May 26th, 2020|

Excerpt: The extent to which other related global relationships, national entities, and supranational organizations have performed in the current case will only be clear in retrospect: it will quite possibly emerge that a combination of right- and left-wing polices – cherry-picking elements of travel and visa restrictions, greater health security and diplomacy investments, and other defensive and protective policy aspects from the two highly divergent sets of agendas -- will be the guiding paradigm for the decades to come. Despite the mutual antipathy between contemporary political perspectives in the United States, there are elements of each agendas -- what has [...]

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