While geopolitical tensions dominate headlines, the risks of local and intrastate conflicts can often go unnoticed. Recent violent protests in Indonesia and Nepal have shown how quickly latent risks can flare up. These threats—which also pose serious risks to regional stability and Australia’s national interests—are growing amid shrinking aid budgets, global trade disruptions, weakened multilateral institutions and global norms, as well as accelerating climate impacts.
This month, the Lab partnered with The Asia Foundation to host a dialogue on conflict prevention with some of Australia’s leading conflict/ peace experts. We heard there’s strong momentum for Australia to "do more” in preventing conflict in the region—but how? Where should Australia begin? How should it prioritise its efforts? And what trade-offs will be necessary?
So, on The Intel this week, we asked three experts, “What’s the one thing Australia could do to better address local conflict risks in our region?”
Australia’s approach to regional conflict risks has long been shaped by geopolitical concerns such as strategic competition, defence cooperation and power balancing. While these issues matter, they often overshadow the deeper, more complex drivers of fragility in our neighbourhood such as economic exclusion, climate vulnerability, weak governance and social inequalities. If Australia wants to be a meaningful partner in building peace, it must broaden its lens and rethink how it engages.
The most impactful shift Australia could make is to adopt a ‘co-design, co-deliver, and co-govern’, or ‘learn / adapt’ model— working with regional communities to understand and respond to their priorities. This means moving away from top-down, Canberra-crafted solutions and toward locally led, inclusive partnerships.
A key part of this shift is recognising and addressing gender inequality, a persistent and often overlooked driver of instability. Women, girls, and gender diverse people are disproportionately affected by conflict and exclusion, yet are frequently left out of peacebuilding and development processes. Addressing gender inequalities using inclusive rights based approaches, enables a nuanced understanding of how conflict, crisis and peace emerges in communities, and the power of inclusive solutions for national resilience.
By listening first and acting collaboratively, Australia can help build resilience that is locally grounded and regionally relevant. This isn’t just about doing development differently, it’s about doing it better. A genuine partnership approach will not only reduce conflict risks but also strengthen trust and shared prosperity across the region.
Tim Manton is a national security specialist with over 30 years of service in the Australian Army, including operational deployments to Bosnia, Iraq, and Egypt. As part of his career, Tim completed the ADF Gender Advisor course and went on to serve as the Gender Advisor for Land Operations, contributing to Defence’s response to Australia’s National Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security, and working with partners such as UN Women to deliver training in Australia and abroad. He now works with Synergy Group in the Defence and National Security team. At the Lab, we admire Tim’s out-of-the-box thinking and his unwavering commitment to integrating gender perspectives into national security.
From Sri Lanka to Bangladesh, Indonesia and Nepal, Generation Z has been at the forefront of protest movements demanding change. These young women and men are not mobilised along party lines, but are united in their call for economic redistribution, and fairer, more accountable leadership.
Australia’s development policy emphasises inclusion, stability and prosperity in our region. Yet, most aid flows to governments have failed to curb corruption or give voice to their economically hard-hit younger generations.
If Australia is serious about “inclusion” as a policy goal, it must mean more than scholarships or training abroad— as important as they are. It requires using Australia’s diplomatic and development partnerships to encourage governments to meaningfully involve young people in decision-making.
Young people’s concerns are often concrete: access to housing, jobs, and fair opportunities. What they want is not to be passive recipients of policy but active participants in shaping it—even when choices are difficult under conditions of scarce resources. They need to feel fairness: that their priorities are placed front and centre in political systems.
For Australia, the lesson is clear: investing in youth inclusion is not just development rhetoric but a safeguard against instability. Supporting meaningful dialogue with young people, and ensuring their voices shape national priorities, is the best insurance against the next wave of burning capitals.
Leena Rikkilä Tamang is the Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific at International IDEA, where she leads democratic development initiatives across countries like Myanmar, Nepal, and Bhutan. With over two decades of experience, she specialises in constitutional reform, democratic transitions, and political inclusion, particularly in fragile and post-conflict states. At the Lab, we love Leena’s dedication to fostering inclusive democratic processes and her unwavering commitment to political dialogue in some of the world’s most complex governance environments.
To address local conflict risks, Australia needs to think local. To act local. To be local.
Security narratives differ substantially between Australia and Pacific countries. Australia emphasises military security as the way to minimise conflict risk. Look no further than the fivefold difference between Australia’s spending on defence than other areas of its foreign policy. Meanwhile, Pacific islanders are more focused on human security. Embodied in the Boe Declaration, this speaks to preventing conflict by acting on conflict drivers. At the local level, where most violent conflict in the Pacific occurs, these drivers include land disputes, livelihood insecurity, climate change and intergenerational stresses.
To address local conflict risks, Australia should:
Think local: Lead with our ears, not our mouths. Learn from Pacific islanders, including diaspora communities about community stresses and community responses to them. Keep investing in locally led learning and assistance. Keep pushing localisation further— there is always more that can be done to work with local leadership, ideas and capacities, especially when considering the very local factors driving conflict.
Act local: Work to strengthen established systems of leadership and conflict resolution, ensuring that the highest-level plans and metrics (like Development Partnership Plans) explicitly respond to and measure action at local not just national levels.
Be local: Truly integrating with the region through openness to migration and trade, and investment in understanding and working with Pacific ways, will make us more sensitive and responsive to local conflict threats and better placed to work with Pacific people to mitigate them.
James Cox is the founder of Peacifica and a leading figure in international peacebuilding and state-building policy, with over 20 years of experience across government and the non-profit sector. He has played a pivotal role in shaping global policy frameworks for fragile states, including as former Chair of the Civil Society Platform for Peacebuilding and State-building, and a key contributor to the Sustainable Development Goals’ inclusion of peace as a core objective. At the Lab, we love James’s deep strategic insight into fragility and his tireless advocacy for peace as a foundation for sustainable development
