Law & Paneir

  A quarter of a century following the September 11 attacks, a question that warrants fresh consideration in Malaysia and Southeast Asia is whether terrorism has genuinely decreased, or if it has merely evolved into a different manifestation. The answer is uncomfortable. Terrorism has not disappeared. It has evolved. The attacks of Sept 11, 2001, transformed international security. Al-Qaeda demonstrated how a relatively small non-state organisation could exploit globalisation, international travel, communications and technological vulnerabilities to produce strategic consequences far beyond its physical strength. Two and a half decades later, the threat has become more fragmented, decentralised and technologically adaptive. The rise of Yemen's Houthi movement illustrates this transformation. The Houthis are not Al-Qaeda or Islamic State (IS), and their ideology and political objectives are different. Yet their evolution demonstrates how a non-state armed movement can exploi...

Twenty-five years after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, it is tempting to regard Al-Qaeda as a diminished remnant of a different era. Osama bin Laden is dead, the organisation’s original leadership has been severely disrupted, and the Afghanistan sanctuary that once provided the environment for planning and training has been transformed. Nevertheless, such assumptions risk overlooking the most important lesson of 9/11: terrorism does not disappear simply because its original organisation is weakened. It adapts, fragments and finds new pathways into societies. The threat facing Malaysia today is therefore not a return to the Al-Qaeda of 2001, but the emergence of a more dispersed and technologically enabled extremist ecosystem that can operate without a conventional command structure. The importance of 9/11 should consequently be reconsidered not merely as a historical event, but as a strategic turning point. The attacks demonstrated how a relatively small terrorist netw...

  The latest revelations about China-linked online influence operations should be treated as more than another episode in the long-running contest over information. They point to a fundamental transformation in cognitive warfare: artificial intelligence is making it cheaper, faster and easier for states and their proxies to manufacture the appearance of public opinion. The danger is not simply that artificial intelligence can create false information. The more consequential development is its ability to combine falsehoods with genuine grievances, authentic news, realistic images and apparently independent voices. This makes manipulation considerably harder to distinguish from legitimate democratic debate. Recent investigations provide a warning. OpenAI reported in June 2026 that it disrupted China-linked clusters using ChatGPT to generate social-media comments and images designed to influence American debates over data centres, AI policy and tariffs. One operation created mater...

  The death of Professor Jason Arday has become more than a tragic episode in British academia. It is a warning about what can happen when allegations of academic misconduct, institutional accountability, media scrutiny, social-media amplification and personal vulnerability collide. Arday, who became Cambridge University’s youngest Black professor in 2023, resigned on August 5 after intense scrutiny over allegations concerning plagiarism, his academic record and aspects of his personal history. He was found dead in London days later. Police have said his death was unexpected and not being treated as suspicious. It would be wrong, however, to conclude that the allegations caused his death. That causal connection has not been established. Equally, it would be wrong to ignore the extraordinary sequence of events preceding his death. His family described a sustained campaign of abuse and misinformation, while supporters criticised the scale and tone of media coverage. Arday him...

  Malaysia’s 10th-place position in the Lowy Institute’s 2025 Asia Power Index should be read not as a measure of national prestige, but as a strategic warning. Malaysia is classified as a middle power with significant diplomatic, economic and cultural influence, yet its military capability ranks only 17th among 27 countries and territories. This imbalance raises an important question: does Malaysia’s defence strategy adequately match the strategic environment it faces? The answer is increasingly uncertain. Malaysia’s overall power score of 20.6 reflects a country whose influence exceeds its hard-power capacity. Its diplomatic influence ranks ninth, economic relationships eighth and cultural influence sixth. Military capability, however, stands at 17th. This disparity has allowed Malaysia to pursue strategic autonomy and maintain constructive relations with competing major powers, but it also exposes a potential vulnerability: diplomacy can reduce tensions, but it cannot substitute...

  The K3 Scout controversy should not be reduced to a question of whether a camera sent harmless technical signals to an internet address in China. The more important question is whether Britain and its allies have fully adapted their security thinking to an era in which military capability increasingly depends on commercial electronics, software, cloud infrastructure, communications networks and globally distributed supply chains. If the answer is no, the consequences could extend far beyond one uncrewed vessel. The reported “heartbeat” communications may have contained little intelligence value individually. Yet intelligence operations rarely depend on a single piece of information.  Repeated technical signals can potentially reveal when equipment is operating, whether a platform is connected and, over time, patterns of activity. When combined with information from other sources, apparently insignificant metadata can contribute to a much broader intelligence picture. This do...