Australians have watched on in horror as more details have come to light about the shooters in the Bondi terror attacks.
As people grapple with the tragedy, many wonder how such a thing could have happened in a country that has long prided itself on its tough gun laws.
The 50-year-old father, Sajid Akram, and 24-year-old son, Naveed Akram, had six guns. Police confirmed all of them were registered firearms. The father, who was fatally shot by police, had a recreational hunting licence and was a member of a gun club.
National Cabinet has since committed to a raft of new gun laws, including renegotiating the National Firearms Agreement, caps on the amount of firearms any one person can own and limiting open-ended licensing.
So how easy is it to get a gun in Australia currently, and how might the reforms work?
The laws of gun ownership
Gun control laws vary slightly in each state and territory, but are broadly similar. We’ll look here at the laws in New South Wales.
The first step is to apply for a firearms licence. As part of this, authorities will conduct a background check to ensure there’s no criminal history, including mental health orders or domestic violence charges.
The applicant must also pass the “fit and proper person” test. NSW Police says this test checks someone is “of good character, law abiding, honest, and shows good judgement”.
If these standards are met, a firearms licence is granted.
But in order to actually buy a firearm, people must apply for a “permit to acquire”. This is linked to the specific firearm they’d like to purchase.
If it’s their first gun, there’s a 28 day waiting period before they can have it in their possession. Subsequent guns do not need a waiting period as long as it’s in the same category they already have approval to own.
They must also pass a safety course, with both practical and theoretical components, including a written test.
Firearms, once acquired, must be stored in a specific way. Guns cannot be stored while loaded, for instance, and ammunition must be kept in a separate safe.
Finally, someone must have a “genuine reason” to buy a firearm. These include working as a primary producer, or participating in recreational hunting, among others. They need to prove a genuine reason for each and every firearm purchase. Personal protection is not a a genuine reason.
Applicants need to prove their reason is truthful. This may be proof of membership to a gun club, or a letter with express permission from the landowner on whose property they intend to hunt.
Importantly, if someone holds a firearm licence for recreational purposes, they must compete in a certain amount of competitions each year. In NSW, it’s two to four.
What works well?
Many parts of Australian gun control laws work well.
The genuine reason provisions are particularly useful. By requiring people to engage with the firearm-owning community, it stops so called “lone-wolves” from buying a gun just to have.
My research with gun clubs has also shown members can be a crucial grassroots safety check. They typically look out for each other and check in if there’s a concerning shift in someone’s attitudes or beliefs.
If things seem particularly dangerous, many report fellow members to the police so they can investigate further. The gun owning community also want our communities to be safe.
It raises the question of how engaged the shooter in this case was with his local gun community.
What could change?
While the exact circumstances for these two shooters are still emerging, we know one of the men was known to ASIO (the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation). The guns were registered to the father.
National Cabinet has agreed to a list of measures, including speeding up work on a national firearms register and limiting gun licences to Australian citizens.
They will also move to cap the number of guns a person can own. Western Australia did this earlier this year. Recreational shooters in WA can have up to five firearms, while primary producers and competition shooters can have up to ten.
It’s not uncommon for people to have more than one firearm. Licensed firearm owners in NSW have an average of about four, according to a 2025 report.
While it’s reasonable to examine the working of our current gun control measures, it’s unclear how effective such a measure would be. In the case of the Bondi attack, we need more information about the sorts of guns that were used and how many were used.
Plus, under the current laws across the country, people can’t buy more guns just because they feel like it. They have to prove a genuine reason to own another one.
National Cabinet also decided to limit open-ended firearm licensing.
As it stands, licences are usually not granted for life. Renewal periods differ depending on the jurisdiction, but in NSW most licences are issued for somewhere between two and five years. We don’t yet know if any changes would make these renewal periods more frequent.
But licensing mechanisms, like recent concerns over working with children checks in the childcare sector, only capture what we know has happened. Unless people have already fallen foul of the law, authorities won’t necessarily find any concerning behaviour.
Indeed, authorities have said the Bondi shooter who owned these firearms had “no incidents” with his licence. Renewing it more regularly may have unearthed something important, or it may not have. We don’t know enough about this incident yet to say if such a law change would have been useful here.
If reviews were made much more frequent, that would require a large-scale increase in police resources.
One change that might help would be to actively involve firearms dealers in these legal changes. They have the most contact with those purchasing guns and may have valuable intelligence about how their customers are behaving and thinking.
So while changes in the letter of the law may or may not help monitor firearms owners, we have to ensure it’s implemented effectively too. This means resourcing authorities properly, working closely with communities and making sure legal changes would actually tell us what we need to know to prevent deadly gun violence.
Suzanna Fay has received funding from the Sporting Shooters Association of Australia for a research project in 2018 and the University of Queensland.
A supporter holds a portrait of José Antonio Kast, presidential candidate of the opposition Republican Party, after results show him leading in the presidential runoff election in Santiago, Chile. AP Photo / Matias Delacroix
Chileans have elected the most right-wing presidential candidate since the end of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship over three and a half decades ago.
In a runoff held on Dec. 14, 2025, José Antonio Kast, a Republican Party ex-congressman and two-time former presidential candidate, won just over 58% of the vote, while his opponent, Jeannette Jara, the left-wing labor minister of current President Gabriel Boric, won nearly 42%.
Approximately 15.6 million Chileans were eligible to vote in the first presidential election to take place with mandatory voting and automatic voter registration.
Amid Chile’s expanded electorate, the primary issues of voter concern during this campaign were crime and immigration. An October 2025 poll specifically found delinquency to be the top issue, with immigration, unemployment and health care also marking high.
A campaign banner reads in Spanish: Neither Jara nor Kast will make our lives better, don’t vote, rebel and fight. AP Photo / Natacha Pisarenko
Many commentators have highlighted the stark polarization of this election, with a Communist Party labor minister campaigning against the arch-conservative Kast, who has lauded the Pinochet dictatorship under which his deceased older brother once served. But there is more to the story.
Some observers have drawn comparisons between Kast and other far-right Latin American leaders like Nayib Bukele in El Salvador, Javier Milei in Argentina and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. But Chile is not merely following the same far-right playbook of its neighbors.
In the weeks leading up to the runoff in Chile, both candidates moved toward the center. Jara vowed to expand the prison system to combat rising crime, while Kast – who had previously threatened expulsion of undocumented migrants – softened his tone to say they would be “invited” to leave.
Yet beyond the campaign trail messaging, the results also reflect a structural fact of Chilean politics that mirror political realities of other parts of Latin America, and even globally. In every presidential election since 2006, Chileans have voted out the incumbency to swing to the opposing side of the political spectrum. With candidates barred from consecutive presidential terms, the pendulum has swung back and forth since the alternating presidencies of socialist Michelle Bachelet – 2006-2010 and 2014-2018 — and conservative Sebastián Piñera – 2010-2014 and 2018-2022.
At a José Antonio Kast rally in Santiago on Dec. 14, 2025, supporters wave various flags, including one depicting late dictator Augusto Pinochet. Eithan Ambramovich / AFP vis Getty Images
Boric, a former left-wing student leader, took office in 2022 following a wave of upheaval and popular protests over inequality in 2019-2020. In what was a historic moment, the country voted to begin a process of rewriting its Pinochet-era constitution, which entrenched neoliberal economic policies and limited the government’s capacity to confront inequality. The constitutional convention was made up of directly elected citizens, many of them from grassroots movements.
Yet in a stunning reversal, the progressive constitution – which would have protected rights to nature, Indigenous rights and social rights – was roundly defeated in a plebiscite in 2022. Just over a year later, voters similarly rejected a second attempt to rewrite the constitution, albeit under a process that conservative parties helped shape.
Boric’s approval ratings, already low, suffered from this failed constitutional process. More than the right-wing elections elsewhere in the region, this national context helps to explain Chile’s own conservative turn.
The ever-present discontent of voters
Even as the pendulum has swung back and forth in recent Chilean presidential elections, there are deeper continuities across the different Chilean governments in the 21st century. Important among them is generalized voter discontent with the political system.
This has traditionally been expressed in popular protests, such as the student movements of 2006 and 2011 and the Estallido Social – or Social Uprising – of 2019-2020 that were the largest protests since the return to democracy in 1990 and helped propel Boric to power. Public discontent was also expressed in the overwhelming vote to rewrite the constitution, which passed with 78% of the vote in 2020.
In this Oct. 25, 2019, photo, anti-government protesters fill Plaza de la Dignidad – Dignity Square – in Santiago, Chile, during a nationwide call for socioeconomic equality and better social services. AP Photo / Rodrigo Abd, File
Even though the constitutional process was ultimately rejected by voters, this underlying discontent has not gone away.
One of the recent signs of discontent with the political choices on offer was in the first round of voting on Nov. 16: The third-place candidate was not one of the veteran politicians on the right, but Franco Parisi, a populist economist who has not set foot in Chile in years and who called on his supporters to intentionally vote null – or “spoil” their votes. Discontent has taken many forms – outrage about inequality and neoliberalism in 2019-2020, or unease about economic precarity and crime in the current election. But it has persisted, even as Chile’s political system remains stable.
Some observers have pointed out that, unlike in many places around the world, Chile’s democratic norms are holding strong. The fact that power continues to pass peacefully despite major ideological differences is significant, particularly in light of the long struggle for democracy during the Pinochet regime. Kast’s style, for what it’s worth, is not as bombastic as that of U.S. President Donald Trump or Argentina’s Milei.
Still, his apparent politeness belies what many fear is a coming erosion of rights: the rights of women to bodily autonomy; the rights of individuals] to due process; the rights of workers to dignified conditions. These may well be up for negotiation under the new administration.
Kast, a staunch Catholic and father of nine, is opposed to abortion under any circumstances and has even attempted to ban the morning-after pill. He was a supporter of Pinochet up until the regime’s end, campaigning for the “yes” vote in 1988 that would have seen eight more years for the authoritarian leader after 15 years already in power. Kast has likewise vowed to slash public spending and deregulate the economy, a clear echo of the Pinochet years.
Despite the momentous shift heralded by Kast’s election, though, it is unlikely to change one of the principal challenges of Chile’s democracy in the 21st century: voter discontent and disenchantment. There has been a consistent trend for the government in power to lose popular support and face strong headwinds in Congress from the opposition. For all the celebration happening right now for Kast and his supporters, it is hard to see that changing once the new government takes office in March 2026.
Andra B. Chastain receives funding in 2025-26 from a Fulbright-García Robles research grant in Mexico. She has previously received funding for research in Chile from the Social Science Research Council and the PEO Foundation.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and French President Emmanuel Macron take in the view at the UNESCO World Heritage site in Dujiangyan, southwestern China’.Sarah Meyssonnier/AFP via Getty Images
When French President Emmanuel Macron traveled to China in early December for his fourth state visit, the itinerary began with the expected formalities. There was a red carpet reception at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing and high-level talks with President Xi Jinping on trade, technology and Ukraine.
But the defining image of this diplomatic trip did not take place in the capital. Rather, it occurred more than 1,000 miles (1,600 km) away in Chengdu, Sichuan province. There, Xi hosted Macron for a rare instance of “no-tie diplomacy,” a term used by Chinese media to describe a relaxed and informal style of statecraft.
Stepping outside the rigid protocols of Beijing, Xi personally guided Macron through the mist-covered mountains of Sichuan. The walk held high significance: It marked the first time Xi has hosted a foreign leader for such an informal sightseeing meeting outside the capital, with an itinerary that included the Dujiangyan irrigation system, a visit to China’s national table tennis team and the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding.
Global attention remains understandably fixed on “hard” issues — trade tariffs, the war in Ukraine and nuclear energy. But as a cultural historian of modern China, I believe the choreography of this visit offers a vital window into Beijing’s diplomatic strategy. By foregrounding things like ancient waterways and table tennis, China is deploying a sophisticated brand of cultural statecraft designed to soften the edges of a hardening geopolitical landscape.
The reciprocity of ‘home diplomacy’
The choice to host Macron in Chengdu was not random, but a carefully curated act of diplomatic reciprocity. In April 2024, Macron had invited Xi to his personal retreat in the French Pyrenees, a gesture intended to foster personal intimacy.
During the latest tour, Xi reportedly referenced their previous meeting, telling Macron: “Last year you invited me to your hometown in the Hautes-Pyrénées; I believe this visit will further deepen your understanding of China.”
By bringing Macron to Sichuan, Xi was returning the favor, moving the relationship from the professional to the personal. This reflects a shift in Chinese diplomacy from a “Wolf Warrior” mentality, defined by confrontation and rhetorical aggression, toward a more relational approach with key European partners. By investing time in this kind of provincial visit, Beijing is signaling that it views France not just as a trading partner, but as a nation worthy of deep, personal engagement.
French President Emmanuel Macron’s sightseeing tour recalls that of U.S. President Richard Nixon during his breakthrough 1972 visit to China. Bettmann/Contributor/Getty Images
This outreach is especially important at a time when China–U.S. trade tensions remain high, as Beijing increasingly looks to the European Union as a critical component of its broader strategy to counter Washington-led containment efforts.
Governing with the flow
The centerpiece of Macron’s cultural tour in China was the Dujiangyan irrigation system. Built in the third century B.C.E., the UNESCO World Heritage site remains the world’s oldest still‑operating dam‑free hydraulic project.
However, Dujiangyan is more than a tourist attraction; it is a physical manifestation of Chinese political philosophy. Unlike modern dams that block water, Dujiangyan manages it by dividing the flow. It embodies the Taoist principle of wu wei (nonaction) and Xi’s metaphor “to govern water is to govern the country.”
By showcasing this specific site, Xi was offering a subtle lesson in statecraft. The metaphor implies a governance style based on balance, adaptability and working with natural forces rather than confronting them head-on.
In the context of strained international relations, the message to France was clear: Cooperation should not be constrained by rigid binaries between East and West, nor shaped by the logic of containment. Instead, it should follow the natural flow of mutual interests — ranging from trade and climate action to cultural and educational exchange.
Pingpong diplomacy 2.0
If Dujiangyan represented ancient wisdom, the visit to the Sichuan Provincial Gymnasium brought diplomacy into the modern, high-energy arena of sport.
Table tennis holds a mythical place in Chinese diplomatic history. The original “ping-pong diplomacy” of the early 1970s helped thaw the ice between China and the United States, paving the way for President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 visit. As historian Pete Millwood argues in “Improbable Diplomats,” these athletic exchanges offered a politically safe and publicly palatable setting through which both countries could begin signaling a major shift in diplomatic relations.
French President Emmanuel Macron takes on Chinese table tennis players at Sichuan University in Chengdu on Dec. 5, 2025. Sarah Meyssonnier/AFP via Getty Images
On Dec. 5, Macron tapped into this legacy when he visited the venue of the 2025 ITTF Mixed Team World Cup and participated in an impromptu match. Partnering with French players Félix Lebrun and Prithika Pavade against Chinese stars Wang Chuqin and Sun Yingsha, Macron engaged in a lighthearted rally that went viral on Chinese social media.
In an era where diplomatic interactions are often scripted and stern, these moments humanize the “other side” for the domestic public, creating a reservoir of public goodwill that leaders can draw upon when navigating difficult political compromises.
Soft power with fur
While the two leaders bonded over paddles, Brigitte Macron, France’s first lady, engaged with China’s most enduring soft-power asset: the giant panda.
“Panda diplomacy” has been a hallmark of Beijing’s foreign policy since the 1950s. The loaning of these animals is a barometer of political warmth; their recall can signal a chill.
The French First Lady visited the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding to see “Yuan Meng.” As the first panda born in France, to parents on loan from China, Yuan Meng is a living symbol of the bilateral relationship between France and China. Brigitte Macron, who is his godmother, helped facilitate Yuan Meng’s return to China alongside his parents in November 2025.
Following Brigitte Macron’s visit, the announcement of a new agreement to send two more pandas to France by 2027 served as a tangible deliverable of the summit.
A giant panda looks on as French first lady Brigitte Macron makes a visit to the Chengdu research base for giant panda breeding. Ludovic Marin /AFP via Getty Images)
The limits of cultural diplomacy
What do waterworks, pingpong and pandas add up to?
Critics might dismiss these events as mere pageantry — a velvet glove concealing the brutal fist of realpolitik. Indeed, a friendly game of table tennis does not resolve the European Union’s concerns over Chinese state subsidies, nor does it bridge the gap regarding China’s stance on the war in Ukraine.
However, dismissing the cultural dimension ignores how China views diplomacy. For Beijing, “friendly atmosphere” is often a prerequisite for progress on substantive political issues.
The Xi-Macron meeting in Chengdu also signaled a refinement of Chinese soft power, moving away from the combative rhetoric of recent years toward a strategy that embraces warmer ties with key European powers like France.
While culture cannot replace hard diplomacy, this Macron visit demonstrates that in 2025, the road to political consensus in Beijing may very well run through the panda enclosure and table tennis arena.
This long-term intent was encapsulated in the leaders’ farewell at Dujiangyan. As they parted ways, Xi joked, “Next time, we’ll see another place.” Macron’s immediate response — “Of course, definitely” — hints that this cultural diplomacy is designed to be an ongoing effort.
Xianda Huang does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Benin’s coup leaders appear on state TV on Dec. 7, 2025, to announce the suspension of the country’s constitution.Reuters/YouTube
In a scene that has become familiar across parts of Africa of late, a group of armed men in military garb appeared on state TV on Dec. 7, 2025, to announce that they had suspended the constitution and seized control.
This time it was the West African nation of Benin, and the coup was relatively short-lived, with the government regaining full control a day later. But a week before, senior military officers in Guinea-Bissau had more success, deposing President Umaro Sissoco Embaló and effectively annulling the Nov. 23 election in which both Embaló and the main opposition leader had claimed victory. A month earlier it was Madagascar, where a mass Gen-Z uprising led to the elite CAPSAT unit of the Malagasy military ousting President Andry Rajoelina and installing Colonel Michael Randrianirina as leader.
The cluster of coup attempts follows a broader pattern. Since 2020, there have been 11 successful military takeovers in Africa: one each in Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Niger, Sudan, Chad, Madagascar and Gabon; and two each in Burkina Faso and Mali. Benin represents the fifth failed coup over the same period.
The prevalence of military takeovers led United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres to warn as far back as 2021 of a coup “epidemic.”
But can coups, like the pathogens of many epidemics, be contagious? Certainly observers aroundthe world continue to ask whether a military takeover in one country can influence the likelihood of another one happening elsewhere.
Do coups spread?
Cross-national research offers little firm evidence that a coup in one country directly increases the chances of another. And some scholars remain skeptical that such a phenomenon exists. Political scientist Naunihal Singh, for instance, argues that the recent wave’s coup plotters are drawing less from contemporary events than from their own countries’ long histories of military intervention.
In addition, he suggests that any observed regional cluster mostly reflects shared underlying conditions. For example, the countries across the Sahel region that have been the center of post-2020 African coups share a common set of coup-prone pressures: chronic insecurity driven by insurgencies, weak state capacity and widespread frustration over quality of governance.
Likewise, Michael Miller and colleagues at George Washington University, in a broader analysis, contend that would-be plotters pay closer attention to domestic dynamics than to foreign coups when deciding whether to move against their own governments.
As scholars ofmilitary coups, we recently explored the phenomenon and have come to a different conclusion.
Our forthcoming study argues that would-be plotters do indeed pay close attention when contemporaries seize power. A number of dynamics, however, could keep a statistical trend from being realized.
For one, statistical modeling typically requires contagion to occur within a tight temporal window, often 1 to 3 years.
Our findings challenge this approach. A wave of so-called “Free Officers” coups – military takeovers led by junior or mid-ranking nationalist officers, inspired by Egypt’s 1952 Free Officers movement – is a widely invoked example of contagion. The original Free Officers ousted King Farouk and went on to abolish the monarchy and end British influence in Egypt.
However, it took a full six years before a second “Free Officers” coup occurred in the region, in Iraq in 1958.
Rather than blindly follow the lead of Egypt’s coupists, would-be copycats watched closely, took notes and moved only when two factors lined up: the rewards appeared to be worth the risk, and they obtained the ability to make a takeover possible.
In the case of the post-1952 Middle East, the potential “rewards” of emulating Egypt’s Free Officers were not immediately apparent, even in countries with circumstances very similar to Egypt’s.
It wasn’t until the original Free Officers Movement’s leader, Colonel Gamal Abdel Nasser, emerged as a revolutionary icon in the region that others attempted to emulate his success. Nasser’s status grew further through his anti-colonial sentiments and victories, like his handling of the Suez Crisis of 1956.
As Nasser’s influence grew, the perceived value of a military takeover increased, and Free Officers-inspired plots quickly proliferated against the region’s monarchies. Six years after the Egyptian coup, the first copycat coup succeeded in Iraq, followed by additional successes in Yemen, Libya and Sudan between 1962 and 1969.
A further complication to establishing a firm trend is that the success of one takeover may actually hinder the immediate progress of another. After all, would-be copycats are not the only observers.
Vulnerable leaders and their allies can take cues from coups in other countries to try to mitigate their spread at home.
Thwarted conspiracies in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, which were uncovered between 1955 and 1969, demonstrated that while the sentiment to emulate Egypt’s coup was widespread, not all plotters had the capacity to act. Some governments were better prepared to block these attempts. Foreign partners like the United States and Great Britain also played no small role in helping shore up their monarchical allies against coup plots.
Africa’s coup wave
The case of the Free Officers Movement shows that plotters wait for clear signals that a coup is worth the risk. In Africa today, those signals are more immediate, even without a monumental figure like Egypt’s Nasser.
Coupists now see visible domestic support for military takeovers and muted international consequences for those who seize power.
It is increasingly clear to us that the region has seen a large increase in public support for military rule during this post-2020 wave.
Data from Afrobarometer, which has regularly asked about respondents’ positions on having military rule, illustrate this shift clearly.
In the survey wave that ended in 2013, less than 11% of respondents in Benin said they supported or strongly supported army rule. This nearly doubled to 19% by 2021 and has now tripled, with 1 in 3 people in Benin expressing support for military rule. While a majority still opposes military rule, the direction of this change is significant.
These attitudes are reinforced by military leaders’ promises to “clean up” corrupt or ineffective governments. In Madagascar, for example, over 60% of citizens in 2024 said it was permissible for the armed forces to remove leaders who abuse power.
Highly visible images of cheering pro-military crowds in countries like Niger and Gabon further signal that a takeover can gain public support.
International indifference
The international signals are just as important. From the near-absent reaction to the Zimbabwean military’s removal of Robert Mugabe in 2017 to the lukewarm response to Chad’s military takeover in 2021, these cases suggest that international punishment can be temporary or even nonexistent.
The message is reinforced when coup leaders who are initially condemned, like Madagascar’s Randrianirina, later gain acceptance from regional organizations like the South African Development Community. In Guinea-Bissau, attention on last month’s coup has somehow seemed to focus more on President Embaló’s alleged involvement in the coup than on the military’s unconstitutional seizure of power.
And the lessons drawn from international responses involve more than just the seizure of power. Contemporary military leaders are staying in power much longer than their predecessors in the early 2000s, either by indefinitely delaying elections or by directly contesting them.
Although the African Union’s framework specifically forbids coup leaders from standing in elections, there has been virtually no consequences for coupists consolidating their rule via elections in places like Chadand Gabon.
This is not lost on would-be plotters, who see their contemporaries seize and legitimize their authority with minimal pushback.
To some degree, the spread of coups depends on how they are received. And in the case of the recent rash of military takeovers in Africa, the international community and domestic policymakers have done little in the way of stemming that spread.
The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
When Donald Trump stood on the White House lawn in April 2025 holding a large, laminated poster announcing the first round of trade tariffs to be imposed on different countries, the Trade Policy Uncertainty Index shot through the roof.
Every month, this index, which is overseen by five board members of the Federal Reserve (America’s central bank), crosschecks the frequency of usage of terms relating to trade policy and uncertainty in seven leading newspapers including the New York Times and the Guardian. Here’s the chart since 1960:
Trump’s so-called “liberation day” sparked volatile shifts in the value of financial products and currencies as governments across the world scrambled to respond. The levels of uncertainty were unprecedented – the outbreak of the COVID pandemic was nothing in comparison, according to the index.
In highly complex systems, conditions of uncertainty and even ignorance – where we don’t know what we don’t know – are extremely common. These conditions become even more likely when such systems, such as those which control global finance, are opaque and poorly regulated. Add in a maverick US president and an administration determined to overturn the status quo, and the old, orderly assumptions are thrown out of the window.
Uncertainty is where we don’t know the likelihood of different things happening: we can’t predict, we can’t manage, we can’t control. For many people, conditions of uncertainty result in precarious jobs, insecure housing and rising inequality. Vulnerabilities including mental illness can become even more exposed when life is so uncertain – only serving to accentuate these perceptions of uncertainty.
However, for a lucky few, uncertainty is an opportunity to make a fortune. Financial capitalism thrives off uncertainty and asymmetric information, which may be encouraged by some who can pocket the profit, betting on the unknowns.
In politics too, uncertainty is being capitalised on. Rising economic precarity in the wake of COVID-19 has been linked with increased support for populist parties in many European countries. And this nationalist politics sweeping much of the world reduces the possibilities of transnational collaboration and multilateral regulation.
The Insights section is committed to high-quality longform journalism. Our editors work with academics from many different backgrounds who are tackling a wide range of societal and scientific challenges.
There are real and present dangers in this age of uncertainty. But through my research at the Institute of Development Studies, I have witnessed inspiring innovations that I believe could be applied across other fields of work and life. My latest book, Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World, explores the strategies used to counter uncertainty in fields as seemingly different as corporate finance and pastoral farming, in settings stretching from southern Zimbabwe to the Midlands of England.
The book highlights some surprising commonalities between these different worlds in their use of diverse sources of knowledge, social networks and human interactions. Above all, I believe the loss of the central role of people in today’s complex systems is the greatest danger of all.
Uncertainties of global finance
The 2008 financial crisis can be explained in part by a lack of such human engagement, and the reliance on a trading system where the assumption of control turned out to be highly misleading.
The international financial system involves a multitude of players, each with different sorts of information about the future. In the build-up to the crisis, many new financial instruments were devised to extract profit. The investment banks – Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley – perfected the art of managing the huge amounts of cash generated in the financial system through a range of derivative instruments, including the fateful mortgage-backed securities that triggered the crash. But the bewildering array of acronyms and actors involved meant few actually understood the system and its dynamics.
Who was to blame for the 2008 financial crisis? Video: BBC News.
At the centre of this complex web of financial interactions were mathematical models designed to offset uncertainty and provide control. The notorious Black-Scholes-Merton equation helped manage the transactions that were occurring in ever greater volumes and super-fast speeds, with billions of dollars being exchanged in nanoseconds across high-speed internet links.
However, when you are overly confident in risk-based models within a narrowly defined regulatory system, uncertainties have the nasty habit of creeping up behind you and catching you by surprise. As Andy Haldane, then chief economist at the Bank of England, commented in the aftermath:
The financial cat’s-cradle became dense and opaque. As a result, the precise source and location of underlying claims became anyone’s guess. Follow-the-leader became blind-man’s buff. In short, diversification strategies by individual firms generated heightened uncertainty across the system as a whole.
The crisis was rooted in what Haldane called “an exaggerated sense of knowledge and control”. Since then, there has been much reflection on what went wrong and what to do about it. One response has been to add new layers of regulation, but many argue that this may just hide the underlying uncertainties, as happened before.
The financial system was ill-equipped to respond to the shocks that emerged from the sub-prime mortgage collapse, and precious little appears to have changed since – as was demonstrated so vividly following the announcement of Trump’s tariffs.
Today’s financial system is increasingly reliant on algorithmic models to make decisions, driven by even ever more sophisticated AI applications. The large language machine learning models take accumulated past data to predict the future – but as well as increasing opacity, there is a decrease in accountability. AI offers an illusion of control, and this can be very dangerous.
The reality is that conditions of uncertainty are not unusual, freak occurrences, but the normal consequences of complex systems. So what if the standard assumptions of modernity – planning, management, regulation, control – have to be radically rethought? Is it possible to embrace uncertainty for the benefit of all – rather than denying or ignoring it until it is too late?
For financial systems, Haldane and others have argued that this means rethinking financial network configurations and enabling new practices (requiring new skills) for those involved. A shift from reliance on opaque and highly complex risk-based model algorithms to allowing more human discretion and judgment. Active deliberation on the appropriate responses to inevitably incomplete information in a world where uncertainty, even ignorance, is not only accepted but embraced.
Where can we look for inspiration? I’d suggest that the pastoral systems of northern Kenya and Amdo Tibet in China are good places to start. In both settings, pastoralists – mobile livestock keepers – must manage highly variable climates, and volatile market conditions alongside conflict and political uncertainties to keep their animals healthy and provide for their families. Like the global financial system, pastoralists trade across borders, manage highly variable supply and demand, and interact across networks in real time.
During my research with Kenyan and Chinese colleagues in both places since 2018, we have been struck by how pastoralists expertly live with, and benefit from, uncertainties. I believe that this offers some important lessons for elsewhere in the world – including its centres of global finance.
Livestock markets in northern Kenya
Meet Mohamed Hassan, a livestock trader from Moyale in northern Kenya on the border of Ethiopia. He manages a large and fluctuating trade in livestock – cattle, camels, goats, sheep – buying from producers, dealing with brokers and transporters, and selling animals on to terminal markets in Nairobi and further afield. He explains:
I have connections all over this region and buy cattle from as far as Garissa and Moyale [in Kenya], even Somalia. I transport cattle on trucks and sell on to customers in Nairobi. I also buy up small stock in bush markets around here, and sell to other traders in nearby areas for sale in local towns.
The pastoral areas of the Horn of Africa – from Somalia to Ethiopia to Kenya and beyond – are the centre of a massive international market in livestock. Estimates vary, but each year around US$1 billion in trade in live animals passes through the ports along the Somali coast destined for the Gulf countries, notably Saudi Arabia.
This is an internationalised, cross-border market affected by multiple uncertainties. It requires considerable financing, sophisticated coordination and complex governance arrangements. It operates almost completely informally outside the grip of state regulation and taxation, yet in a highly sensitive geopolitical arena.
Central to this complex international market is a network of traders and brokers who source animals from diverse locations across pastoral regions and organise their transport to and subsequent sale in terminal markets. This requires a great deal of collective skill by traders like Hassan, galvanising different knowledge, connecting people and negotiating trade in real time.
This includes negotiating with border police, customs officials and veterinary officers. One of the key features is the willingness of all parties to accept that the entire system requires a deliberate maintenance of ambiguities around regulation to ensure the flexibility of movement when official rules would prevent it.
These pastoralists in northern Kenya are part of a complex network of traders and brokers. Ian Scoones, CC BY-NC-SA
Brokers – intermediaries in the system with knowledge of the whole network – are relied on by the traders for knowledge about conditions in production areas, prices in different places and connections to markets. They operate in multiple languages and can link producers and traders, measuring livestock weights, recommending prices and preventing fraud.
Connected across far-flung areas, they use kinship and cultural connections to build trust between market players, facilitating effective trade. By offering knowledge, credit and informal insurance, they smooth the operation of the market, reducing sources of uncertainty. Collective arrangements for trading animals also diminish risks and enhance capacities for financing and transportation.
Such markets are always social, connected by trust-based relationships frequently over long distances, but with the end result being an efficient, effective market that can respond to multiple shocks – whether trade bans, price volatility, insecurity or drought.
Unlike with global finance and its addiction to predictive algorithms, the web of interactions between actors in this market are based on close connections among kin and clan groups, rooted in sustained social relations. Facilitated by increasingly robust mobile-phone coverage enabling rapid and secure money transfers, the system is remarkably effective given the volume of exchanges in this informal cross-border trade.
In contrast to contemporary financial systems, this is a system where networks of people keep a close eye on any potential failure, and respond in real time. Uncertainty is accepted, not dismissed or ignored. Informality means that a rapid response to changing circumstances is possible, with everyone contributing to generating reliability. The “human touch” is always present, and there is no opportunity for the system to collapse.
Studies of these livestock markets have highlighted differences between “long” and “short” market chains. While the former are run mostly by men, short market chains are more local, more embedded in local social relations and involve more women, particularly in the sheep and goat trade.
As uncertainties increase, it is these shorter, more locally managed chains that can adjust most rapidly. A much more variegated pattern is emerging, replacing the “big man”-dominated long chains of the past. With more players connected in networks through more diverse and decentralised social relations, the capacity to respond to uncertain events increases.
All this may seem very far from the challenges of global finance, but I believe there are important lessons to be learned. Livestock markets are similarly non-linear and complex, operate internationally and have limited formal regulatory control – yet they remain firmly embedded in social settings. A more social basis for “the economy” and “the market”, rooted in collective, networked responses, is apparent, where responses to uncertainty are central. This contrasts with the idealised image of an individualised, risk management response promoted in mainstream finance and banking systems,
The livestock markets of northern Kenya are facilitated by personal, culturally imbued interactions, while also using technologies that support the efficient and rapid flows of money and information. It is the human touch, involving a range of networked social practices, that is central to grappling continuously with uncertainties.
Buddhist herders in Amdo Tibet
Next, meet Loba Tsering from Dreinag village in the north of Kokonor, in the high pastures of Amdo Tibet, China. Like Hassan, he and his family must navigate many uncertainties. Heavy snowfall and an extended winter can wreak havoc with herding arrangements as people move yaks and sheep from winter to summer pastures at altitudes in excess of 4,000 metres.
Access to land, particularly for winter grazing by Qinghai lake – China’s largest – is increasingly constrained, as land along the lakeshore is divided up, privatised and acquired for tourism development and conservation projects. Markets for yak meat, as well as milk, butter and cheese, are expanding in the lower altitude areas as towns grow and lakeside tourist resorts are established, but in this volatile context new market connections must be found.
Uncertainties are accepted as part-and-parcel of life. As Tsega Norbu, a 40-year-old herder and father of three from Darnama village in the south of Kokonor, explains: “What happened is already in the past, and what is going to happen is unpredictable. All we can depend on is the present, we deal with what is happening now.”
Access to land for winter grazing by Qinghai lake in Kokonor is increasingly constrained. Palden Tsering, CC BY-NC-SA
Uncertainty is central to a Buddhist sensibility governing life. The world cannot be stable and controlled, but is part of a cycle of ongoing change. According to Tibetan Buddhist teachings and practices, uncertainties from whatever source – climatic, economic, political – should never be feared. They are part of how knowledges and experiences are constructed.
Unlike the anxiety and stress that uncertainties may create amid the western ideal of an ordered, regular, stable world, for Loba Tsering and others, there is no such expectation of a linear path. The assumptions of western-style modernity are fundamentally challenged.
But this doesn’t mean that they reject the trappings of a modern life. Mobile phones and internet connectivity, reliable off-grid electricity, functioning transport infrastructure, good healthcare, education for children and commercial market interactions are all crucial for pastoralists living in Kokonor. But these are integrated within an outlook that makes use of ambiguity and embraces uncertainty as part of daily life.
This requires particular skills for generating reliability which, just like for Mohamed Hassan and his fellow Kenyan traders, involve relying on social relations and networks. But in contrast to northern Kenya, where state presence and regulation is limited, in areas such as Kokonor there is much more interaction with state officials and government investment projects. This has implications for how uncertainties are navigated.
Infrastructure development continues apace in Amdo Tibet, with the Chinese state investing in large settlement programmes alongside road and rail infrastructure and conservation projects to protect watersheds. While Amdo Tibet remains a largely rural and very mountainous area, land access is always contentious as different actors – local people, investors, the government – compete for control. This generates heightened uncertainties for pastoralists. However, despite the increasing state presence, whether through local county officials or national-level projects, there is always room for manoeuvre.
Loba Tsering and others make use of this latitude to navigate within often ambiguous, hybrid arrangements around market or land access. Policies coming from the centre are never specified in detail, but provide guidance around broad objectives set by the Chinese state.
This approach to navigating uncertainty is what the Singaporean political scientist and author Yuen Yuen Ang calls “directed improvisation”. It provides a route to responding to complexity and uncertainty that allows flexibility and the possibilities of adaptation, avoiding top-down imposition. It is a combination of central facilitation and local innovation – one that makes use of ambiguity and thrives off uncertainty.
Yuen Yuen Ang on the pros and cons of China’s economic approach. Video: New Economic Thinking.
So, for example, when Loba Tsering and other villagers wanted to secure land for winter grazing to fatten their animals for sale to nearby markets, they had to exploit this flexibility and navigate the uncertainties. Their original winter grazing sites had shrunk, both because of encroachment of urban areas and expansion of the lake, due to increasing snow melt thanks to climate change. This meant that land was scarce and their opportunities for livestock marketing had declined.
First, they approached the local township officials to put their case. They were already connected with some officials who came from the same village, so conversations could start easily. Working together with these representatives, they then approached the county officials.
Although there were limits imposed by central state policies due to environmental regulations and plans for a conservation area, a creative, improvised solution was found through dialogue and deliberation. A two-year compensation for the loss of the winter pasture was offered, and a new area allocated for the landless pastoralists in the village. This ensured their animals could be fed and fattened, allowing new marketing opportunities in the fast-growing nearby towns and tourist resorts.
This was “directed improvisation” in action, with solutions being found that responded to changing circumstances. It is not an isolated example but, as many have commented before, central to the style of centralised-yet-flexible, pragmatic policymaking that China has adopted – an approach that has been central to its rapid economic transformation and poverty reduction following the reform era.
In a highly complex system with many different requirements and operating across a vast geographic area, a singular, designed solution rolled out from the centre clearly will not work. Rather, an approach to economic change that is responsive to uncertain conditions is required, with flexible institutions and governance systems – very unlike the fixed regulatory protocols of global finance.
No standardised blueprint model of either design or regulation will work. Solutions must allow for experimentation and improvisation, and be built on social relations where trust is essential. Once again, it is the human touch that is key.
Rethinking an uncertain world
Despite the very different contexts, the experiences from northern Kenya and Amdo Tibet in China offer some important insights into how to navigate uncertainty in our turbulent times. Could such insights help us avoid the chaos and collapse we saw during the financial crash and following the imposition of Trump’s tariffs? Interestingly, the principles that emerge are similar to those suggested by Haldane and others following the 2007-08 financial crash.
What does this involve? The need to decentralise and rely on social interactions in localised networks. The need to avoid reliance on simple, centralised solutions, whether from algorithmic or state diktats. The need to be careful about relying on top-down imposition of regulations, and to seek adaptive, flexible solutions. The need to develop collective options based on trust-based relations – avoiding either an atomised, individualised response or one emerging from a centralised, dirigiste imposition.
Above all, it highlights the need for the human touch – the social, networked relations that are only possible to develop when people interact with each other and build trust.
What does this suggest for the future? A modernist vision of control – whether through markets or states – towards a singular understanding of progress is clearly inappropriate. Instead, a more flexible, adaptive path is required. This means opening up to alternatives, decentralising activities, facilitating experimentation and improvisation and accepting uncertainty.
Embracing uncertainty and encouraging democratic deliberation is also a route to avoiding the future being captured by those who seek to profit from uncertainty, or who seek to close down options through the populist rhetoric of “taking back control”.
Whether responding to a financial shock, new technologies, land use change, a pandemic or the climate crisis, this requires – as in citizen assemblies and other forms of deliberative democratic practice – diverse people interacting and building trust for collective responses. AI and predictive mathematical models are no replacement in our current age of uncertainty.
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Ian Scoones was a recipient of a European Research Council Advanced Grant for the PASTRES project – Pastoralism, Uncertainty and Resilience: Global Lessons from the Margins (https://pastres.org/). He is the author of Navigating Uncertainty: Radical Rethinking for a Turbulent World (Polity Books, 2024, https://bit.ly/44f9sqe).
With 15 civilians and one gunman dead so far, and another 40 people injured, Australia is reeling from its worst act of terrorism on home soil. Two gunmen opened fire on a Jewish community gathering to celebrate the first night of Hanukkah at Archer Park on Sydney’s famous Bondi Beach.
Police have confirmed the two alleged attackers were father and son, aged 50 and 24. The father, Sajid Akram, who was licensed to own six firearms, was shot dead by police. The son, Naveed Akram, remains under police guard in hospital.
Given it was clearly an antisemitic attack, authorities soon after declared it an act of terrorism – that is, an act of politically motivated violence. This designation also gives authorities extra resources in their response and in bringing those responsible to justice.
As Australians try to process their shock and grief, there has been some anger in the community that not enough has been done to protect Jewish Australians from the rising antisemitism evident since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023 and the ensuing Gaza war.
What we know about the alleged attackers
ASIO (The Australian Security Intelligence Organisation) Director-General Mike Burgess has said one of the alleged gunmen was “known” to ASIO, though he did not specify which one. Being “known” to authorities can simply mean someone has been associated with networks and communications that have caused concern to authorities. The ABC has reported that Naveed Akram came to the attention of authorities after the arrest of Islamic State Sydney cell leader Isaac El Matari in July 2019.
However, there are hundreds of people who come to authorities’ attention for their contact, online or off, with extremist networks and individuals. With limited resources (and authorities’ resources will always be limited, no matter how much funding they have), they have to run a triage system to assess the threat an individual or a group may pose, and manage the risk as best they can.
They will carefully assess what is being said and the language used, for example, as well as looking at whether a person has a history of violence. As angry and upset as people understandably are in the wake of such a horrific incident, it needs to be recognised that authorities can’t simply arrest everyone who expresses extremist ideas or has passing links with extremist elements.
We still need to know more about this terror attack and the alleged attackers, but to date there has been no evidence of a network in operation. Given the alleged gunmen were father and son, this technically fits the profile of a “lone actor” attack, as we saw in the Lindt Cafe siege in 2014, and Christchurch in 2019.
It is very difficult for authorities to predict and therefore prevent lone actor attacks – by their nature, there’s often no sign beforehand of the potential for violence. And public sites like the reserve at Bondi Beach require extensive resources to police, meaning not all can be adequately secured.
As Burgess pointed out in his annual threat assessment, “our greatest threat remains a lone actor using an easily obtained weapon”. Sadly, that has been shown to be true.
Changing nature of terrorist threat in Australia
There has been much attention in recent years on the rise of far-right extremism and terrorism.
One of the best guides to this is Burgess’ annual threat assessment. In it he explained that a decade ago, just one in ten cases ASIO was following up involved right-wing extremists, with radical Islamist groups occupying most of their attention. However, in recent years the ratio has shifted closer to one in two investigations involving right-wing extremism. In other words, a lot of ASIO’s attention and resources are now necessarily tied up with combating right-wing extremism, especially following the Christchurch terror attack in which 51 people were shot dead by an Australian far-right terrorist during Friday prayers in two New Zealand mosques.
More broadly, Islamic terrorism continues to remain a global threat. IS and Al-Qaeda remain active in the Middle East and increasingly in Africa, as well as central Asia and Afghanistan. Generally, authorities are doing a good job of keeping on top of any threats these networks might pose in Australia.
There is no doubt the general atmosphere between pro-Palestinian and Jewish groups has become far more febrile in the wake of the Hamas attack and the Gaza war. There is a lot of anger and frustration as scenes of violence and suffering are broadcast daily, and we have seen a rise both in antisemitism and Islamophobia since the war began, simply because of the way it plays out in people’s imaginations.
But even in the protests we have seen over many months, the number of people who might use this sentiment to spur violence is small.
Again, there is no evidence the Bondi shooting was part of a wider network, and it is very difficult to stop a lone actor attack on a public site.
In a glimmer of hope, the man whose much-lauded act of heroism in wrestling one of the alleged gunman’s weapons from him has been named as 43-year-old Muslim fruit shop owner Ahmed Al-Ahmed. It is hoped this man’s bravery, which showed us the best of humanity in the midst of the worst, will stop any simplistic analysis of blaming the Muslim community for such violence. We have seen this in the United States, and Australia must do much better.
Has the government done enough?
It is very difficult to keep outdoor public events entirely safe: buildings are relatively easy to secure, but a park at a beach far less so.
The government clearly needs to do more to stop terrorism, and public events are an obvious focus for more resources. No one should be satisfied with where we are right now. It is simply horrifying. But it’s going to take a lot of work to figure out where we can best use resources.
We can’t close every loophole or thwart every risk. We can’t stop people turning to violence, and we can’t police every hateful thought. It has been said this was an attack on all of us, and that’s very true. As the message of Hanukkah inspires us, now is the time when we need to pull together as Australians from all faiths and communities, and work together to ensure that light triumphs over darkness.
Greg Barton is Rector (academic head) of Deakin University Lancaster University Indonesia (DLI). Greg receives funding from the Australian Research Council. He is engaged in a range of projects funded by the Australian government that aim to understand and counter violent extremism in Australia and in Southeast Asia and Africa.
At least 16 people – including a ten-year-old child – are dead after two men opened fire on a crowd of people celebrating the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah on Sunday in a public park at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Many more are injured.
I am horrified. But as a researcher who studies hate and extremist violence, I am sadly not surprised.
The Jewish community has been a top target for terrorist ideologies and groups for a long time. Many people working in this field have been expecting a serious attack on Australian soil.
Much remains unclear about the Bondi terrorist attacks and it’s too early to speculate about these gunmen specifically. The investigation is ongoing.
But what about antisemitic sentiment more broadly?
Our research – which is in the early stages and yet to be peer reviewed – has recorded a significant and worrying increase in antisemitic sentiment after October 7.
Our research
We have been training AI models to track online sentiment in social media targeting Australian communities, including Jewish people.
That means working with humans – including extremism experts and people in the Jewish community – to label content. This is to teach our model if the content it is encountering is hateful or not.
Based on definitions adopted by the Jewish community, we distinguished between two main types of antisemitism: “old” antisemitism and “new” antisemitism.
“Old” antisemitism targets Jews as Jews. It draws on entrenched myths and stereotypes that portray them as alien, dangerous, or morally corrupt.
“New” antisemitism shifts the focus from individual Jews to the state of Israel. It blames Jews collectively for Israel’s actions.
Many in the Jewish community see this as a modern continuation of historical antisemitism. Critics (both within and outside the Jewish community) contend it risks conflating legitimate opposition to Israeli policies with antisemitism.
Central to this debate is whether anti-Israel sentiment represents a continuation of age-old prejudices or a political response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
In our research, we tracked both “old” and “new” antisemitism.
A sharp increase
We found that both increased sharply after October 7.
For example, we studied posts on X (formerly Twitter) geolocated in Australia before and after October 7. We wanted to understand the size of the rise in antisemitism.
We found that “old” antisemitism rose from an average of 34 tweets a month in the year before October 7 to 2,021 in the following year.
“New” antisemitism increased even more, rising from an average of 505 a month in the year before October 7 to 21,724 in the year after.
Some examples of “old” antisemitism are explicit, such as calls to “get rid of all Jews” or “kill all Jews”.
Others are more indirect, including minimising or denying the Holocaust. Examples include posts claiming that “if the Holocaust of 6 million Jews were true, Israel could not exist today” or that the Nazis had only a minimal impact on the Jewish population.
Other forms of hate rely on conspiracy theories, such as claims that “Jews are paying to destroy Australia”.
However, the vast majority of the content our models identified as antisemitic fell into the category of “new” antisemitism. This included content that blamed the Jewish community for events in Israel, such as calling all Australian Jews “baby killers” or “Zionazi fu–wits”, regardless of their personal political views and opinions about the Israeli government and its actions.
(All examples here are drawn from real content, but the wording has been slightly modified to anonymise them and prevent identification of the original authors).
In other words, we have seen an overall escalation of hostilities against Jews online.
More extreme and explicit calls for violence rarely appear on mainstream platforms. They tend to circulate on fringe social media, such as Telegram.
On X, we have seen a collision of mainstream discourse and fringe discourse, due to the lack of moderation.
But antisemitism doesn’t always involve slurs, meaning it can also happen in mainstream platforms. Especially after the election of Trump and the relaxation in moderation practises of Meta, we have also seen it on Instagram. This includes Instagram posts published after the Bondi attack.
Could more have been done?
Certainly the Jewish community, I am sure, will feel not enough was done.
Jillian Segal, Australia’s first government-appointed special envoy for combating antisemitism, released her plan for addressing the issue back in July.
As I wrote at the time, the recommendations fell into three main categories:
preventing violence and crime, including improved coordination between agencies, and new policies aimed at stopping dangerous individuals from entering Australia
strengthening protections against hate speech, by regulating all forms of hate, including antisemitism, and increasing oversight of platform policies and algorithms
promoting antisemitism-free media, education and cultural spaces, through journalist training, education programs, and conditions on public funding for organisations that promote or fail to address antisemitism.
The government had said it will consider the recommendations. Segal has now said government messaging combating antisemitism has “not been sufficient”.
Some might argue addressing points two and three could have helped prevent the Bondi attack. A common assumption is that a climate of widespread antisemitism can embolden violence.
The reality, however, is that this is hard to establish. People who commit terrorist acts – whether they self radicalise or are recruited by terrorist organisations – do not necessarily respond to changes in broader public sentiment.
That said, there is obvious value in prevention work aimed at reducing hostility and antisemitic attitudes, even while small networks or individuals committed to violent terrorism may still exist.
Preventing terrorist violence of this scale relies primarily on effective law enforcement. This requires adequate resourcing and a clear legislative framework.
Education and broader cultural change matter. In short term, however, they are less likely to be as effective at preventing acts of terrorism as measures such as firearm regulation, monitoring extremist networks, and disrupting plots before they turn into action.
Matteo Vergani receives funding from the Australian government (ARC, Department of Home Affairs) and the Canadian government (Public Safety Canada).
The death toll has risen to 15 after two gunmen opened fire on a crowd at Bondi Beach at about 6.47pm on Sunday. Thirty-eight people were injured and taken to hospital, including two police officers and four children. One of the gunmen is also dead. It is the deadliest mass shooting in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.
A crowd of more than 1,000 had gathered to celebrate the first day of the Jewish festival Hanukkah. Bondi Beach is in the Sydney eastern suburbs, the heart of the Jewish community. New South Wales police have declared the shooting a terrorist attack.
Police confirmed one suspect had been taken into custody and was in serious condition. Another suspect was killed at the scene and police said they were investigating the possibility of a third offender. One of the attackers was known to authorities.
On Sunday evening, police were also investigating reports of an explosive device near the beach. At a press conference on Sunday night, New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon confirmed an improvised explosive had been found in a car.
ASIO head Mike Burgess said Australia’s terrorism threat level remained at “probable”. This means there is a greater than 50% chance of an onshore attack or attack planning in the next twelve months. “I don’t see that changing at this stage,” Burgess told reporters in Canberra on Sunday night.
Soon after the shooting began, horrific vision emerged on social media of people shot dead or injured, as well as footage of incredible acts of bravery from passersby trying to thwart the attack.
One video shows a bystander tackling a gunman from behind, wrestling his gun from him. Others were performing CPR on the injured on the beach.
A Jewish chaplain with blood on him spoke of trying to save people amid terrible scenes of people shot in the head. People fled as the attack unfolded, but some elderly people were unable to run.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the scenes as “shocking and distressing”. “My thoughts are with every person affected.” In the wake of the attack he convened an emergency meeting of the National Security Committee of cabinet.
Albanese received a preliminary briefing from Australian Federal Police acting Deputy Commissioner Nigel Ryan and New South Wales Premier Chris Minns, who convened an emergency meeting of state cabinet. Albanese defended himself against criticism he had not taken antisemitism seriously enough.
“Australia is braver than those who seek to make us afraid […] we will see justice done, and we will come through this together,” he said.
“There are nights that tear at our nation’s soul in this moment of darkness,” Albanese said. “We must be each other’s light. Hold on to the true character of the country that we love.”
At Sunday night’s press conference, Minns said “This cowardly act of terrifying violence is shocking and painful to see, and represents some of our worst fears about terrorism in Sydney.” He asked Australians to “wrap their arms around” the Jewish community, and praised both the outpouring of love and support towards the Jewish community as well as the extraordinary demonstrations of courage in the wake of the attack.
Lanyon called for calm, and said this is “not a time for retribution”. He assured the public no stone would be left unturned in bringing those responsible to justice and ensuring there are no further attacks. “This type of disgraceful activity, this wanton use of violence, the taking of innocent lives is unacceptable to New South Wales.”
Independent federal MP Allegra Spender, who represents Bondi in her seat of Wentworth, also expressed her shock and horror.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley also expressed her shock. “Australians are in deep mourning tonight, with hateful violence striking at the heart of an iconic Australian community, a place we all know so well and love, Bondi.
“Today we stand together as Australians against hate in this moment of profound tragedy and shock.”
In a statement, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said “our heart misses a beat”. He called on the Australian government to “take action to fight against the enormous wave of antisemitism which is plaguing Australian society”.
The Australian Imams Council issued a statement condemning the attack.
“These acts of violence and crimes have no place in our society. Those responsible must be held fully accountable and face the full force of the law,” the statement said.
“Our hearts, thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and all those who witnessed or were affected by this deeply traumatic attack.”
A timeline of the events
5pm – Chanukah by the Sea event begins. It’s run by the Chabad of Bondi which promotes it as “the perfect family event to celebrate light, warmth, and community.”
Sometime after 6.45pm – Two shooters can be seen firing from a bridge towards people at the Chanukah by the Sea event. They have a number of guns. Video footage shows cars driving past them as they shoot.
Footage shows the two gunmen beginning their attack from the bridge. AAP
One of the shooters, since identified as Sajid Akram, moves to the park grass.
A bystander, since identified as Ahmed El-Ahmed, tackles gunman Sajid Akram.
Incredible footage of Ahmed al Ahmed tackling a gunman and taking his weapon. ABC
Sajid Akram runs back to bridge where video shows his son Naveed Akram is still shooting. He re-arms. Both men come under fire from police nearby.
Drone footage shows one gunman down while a second remained firing. ABC
The second alleged gunman, Naveed Akram, is shot. A man in pale clothing walks towards the bridge then motions for police to come. Another man moves onto the bridge and raises his hands, a gunshot can be heard in the video footage.
Chaos ensues as bystanders and police rush the bridge. AAP/ABC/X
Police and members of the public run onto the bridge in chaotic scenes. One man can be seen kicking one of the alleged gunmen, while another two people are fighting each other.
By 7.30, police are seen surrounding the shooters on the ground.
Footage shows police securing the scene and stabilising the injured gunman. ABC
Sajid Akram is confirmed to have died, while Naveed Akram is in hospital with injuries.
The death toll has risen to 16 after two gunmen opened fire on a crowd at Bondi Beach at about 6.47pm on Sunday. Thirty-eight people were injured and taken to hospital, including two police officers and four children. One of the gunman was among the dead. It is the deadliest mass shooting in Australia since the Port Arthur massacre in 1996.
A crowd of more than 1,000 had gathered to celebrate the first day of the Jewish festival Hanukkah. Bondi Beach is in the Sydney eastern suburbs, the heart of the Jewish community. New South Wales police have declared the shooting a terrorist attack.
Police confirmed one suspect had been taken into custody and was in serious condition. Another suspect was killed at the scene and police said they were investigating the possibility of a third offender. One of the attackers was known to authorities.
On Sunday evening, police were also investigating reports of an explosive device near the beach. At a press conference on Sunday night, New South Wales Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon confirmed an improvised explosive had been found in a car.
ASIO head Mike Burgess said Australia’s terrorism threat level remained at “probable”. This means there is a greater than 50% chance of an onshore attack or attack planning in the next twelve months. “I don’t see that changing at this stage,” Burgess told reporters in Canberra on Sunday night.
Soon after the shooting began, horrific vision emerged on social media of people shot dead or injured, as well as footage of incredible acts of bravery from passersby trying to thwart the attack.
One video shows a bystander tackling a gunman from behind, wrestling his gun from him. Others were performing CPR on the injured on the beach.
A Jewish chaplain with blood on him spoke of trying to save people amid terrible scenes of people shot in the head. People fled as the attack unfolded, but some elderly people were unable to run.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese described the scenes as “shocking and distressing”. “My thoughts are with every person affected.” In the wake of the attack he convened an emergency meeting of the National Security Committee of cabinet.
Albanese received a preliminary briefing from Australian Federal Police acting Deputy Commissioner Nigel Ryan and New South Wales Premier Chris Minns, who convened an emergency meeting of state cabinet. Albanese defended himself against criticism he had not taken antisemitism seriously enough.
“Australia is braver than those who seek to make us afraid […] we will see justice done, and we will come through this together,” he said.
“There are nights that tear at our nation’s soul in this moment of darkness,” Albanese said. “We must be each other’s light. Hold on to the true character of the country that we love.”
At Sunday night’s press conference, Minns said “This cowardly act of terrifying violence is shocking and painful to see, and represents some of our worst fears about terrorism in Sydney.” He asked Australians to “wrap their arms around” the Jewish community, and praised both the outpouring of love and support towards the Jewish community as well as the extraordinary demonstrations of courage in the wake of the attack.
Lanyon called for calm, and said this is “not a time for retribution”. He assured the public no stone would be left unturned in bringing those responsible to justice and ensuring there are no further attacks. “This type of disgraceful activity, this wanton use of violence, the taking of innocent lives is unacceptable to New South Wales.”
Independent federal MP Allegra Spender, who represents Bondi in her seat of Wentworth, also expressed her shock and horror.
Opposition Leader Sussan Ley also expressed her shock. “Australians are in deep mourning tonight, with hateful violence striking at the heart of an iconic Australian community, a place we all know so well and love, Bondi.
“Today we stand together as Australians against hate in this moment of profound tragedy and shock.”
In a statement, Israeli President Isaac Herzog said “our heart misses a beat”. He called on the Australian government to “take action to fight against the enormous wave of antisemitism which is plaguing Australian society”.
The Australian Imams Council issued a statement condemning the attack.
“These acts of violence and crimes have no place in our society. Those responsible must be held fully accountable and face the full force of the law,” the statement said.
“Our hearts, thoughts and prayers are with the victims, their families, and all those who witnessed or were affected by this deeply traumatic attack.”
We have no way of knowing how many additional lives were saved as a result of Ahmed’s bravery. But it almost certainly prevented further loss of life.
The moment is reminiscent of when a bystander similarly intervened at great personal risk during the Bondi Junction shopping centre attack in 2024.
When acts of courage like these occur, we rightly take notice and commend them.
But they also raise important and often overlooked questions: what motivates ordinary people to take such selfless, high-risk actions, is bystander intervention a good strategy, or does it go against official advice during mass violence events?
Two types of ‘bystander effect’
Many people would have heard of the “bystander effect”, which occurs when the presence of others discourages someone from intervening in an emergency situation, against a bully, or during an assault or other crime.
But decades of behavioural research complicate the popular idea that people inevitably freeze or look away when others are present during dangerous situations.
A large meta-analysis of bystander behaviour shows in genuinely dangerous, unambiguous emergencies (like those involving a clear perpetrator), the classic (passive) bystander effect is substantially weakened, and in some cases even reversed.
In other words, violent attacks are precisely the kinds of situations where people become likelier to act.
One reason is danger clarifies responsibility. When a situation is clearly life-threatening, people recognise it faster and are less likely to wait for social cues or reassurance from others.
We see time and again that in clear high-risk emergencies (particularly those involving violence), responsibility often sharpens rather than disappears.
An analysis of more than 100 suicide attacks in Israel shows bystander intervention can significantly reduce overall casualties.
Across these documented incidents, intervention rarely prevented an attack altogether but it frequently disrupted the attacker’s control over timing and location, triggering premature action in less crowded settings and saving lives as a result.
The same analysis, however, also shows bystander intervention often came at a direct personal cost to the interveners.
But active bystander behaviour takes many forms and can occur at different stages.
It may also involve:
someone who knows the perpetrator noticing and reporting concerning behaviour in the lead-up to an attack
guiding others to safety or sharing information as events unfold
providing assistance and coordination in the aftermath.
However, getting involved does seem to fly in the face of official advice from Australian authorities.
The new public safety campaign explicitly recognises that Australia is a safe country but there remains a risk of weapons attacks in crowded places, and that knowing how to respond can save lives.
escape: move quickly and quietly away from danger but only if it is safe to do so
hide: stay out of sight and silence your mobile phone
tell: call police by dialling Triple Zero (000) when it is safe.
The aim of this advice is to help people respond in the critical first moments before police arrive, make informed decisions, and increase their chances of staying safe.
The official Australian guidance does not include any instruction to confront an attacker.
By contrast, US public safety messaging such as the FBI’s “Run. Hide. Fight” guidance does include a “fight” step, but only as a last-resort option when escape and hiding are not possible and life is in immediate danger.
Australian authorities have chosen not to include such a step, emphasising avoidance and reporting rather than confrontation.
Some practical advice
My previous experimental research has identified more specific behavioural guidance that can improve survival chances in violent attacks, particularly in crowded environments.
First, moving slowly away from danger is not ideal – people need to move away from the source of threat as quickly and safely as possible.
Second, hesitation – whether to gather information, inspect what is happening, or film events – increases the risk of harm.
Third, people need to remain agile in their decision-making and navigation while they are moving and be willing to adjust their movement as situations evolve and information becomes clearer. This means continuously scanning your surroundings and adjusting direction as new information becomes apparent, rather than stopping to reassess.
Finally, when moving with family or friends, travelling in a single-file formation – staying close in a back-to-back snake formation rather than holding hands side by side – benefits everyone by reducing congestion and improving flow.
Crowded spaces will always remain vulnerable to deliberate violence, whether driven by terrorist intent or other motivations.
Messaging needs to reach more people to be evidence-based, nuanced, and widely accessible.
With several major public events and large mass gatherings approaching (including New Year’s Eve) it is more important than ever for people to be aware of these risks and remain vigilant.
Milad Haghani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
