Welcome to Third Institute
This is the second edition of From the Network, Third Institute's weekly window into the analysis, reporting, and regional intelligence our contributors produce across seven regions.
A week on from our newsletter launch, the network is fully underway. Regional digests are publishing daily, the weekly briefing notes are out, and article pieces are live across the network.
Weekly Briefing
South Asia
Navigating Eastward: Sri Lanka's ASEAN Engagement at the 33rd ARF
"Sri Lanka's active engagements at the ARF take place in the backdrop of threatened economic security arising from the Middle Eastern crisis… its engagement aims to attract foreign direct investments and enhance trade relations through its twin-track ASEAN economic strategy of RCEP and SDP."
NEW IN ANALYSIS
Across the Network
OPPORTUNITIES
Applications remain open for both Network Contributors and Analysis Editors. If you have regional expertise and a perspective worth sharing, we want to hear from you.
EDITORS NOTE
Welcome back to From the Network.
Another full week, and the network has kept its pace. The digests ranged widely: the UN's warning over scam compounds spreading across Southeast Asia, the international interest now gathering around Bangladesh's rising strategic weight, Zimbabwe's entry into the BRICS bank as a marker of more sovereignty-driven financing, and Trump's FIFA diplomacy with Sheinbaum, which reveals more about how USMCA will really be negotiated than any formal statement has. The longer pieces went deeper — one on the politics of humanitarian visas in South Asia, another on Japan's blueprint for middle-power digital sovereignty.
Beyond our own coverage, two stories held my attention this week.
The first was South Korea's President Lee, who spent the week moving between Washington, Brazil, Chile, Argentina and Germany. Read through Western coverage it looks like routine alliance management, but that framing misses the more interesting story: an East Asian middle power writing itself directly into Latin America and building its own lines to the Global South without waiting for anyone to broker them. That is exactly the kind of positioning this network exists to notice.
The second was smaller but sharper. New Zealand's foreign minister told a Chinese-born member of parliament to return to his own country, and Beijing lodged a formal diplomatic protest within a day. A domestic remark became a bilateral incident almost immediately — a reminder of how fast questions of belonging can be turned into instruments of foreign policy.
We are continuing to commission contributors across all seven regions now — if you read the world this way, come write for us.
Arabella, Editor-in-Chief
Thank you for reading,
Foreign policy beyond the first take.