In this episode of Devpolicy Talks, Robin Davies speaks with Jelle Postma, founder and CEO of the Dutch NGO Justice for Prosperity, about the rising influence of anti-rights actors across the Asia-Pacific. Drawing on his extensive background in intelligence, security, and international diplomacy, Postma details how his Amsterdam-based NGO investigates and exposes extremist, ultra-conservative and populist groups working to undermine democracy and human rights. The conversation explores the findings of Justice for Prosperity’s landmark report, developed in collaboration with the International Planned Parenthood Federation, Unveiling subversive power: shedding light on anti-rights actors in the Asia-Pacific region, and examines what can be done to counteract these subversive threats.
The interview opens with Postma reflecting on his career trajectory, from senior roles at the United Nations and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security to founding Justice for Prosperity. He explains how the organisation operates at the intersection of intelligence and advocacy, using advanced technologies — including AI-driven tools — to map and counter the tactics of anti-rights actors. Postma describes how his team supports at-risk groups such as LGBTIQ+ individuals, activists, and journalists, not only by sharing intelligence but also by providing training in physical and cyber security.
A central focus of the discussion is the recent intelligence assessment conducted by Justice for Prosperity and the International Planned Parenthood Federation, covering ten countries in the region. Postma reveals how anti-rights actors — ranging from authoritarian states to ultra-conservative religious groups and populist alliances — manipulate cultural narratives and exploit societal divisions. He highlights how issues as diverse as vaccine scepticism, climate change, and demographic decline are weaponised to advance exclusionary and often destructive agendas. The report’s findings underscore the deliberate and interconnected nature of these movements, and the urgent need for early detection and coordinated responses across governments and civil society.
Postma provides concrete examples from the region, such as the role of faith leaders in spreading disinformation about sexual and reproductive health, and the targeting of marginalised groups through lobbying, strategic alliances, and discriminatory legislation. He also discusses the economic and political motivations underpinning these campaigns, including the pursuit of influence, funding, and power. The conversation touches on the challenges of combating corruption and the blurred lines between legal and illegal activities, as seen in cases like Vanuatu’s passport sales to Russian nationals.
The interview concludes with Postma’s vision for Justice for Prosperity and the broader fight to defend democracy in the Asia-Pacific. He emphasises the importance of cross-sectoral collaboration, intelligence sharing, and solidarity among rights movements, health networks, and climate advocates. Postma calls for governments — including Australia’s — to recognise these threats as matters of national security, not just health or human rights, and to break down silos in their policy responses. He stresses that only by understanding and exposing the complex, covert tactics of anti-rights actors can societies build effective, long-term defences.
Download the Subversive Powers report.
Jelle Postma: Democracy needs support, and it doesn't come cheap. We have to understand that we are currently in a paradigm shift. We are overloaded with actors. They are increasingly well-funded, because the stakes are so high. We are not talking about an LGBTQ problem. We're not talking about an SRHR [Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights] problem. We're talking about national security. What we do a lot is explain to those responsible for national security that they should start considering going cross-pillar and not keeping this within the health department or emancipation department, but to really take this seriously and involve the national security experts.
Acknowledgement of Country: We wish to acknowledge the indigenous people of Australia, the wider Asia-Pacific region and other parts of the world and express our respect for their traditional knowledge and practices, which stem from a deep connection to the lands and waters they have inhabited for millennia.
Robin Davies: Welcome to Devpolicy Talks, the podcast of the Development Policy Centre. We're part of the Crawford School of Public Policy at the Australian National University on Ngunnawal and Ngambri country in Canberra. I'm Robin Davies. This is our 12th season, and we're bringing you a mix of interviews, event recordings, and in-depth features on topics central to our research, including Australia's overseas aid, development in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, and broader regional and global development issues.
In today's episode, I speak with Jelle Postma, the founder and CEO of Justice for Prosperity, an Amsterdam-based non-government organisation dedicated to defending democracy, human rights and vulnerable communities from subversive threats. In this conversation, we explore how the sources of these threats operate, the techniques they use to polarise society and what can be done to counter their influence.
Jelle offers insights from his organisation's recent deep dive into 10 countries across our region, showing how seemingly disconnected issues from vaccine scepticism to climate change to demographic decline are linked and weaponised to advance extremist or simply destructive agendas.
With a distinguished career spanning intelligence, security and international diplomacy, Jelle previously held senior roles at the United Nations, where he led global initiatives like the UN Countering Terrorist Travel Program, and also at the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. His expertise lies in developing advanced technologies to support counter-terrorism and to push back against what's sometimes termed the anti-rights agenda.
His organisation, Justice for Prosperity, operates at the intersection of intelligence and advocacy, investigating and exposing the networks and tactics of extremist, ultra-conservative and populist actors who seek to undermine open societies. Its work ranges from conducting multi-source intelligence assessments and publishing evidence-based reports to supporting at-risk groups such as LGBTIQ+ individuals, activists and journalists. Justice for Prosperity is also known for its innovative use of technology, including AI-driven tools, to detect and counter disinformation and polarisation, and for its collaborations with international partners, civil society and governments to build resilience against subversive threats.
In December 2024, Justice for Prosperity, in partnership with the International Planned Parenthood Federation or IPPF, released the landmark report Unveiling subversive power: shedding light on anti-rights actors in the Asia-Pacific region. This rapid intelligence assessment examines how authoritarian states, ultra-conservative religious groups and populist alliances manipulate cultural narratives and exploit societal divisions to erode democratic institutions and human rights, particularly sexual and reproductive health and rights, gender equality and LGBTIQ+ protections.
Covering 10 countries including Vanuatu, Papua New Guinea, Fiji, Indonesia, Malaysia and Australia, the report details how anti-rights actors use disinformation, lobbying and strategic alliances to promote discriminatory legislation, silence dissent and foster environments where marginalised communities face systemic oppression.
Key findings of the report highlight the interconnected and deliberate nature of these anti-rights movements, the urgent need for early detection and unified responses across governments and civil society, and the cross-sectoral threats posed to both national and regional security. Justice for Prosperity emphasises that defending democracy in the Asia-Pacific requires not only technical innovation and intelligence sharing, but also broad solidarity among rights movements, health networks and climate advocates.
We'll put a link to the report in the show notes for this episode.
As you'll hear in the conversation, Jelle's approach is grounded in the belief that only by understanding and exposing these complex, often covert tactics can societies build effective defences.
This interview was recorded a few months ago in December 2024 when Jelle was visiting Canberra to participate in the Development Policy Centre's annual Australasian Aid and International Development Conference. So, you'll hear one or two dated references.
Jelle Postma: I'm Jelle Postma. I have a background in intelligence and security with the National Intelligence Agency, and worked after that in counter-terrorism, mainly on foreign terrorist fighters. Close cooperation with the US, Australia and UK, joined the United Nations, responsible for the detection of terrorism and serious organised crime, aviation security. And a few years ago, we started an NGO called Justice for Prosperity, based in Amsterdam. And what we do is, you could say intelligence and security for good.
So, what we do with some former colleagues and some additional staff now is we help groups that are under siege, and we investigate where their opposition is coming from, and we bring that knowledge both to them and we unveil the subversive powers and organisations and networks that try to instrumentalise topics that work best to polarise society. So, what we do is we use our detection technology to identify — we take polarised topics and then we backtrack, so we investigate who started the whole narrative, who multiplied it. So that's when, if you track everything back in time, then eventually you see the starting points, and very frequently we see the same people, networks and organisations starting rhetoric that leads to polarisation eventually — specifically polarisation.
I mean, a little bit of polarisation is not a bad thing in society. It's a very fundamental part of our democracies. It becomes a problem when it leads to in- and out-group thinking. When it's either you're with me or you're against me, then it becomes problematic. So that's our starting point. We always need a threat to start our investigations and follow it. So that's what we mainly do.
Robin Davies: There are several quite distinct streams of work within your organisation. You've talked about your focus on threats to democracy in particular. You also do some work on victim support. Where does that fit into your priorities?
Jelle Postma: So it's intelligence and security for good, which means that, indeed, we gather intelligence mainly on the actors that target — it could be LGBTQ, women, migrants, whatever — it's really these groups that are instrumentalised to raise fear and to destabilise which is sort of an old-school divide and conquer methodology, but we're talking about real people that eventually suffer the severe consequences.
And we've seen offices of women's rights organisations being arsoned, broken into, sensitive documents on HIV treatment in African countries, stolen from safes, and that's very sensitive information in certain African countries, because that often leads to arrests because of same-sex intercourse, for example. So, we go to these groups. We first of all explain to them who's hunting them now, so that they are better equipped to defend themselves. And second, we train them in technical and in operational elements. So, including, how do you know if you come home alone when you leave a protest, for example, for more human rights?
Robin Davies: All right, that's clear. I was looking for that sort of unifying element in your work, though. So, when it comes to supporting, for example, victims of terrorism, you're working with people who might have been targeted. You might have been working with them previously, and you're following right through to the point in time where they may have actually been attacked, and providing support for them, including legal support after that point. Is that right?
Jelle Postma: Yeah, that's right. We are trying to work with partners that specialise in these illegal attacks, because it's really their new go-to of the anti-rights actors. So, it's a heavy lift. Fortunately, there's some European NGOs that also support with legal help desks, etc., how to defend against SLAPPs [Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation], what we call strategic litigation. So, we try to focus really on the more physical security and the cyber security elements.
Robin Davies: Right, so I'd like to, I guess, go through in a more specific way, some of the things that you're working on, but just before I do—how did you get the organisation together? Where did you find the funding support required to establish the organisation?
Jelle Postma: Well, in all honesty, I worked with the UN, and in the UN, you have a good salary, and when I came back, I had sufficient savings to pay some staff, so I used that to build the new organisation. Of course, it's not sustainable, so we are doing several projects now for the Council of Europe, for example, on the measurement of the effectiveness of counter-narratives.
So, you have hate speech or disinformation, and then CSOs [Civil Society Organisations], NGOs, they try to debunk the hate speech or the lies or the disinformation, and we measure how effective is that. So, there are some philanthropic organisations as well that support us, and we now work closely with IPPF, and we just conducted these investigations in the Pacific region.
Robin Davies: So, there's some funding of your own, some project funding, and which philanthropic, like Open Society, or … ?
Jelle Postma: No, we've not had the pleasure of working with OSF [Open Society Foundation], but there are some organisations that support us on the technical, the AI development that's more for safe internet, so to speak, and some other private donors that remain anonymous.
Robin Davies: In relation to your broad work on threats to democracy, I'm interested to hear a bit more about that, and in particular in the context of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, what kind of issues are you seeing, and how do you go about detecting and countering those threats?
Jelle Postma: So, we did a deep dive in the region. We investigated 10 countries. Specifically, we just released a report today with the findings. The report is "Unveiling subversive power: shedding light on anti-rights actors in the Asia-Pacific region". There are some elements that came as surprise and others that came as something that we expected.
So, what we found is mainly that the bigger actors in the region are the same actors that we see globally. There's some countries that benefit from starting the fires, and also some very conservative organisations. So, we look at mainly, we look at three groups. The first group is the extremists and the influencers, so to speak, those we consider to be mainly like the foot soldiers that do the work. Then we have the more political layer and the state layer. Of course, we see globally, we see a move to a shift to the right. Populism is as it has never been bigger. It's a winning formula currently. We see it in the US. We see it in Europe. We see it all over the place, and we see it here in this region as well. And then finally, we look at the ultra-conservative, often religious organisations, and these three groups, they're active everywhere, and what we've seen is they are very successful here in this region as well. So, we're happy that we've been able to do this investigation, but we for sure would promote to do more research, because it's heavily under-researched, this region.
Robin Davies: And just coming to some specific examples in relation to sexual or reproductive health and rights, or the health sector vaccination, for example, have you looked at specific issues in those areas in this region?
Jelle Postma: Yes, we've seen some very severe or very concerning examples of leaders of faith distributing disinformation on SRHR, elements such as contraception, promoting that using contraception will kill you, cutting out the implant from the arm, because it supposedly will kill you. And that's faith leaders. And in this region, of course, faith is very important. We see both, of course, Christian faith and Islam, and these actors that we investigate know very well how to play that card, so to speak. So, they use faith as an instrument to further their cause, and it's very effective, and it's so effective that they work with governments in the region to take down information, for example, from Marie Stopes, claiming that Marie Stopes distributes, disseminates, this information about contraception, and together with the government, they then take the disinformation out of the air.
Robin Davies: There's a notorious case in Samoa in the Pacific where, over time, people lost confidence in the measles vaccine, because there was an incident where a vaccine was wrongly prepared and some people died, and vaccine sceptics, including, in fact, the person who might become the next Secretary for Health in the US, capitalised on that. Is that within your sphere of interest?
Jelle Postma: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. It is one of the many very serious topics that are being instrumentalised again to raise fear. It can be vaccinations. It can go as far as the climate change and the rise of the water, and how do you then blame that on the LGBTQ community? They're very creative in finding topics, finding real problems, like the rising sea water, and then using that for their own targets to further their own goals, which normally it's just power and money.
So, immorality of LGBTQ causes the rise of the sea water because, of course, it has everything to do with religion and morality, etc. The new go-to, for example, now we see the challenges in the demographic decline that we see globally. That's a new hobby that they found very interesting. So Katalin Novak, the former president of Hungary, just started a new foundation, XY. XY, of course, supported by [Elon] Musk and [Giorgia] Meloni [Prime Minister of Italy], supporting countries with their challenges on the demographic decline, and of course, SRHR is not helping getting more kids in the country, or the LGBTQ community is not helping, of course, with getting new labour capital in your country. So, you see how all the serious real-life problems are connected to these topics of these marginalised communities, which in fact create real-life victims, because there's people dying because of this.
Robin Davies: And at the same time, somehow migration is not seen as a solution to the demographic decline.
Jelle Postma: It's incredibly creative how they explain everything in exactly that way. Well, logic is thrown overboard, but people buy it also.
Maybe, but this is more philosophical. I guess we all feel globally that we are not in a good place currently, and we all struggle with problems and challenges and doubts. And then if someone comes along and offers a very decisive answer, saying, you know, follow me, and I'll help you get rid of all the problems, then whether it makes sense or not, you will follow them.
Robin Davies: So, I mean, there's a lot of different things going on here. You have disinformation in particular, being spread by some people for what they believe are their own good reasons, moral reasons from their own perspective. Then you have a lot of disinformation which is being spread, really, to create divisions and weaken democracy in general, and often the people doing that have no particular beliefs. So, I'm curious to just break it down a bit. When we talk about "they are doing this", who is the "they"? How does that group of actors segment into subgroups?
Jelle Postma: So, I explained the three major groups that we investigate, the ultra-conservative organisations. We see them as the brains behind these operations. We receive a lot of breach data from hacks, and in those you can find the multiple-year strategies saying we need to influence. We need to infiltrate influential positions with the UN, with the AU [African Union], with OSCE [Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe]. We need to defund the IPPF, for example. It's always number one favourite to start with.
But as an example, what we saw before the invasion of Crimea by Russia, we saw a group led by a Russian oligarch with a lot of relics from Russian Orthodox Church going through Ukraine. Of course, Ukraine was still part of the Patriarchate of the Russian Patriarch back then. It drew a big crowd. And that was also the period when there were discussions about, should we lean towards the EU, or should we lean towards Russia? And one of the rhetorics that we saw there, that we see repeated elsewhere, is, you know, if you work, if you cooperate with the EU, if eventually you'll decide to join the EU, you will have to submit to the gay dictatorship that comes with membership or with the EU.
And that really did the trick, combined with the relics, combined with substantial funding that they brought with them to support family projects, natural family, of course, meaning white father, white mother and white children. So those pro-family, natural family projects, they were heavily subsidised by these Russian oligarchs. So, it's about connecting the faith with preparing the mindset for better welcome when the troops arrive.
Robin Davies: So, when you speak of ultra-conservative organisations, where are the majority of those based? Is it the US?
Jelle Postma: The US is one of the main suppliers of ultra-conservative organisations. For sure, Europe has their own contribution to the collection. One very successful mother organisation is TFP, Tradition, Family and Property. Many know some of their organisations. Organisations in Spain were, for example, set up. Many do not know that organisation, but that is the organisation that is connected to CitizenGo, which is the international branch of CitizenGo, active globally, very much in Africa, present in this region as well.
The Philippines have a strong presence of CitizenGo, and they are quite serious in their activities, in the rhetoric that they disseminate, and also a lot of petitions and fundraising that they do. Very successfully. They collect a lot of signatures in any petition. And in all honesty, again, they just take any topic that they think will raise emotion in society. It's not only about abortion and protection of life. It is also about agriculture. It is about traditions in Europe.
Robin Davies: When you say agriculture, you mean like they're opposed to genetically modified crops? Or?
Jelle Postma: Good question. In Europe, there's a big debate about agriculture because it causes a lot of pollution, and the EU collectively decided that we need to cut the emissions. So, this means that many countries, including, for example, the Netherlands, that they need to cut back on the volume of agriculture, especially because of the cows, etc. So, there was a lot of — there were riots, there were farmers saying, you know, without us, you don't eat. And they jump on the wagon, CitizenGo, and they build their petitions saying, you know, we need to protect the farmers. It really doesn't matter for them what topic it is, as long as it is generating enough emotion. Because that's the earning model, so to speak. That's the business case.
Robin Davies: And what are they trying to achieve if they don't necessarily deeply hold the values that they espouse. What are they trying to achieve?
Jelle Postma: It's position and leading to money and power. It's to grow big and bigger. It's influence.
Robin Davies: Is it in part about indirectly building support for conservative political parties?
Jelle Postma: That too. That's definitely... It's not the same, but it is definitely happening, even contributing to formation discussions, when you know after election, government needs to be formed, and they are very happy to deliver their talking points to the negotiators. Same in the UN for example, they're very successful in getting even the smaller countries, especially in this region, to change votes, because every vote, of course, is one in the UN so smaller countries, if you have the right compelling, maybe sometimes financial arguments, then you get more vote.
Robin Davies: Are organisations of that kind particularly evident in our region, in the developing countries in our region?
Jelle Postma: For sure, yeah, the same organisations, and also new organisations. We found, again, this is, this is all laid out in the, well, not all, but most of it is laid out in the report released today.
Um, so yeah, no, for sure they are active. They're active both on the political level, they're active in the communities, the faith communities, and also in the businesses. Especially in this region, a lot of natural resources are being targeted — mining, logging, of course, logging very much connected to forced marriages, especially on Solomon Islands, which is heartbreaking to see, but it is. And I'm not saying that correlation is causation, but they sure profit from the whole system of the forced marriages for the loggers from abroad that need to stay happy.
Robin Davies: You've spoken about ultra-conservative organisations, you've spoken about religious extremists, and obviously there's a lot of cross-over there. I guess a third category of actor, though, is purely nefarious, and they may be spreading disinformation through social networks or whatever it might be, in an attempt to make money ultimately. Are you as focused on that group of actors in your work? To give an example, you spoke this morning in one of our conference sessions about the case of Vanuatu, where, through the sale of passports to Russians, at a time when people could travel freely within the Schengen zone on Vanuatu passports — you know, it's essentially corruption — and I'm wondering, you know, where does the work of your organisation cross over into anti-corruption as distinct from attacks on human rights and democracy?
Jelle Postma: We come across a lot of corruption. We've witnessed corruption in the past weeks when we did a deep dive here in the region, and yes, indeed, there is a lot of corruption that we come across when doing our research. But in fact, most of what we see is legal. It stays within the just ... it touches the border of legal and illegal, but most of the time it doesn't cross it. So yes, we come across a lot of corruption and illegal stuff, illegal mining, illegal logging, illegal payments, but that's not our main goal.
But yes, indeed, the whole buy a new passport or buy a new nationality in Vanuatu is a terrible example, because the privilege that Vanuatu had was a visa-free travel agreement with the Schengen area, with the EU. That is a great position for a country to have, not only because the EU is such a great place, but business-wise, it is very helpful.
So, with people promoting and creating the possibility for including Russian nationals, to buy a second nationality, and with that, be able to travel freely to the Schengen area. That creates a problem for Schengen. Of course, in this period of time, the travel from Russia, Russians to the EU is closely monitored, so to speak, as an understatement. So this was also the reason for the European Parliament to cancel the agreement with Vanuatu of the Schengen free travel, the visa-free travel to the Schengen area, which eventually … it was a short-term win, because if you make 120K per passport you sell that's nice, but in the long term, it's the people on the ground, the voters and the people, the civilians of Vanuatu that suffered the sad consequences because they're kicked out of the agreement.
Robin Davies: You may not be able to say a lot about this, but I'm curious to hear about how your organisation undertakes its work. What are your methods, broadly speaking, to the extent that you can, you can discuss those?
Jelle Postma: If I was in intelligence I would say, unfortunately, I cannot disclose. Yes, but it's the same methods. Of course, we do not have the capacity of a nation, but on the other elements, we have advantages that sometimes a country cannot, and we can. But the methods are more or less the same. There's a lot of nowadays, very helpful OSINT [Open-Source Intelligence] research involved, open-source intelligence. There's a lot of work done on the deep web and the dark web. And of course, we combine that ... Well, of course, we are one of the few to combine that with fieldwork. So, we go out there. It's not just from behind the desk. We need to speak to people and see for ourselves what's really happening.
Robin Davies: And I and your prior career involved a lot of work on the term, I guess, would be big data these days, and we've actually heard at this conference about the way in which artificial intelligence is beginning to be used in a development context. How are you using artificial intelligence, particularly for data analysis, in your work?
Jelle Postma: So, we built a tool are called, "WhoDis?", a wink to "Who's dissing me?", "Who is This?" And we scrape social media platforms, and we use NLP [Natural Language Processing] and natural language processing to identify polarising debates in the early stages, so as soon as possible, we detect them. And as I just explained earlier, that we use that same method to track back where polarised debates started from, so the starting point. So that's how we use AI.
We are just about to start a new AI development, together with the University of Tilburg, Tilburg University and Ministry of Defence, the Defence Academy of the Netherlands, to work on the same basis as "WhoDis" tool, and connect the findings with names and numbers that we find on internet. So, we look at the owners of websites, for example, or the owners of platforms used to multiply the information. So, it's not only about influencers, for example, but sometimes it's bots. And so, this is a very exciting moment for us, because we'll be starting in January with the development of this new AI capacity.
Robin Davies: And is this primarily focused on the anglophone world at the moment, or do you have a capability to do it across languages?
Jelle Postma: Yeah, there is a capability of doing it across languages. Unfortunately, the funding that we just received has a European focus, so we definitely are looking for additional funders to also be able to go across the borders. So, in our first tool, we had 20 languages that we were able to target. In our new ones, it's predominantly EU languages.
Robin Davies: When you undertake that sort of data scraping, is it as easy as it used to be? I recall, for example, that for a long time, Twitter essentially made available a public firehose of data, which it switched off, and then it began charging for access to that. Is that a problem for you?
Jelle Postma: For sure, I can't say otherwise, it is a problem. The APIs are becoming increasingly difficult or more expensive. I understand the reason behind it, but it does create difficulties for us.
Robin Davies: Yes, it's like there's a process where a lot of these platforms are becoming more and more walled in and echo chambers and less accessible to people who are interested in looking across the system.
Jelle Postma: Yes, I know very much call upon people to create, to enter other echo chambers, to be very conscious about the fact we all live in echo chambers, and that sometimes we need to take a bold step and enter another echo chamber and just monitor. At least you don't have to actively participate but at least see what's going on out there. Because it's not all evil.
Sometimes it's people with real concerns about your children, about the ... I don't know, the migration, for example. There's a lot of terrible things being said but monitoring them and keeping your conscience with it. Saying to yourself, these are ordinary people, some of them, anyway, most of them, I would dare to say, are ordinary people with real concerns.
Robin Davies: When you identify a pattern of activity driven by an organisation rather than some disenchanted individuals, what's your next step? Is it typically to shine some sunlight on that and publish or is it to contact the people of in a more private way?
Jelle Postma: So what the next step looks like is that, together with several larger NGOs, we think it's needed to build a joint capacity for investigations, and that's a fusion centre, so to speak, researching these topics, and these actors will then build intelligence pictures and push them to this second table, with the relevant NGOs sitting at that table, and together decide on the best action forward.
And indeed, that can be publication, but it can also be litigation, or it might be do nothing and save it for a rainy day or any other course of action. But it is very important that these decisions are taken as a collective and not by individual organisations in a very reactive, short-term win strategy.
And the challenge that every NGO and CSO have is funding and having information and being able to profile yourself with that information. That's good for funders, because they need to see you, otherwise you're not relevant. And that is the devil's dilemma that all these CSOs run into, because you sit on the information and you want to profile yourself, because that's good for donor relations and for visibility. On the other end, maybe another course of action would be more effective to counter these anti-rights sectors. So jointly, that's the next step. They will then receive these intelligence pictures and jointly decide on the best action forward.
Robin Davies: Are there other organisations that are like-minded, or more or less adjacent in their mandates that you would see yourself working more closely with? For example, in this region, the International Crisis Group has for many years monitored and reported on Islamic extremism in Indonesia or in the Philippines. In many ways, what they've been doing has some similarities to what you are now doing.
Jelle Postma: We are very much open to cooperating, collaborating with any organisation, as long as the mindset is right and we're working to stabilise democracy, as opposed to destabilising it, then, for sure. I have not come across many similar organisations. There is a lot of actor monitoring going on, but we believe that is a great first step, but that needs to be enriched with other information sources, and not only the monitoring and then publishing, but a little bit deeper than that. But yeah, very much open and an open invitation to reach out and see if we can, because the world is too big for us, we can't do it alone.
Robin Davies: What's your vision for the organisation over the next five or 10 years? Do you see a capacity to expand subject to accessing resources, or is it more a matter of continuing as you are?
Jelle Postma: No, we ... Democracy needs support, and it doesn't come cheap. We have to understand that we are currently in a, as I would say, maybe a paradigm shift. Things are not looking good. We are overloaded with actors. They're increasingly well-funded, also because the stakes are so high, there's oligarchs popping up all over the place, especially those connected with politics. And that's not limited to Russia. As we all know, we see the same in the US currently happening.
So, there is, let's say, enough market for us to expand and to grow on. I really hope that we don't have to do this all by ourselves. But there's others that come to the rescue, so to speak, because what we see is that there's so much going on under the radar that needs to be unveiled. So that's what our vision is.
And together with this group of NGOs that we plan our next step with is definitely also presence in the region, here and elsewhere across the globe. Because this needs to be not a one-time off, so to speak. This needs to be a continuous process to monitor and detect and again, spit out the information to the NGOs to collectively decide on the best action forward, and keep in mind this is not just... We are not talking about an LGBTQ problem. We're not talking about an SRHR problem. We're talking about national security.
And what we do a lot is explain to those responsible in the government responsible for national security that they should start maybe considering going cross-pillar and not keeping this within the health department or within the emancipation department or the policy advisors on those topics, but to really take this seriously and involve national security experts.
Robin Davies: And that's a point that has struck me as you've been talking — that in the end, governments are very siloed, and in order to raise funding for your work, ultimately, you've got to approach one or another of those silos. And it might be a development silo, it might be a security silo, it might be a health silo. Do you have a way of doing that? Can you pitch your work in ways that would make it easier for donor governments like Australia to fund your work in particular places? I guess you've done that with the EU to some extent.
Jelle Postma: We have. And at the same time, I see that it's quite difficult for the colleagues responsible for national security, counter-intelligence, etc., to onboard this new challenge. Of course, we are overloaded with challenges when it comes to national security. Currently, all of the democracies are, in all honesty, I really look at Australia as one of the last standing that can make a difference, especially in this region, but even globally, it's becoming quite thin. The government taking up the responsibility and trying to maintain our democracies.
So, I really hope that, together with the Australian colleagues, we can approach other governments because it takes a government to explain to another government eventually. So, we just need ... We are taking small steps, but it's a big challenge indeed, to not only get the room filled with SRHR professionals, but to get the security policy advisors and experts in the room of a government.
Robin Davies: Just before we close. Is there anything else you would like to say, any other points you would like to speak to before we finish?
Jelle Postma: I wish Australia the best and a lot of wisdom in the upcoming elections, and I really hope that you will continue being one of the last beacons of hope when it comes to democracy and together, you know, turn the tide.
Robin Davies: Thank you very much for your time, and we will see what happens sometime between March and May next year in Australia, thanks again.
Jelle Postma: Thank you.
Outro: Devpolicy Talks is the podcast of the Australian National University's Development Policy Centre. Show notes are posted to Simplecast. Our producers are Robin Davies, Amita Monterola and Finn Clark.
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