Questioning the assumption that the United Kingdom's experience in Northern Ireland holds few lessons for contemporary counter-terrorism strategy, this article examines the complex relationship between terrorism, counter-terrorism policy, and minority alienation in the United Kingdom through the lens of the Northern Ireland conflict and the BelfastAgreement. The main argument in this article, and the ultimate lesson that emerges from the Northern Ireland conflict, is that an effective counterterrorism strategy must move beyond short-term, coercive strategies, toward social and political strategies that are designed to address minority alienation and facilitate the project of building a socially cohesive, multicultural society.

Using case studies of Muslim minorities in Canada and Singapore, this paper examines the complex relationship between multiculturalism and national security. The first part of the paper examines the different characteristics of Muslim minorities in Canada and Singapore with an emphasis on how Canada's Muslim minority is smaller, more diverse and less well established than Singapore's. The next section examines some of the dangers of hurried or heavy-handed attempts to merge concerns about multiculturalism with security that do not build on pre-existing institutions and inter-group relations. The next part outlines Canada's and Singapore's main responses to 9/11 with special attention to how these responses may affect the Muslim minorities in both countries and the way each society has managed the arrest and detention of suspected terrorists. The next section explores the role of transparent and independent review of national security activities in the maintenance of public confidence in the fairness of the state's security strategies in multicultural societies. The final section critically examines the emerging trend of prosecuting speech associated with terrorism and the consequent blurring of anti-terrorism and anti-hate rationales for the prohibition of extreme political or religious speech. The article concludes with a discussion of how Canada and Singapore will deal with the challenges of crafting national security policies for their multicultural societies in their own distinct manner.

Since early 2005, members of the NUS Legal Skills Team have been engaged in a project jointly sponsored by the UNDP and the Singapore government to translate Lao laws into English. The translations have been adopted by the National Assembly of Laos, published online and made easily available with the aim of facilitating interaction between the international community and Laos. At this time, the team has already worked on more than three quarters of the total number of laws in Laos. This paper discusses the challenges faced by the project team and the insights gained in bridging the differences of language, legal system and culture. The author hopes that the insights will be relevant not just to those engaged in the process of legal translation but to transactional lawyers, law academics and other readers who have had to confront similar challenges in arriving at a true meeting of minds across legal systems and cultures