(l-r) Commonwealth Secretary General Rt Hon Patricia Scotland and Rawnada's High Commissioner H.E. Yamina Claris Karitanyi at the January conference and Helen Clark at the April event(l-r) Commonwealth Secretary General Rt Hon Patricia Scotland and Rawnada's High Commissioner H.E. Yamina Claris Karitanyi at the January conference and Helen Clark in April.

We’ve been looking through the articles and commentary appearing on the Round Table website which most interested our readers during 2019.

Some originally appeared in The Round Table: Journal of Commonwealth Affairs and some had been written for the Round Table website.  

The Round Table’s 2019 calendar had an early start with a January conference entitled The Commonwealth in 2019: Challenges and Opportunities. A cross-section of Commonwealth officials, experts and diplomats met to discuss the challenges the Commonwealth faced on the road to CHOGM 2020 in Rwanda.

Article on the January 2019 conference

As plans for Commonwealth @70 events geared up, the Round Table’s Alex May looked at the developments which had given birth to the modern Commonwealth and why different dates could be attributed to the start of the grouping we know today.

Read more about the 1949 Declaration and facts from the Round Table and other archives at that time.

In April, the Round Table hosted a session “in conversation” with former New Zealand Prime Minister, the Rt Hon Helen Clark. A report and edited video of the event is available on the website:

Helen Clark in conversation – report.

Helen Clark – video highlights.

Brexit was never far from the agenda during 2019 as Commonwealth countries started to take stock of where Britain’s exit from the European Union would leave them.

Here are some of the Brexit-related articles which grabbed our readers’ attention this year:

In part two, we’ll look at the most read articles on the second half of 2019.

View the current edition of The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs.