Australian Journal of Politics and History最新文献

A double-barrelled question underpins this special edition: can International Relations (IR) be decolonised? If so, how? I argue that IR's insistence on more-or-less concretised subjects, which engage in dialectical relations of struggle, renders the discipline (and the practice it engenders) constitutionally blind to the origins of colonial violence. Traditional theory necessarily elides the violence which forges legible concrete actors and which culminates in colonialism and slavery. I offer a critique of this theoretical structure through Achille Mbembe's reading of Bataille, Fanon, Hegel, and Kojève, and I close by touching on the decolonising potential of Édouard Glissant's work for academic IR. I conclude that IR can indeed be decolonised, but it must become something quite unrecognisable if it is to do so.

In the context of this special issue's inquiry into whether it is possible to decolonise Australian international relations, this article investigates the service of Indigenous people in the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The military is a crucial site to investigate the colonial state of Australian international relations not only because it is an institution that performs key international relations practices such as war and diplomacy, but also because it defines and projects the identity of the state both domestically and internationally. In the past two decades, there has been a sustained effort to include Indigenous people in the ADF. An inclusive and multicultural defence purports to represent a post-colonial state where Indigenous and non-Indigenous people stand next to one another for the defence of their shared country. However, in Australia, Indigenous people do not enjoy the wealth of the nation equally and remain dispossessed from their land and economically disadvantaged. Using discourse analysis of publicly available materials praising Indigenous military inclusion, this article argues that the inclusion of Indigenous people in the Australian Defence Force risks further entrenching the settler colonial project.

Addressing issues of political tribalism in Kuwait, the study reported here examined the political role of tribes in Kuwait, particularly to determine why badū tribespeople in Kuwait have shifted from being the regime's political ally to its political opponent. To that end, a survey questionnaire was created and distributed to 696 badū individuals living in Kuwait. The results suggest that most badū in Kuwait agree with the political opposition's agenda and feel excluded, marginalised, powerless, deprived of equal social justice, and deliberately targeted by certain local media networks. Furthermore, most badū sampled agreed that parliamentary elections are an effective way to exercise their political influence and that their tribes provide them with social protection as well as political power.

The discipline of International Relations (IR) in Australia, as elsewhere, is steeped in historical and ongoing violence, including violences of colonisation. The way that IR is taught and practised in Australia reproduces the discipline's erasures and ignorance of the effects of colonisation and ongoing forms of marginalisation, knowledge extraction, and harm that normalise existing structures of power. In this article, we ask how mainstream theories, pedagogies, and practices of IR scholarship in Australia contribute to the ongoing coloniality of the discipline and reproduce these geospatial hierarchies and structures of marginalisation and exclusion. We argue that, as teachers, we have to consistently engage in un-doing the violence of disciplinary history. We theorise that this is so because the artefacts we teach are the product of a knowledge life cycle immersed in, and structured by, coloniality and hierarchy. Drawing on a survey of Australian universities' IR curricula and interviews with their instructors, in addition to our own research training and practice as Australian IR academics, we examine how, if, and when it is possible to connect decolonial theory with practice and to thus generate decolonial praxis in the production of IR knowledge.

Thousands of Palestinians have been imprisoned in Israeli jails since 1948, reflecting an objective of Israel's occupation of Palestine to break the spirit of Palestinians in their struggle for liberation. A form of protest often undertaken by Palestinians in response to their political imprisonment is hunger strike. Indeed, when considered in relation to governance as an enactment of power upon people in prison, hunger strikes are an attempt of powerless prisoners to exercise some level of power over their circumstances. Concepts around hunger strike as form of protest are complex and multidimensional, and may reflect the interests of an individual or group, and/or speak more to the broader rights of people. Of interest to this study is the relationship between hunger strike and human dignity as manifest as a form of protest by Palestinians incarcerated in Israeli jails. Specifically, this study aimed to investigate the extent to which the concept of human dignity is a fundamental principle guiding Palestinian political prisoners' initial decision to hunger strike and then to continue to hunger strike. To facilitate the investigation, a stratified sampling approach was used to support the collection of quantitative data via a survey of 29 expolitical prisoners who had participated in hunger strikes during their imprisonment in Israeli jails. The collected data were related to three core dimensions of the protest construct: motivations for undertaking the protest (hunger strike); personal feelings when undertaking protest; and the experienced responses to/outcomes of the protest. Analysis of the participants' responses and the reporting of the main findings was informed by reference to key theoretical frameworks developed by Habermas, Kant, Sartre, and Durkheim. This study found that Palestinian political prisoners often considered human dignity to be more important than food. They therefore believed that hunger strike was a way to express that they would not surrender their dignity nor stray from their resistance. This article contributes to the important debate on the extent to which the hunger strike is an effective way to protest against the loss of human dignity experienced as a Palestinian political prisoner.

The reception of John Stuart Mill's The Subjection of Women (1869) has changed considerably during the last half century. In the increasingly positive reading and re-reading of the book, one criticism persists unchallenged: Mill's argument was universalistic. Not only did his analysis posit a uniform trajectory of both the subjection and the liberation of women, critics argue; also, they add, Mill failed to acknowledge the interrelation of identity and society by adhering to an abstract view of persons. This interpretation does not do justice to Subjection's text and context: Mill's legal prescriptions were not merely a symptom of a liberal theory of progress. He thought the unobstructed participation in the public life of the community the only way out of the vicious circle of habituation and oppression for women. This paper argues that his conclusion was grounded on ethological analyses of English national character, legal history, social institutions, and practices.