Indigenous foreign policy: the challenges of survivalism before and after the era of Western dominance

Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg advance a timely and provocative call to incorporate a relationalist ethos into Australian foreign policy, informed by Indigenous Australian worldviews and diplomatic practices. Their proposal holds great promise in enriching Australia’s regional engagement. Yet it abrades against a persistent survivalism that is deeply sedimented in Indo-Pacific Asia’s statecraft. Quintessentially survivalist practices – exemplified in coercive state-building and competitive power politics – date from the advent of sedentary civilizations in antiquity. These traditions of violent inter-polity competition long predated and have now outlasted the West’s brief period of colonial domination in Asia. Exemplified most dangerously in China’s current push for regional primacy, these survivalist pressures will constrain Australia’s foreign policy for the foreseeable future. This limits but by no means negates the progressive possibilities offered by incorporating an Indigenous relationalist ethos into Australia’s statecraft.