The skin of the Burqa: Recent life narratives from Afghanistan

The "war on terror" has been associated with an extraordinary proliferation of Afghan autoethnographies in the Western marketplace. In this article, various implications and connotations of this are read to explore the ethical engagements of life narrative in these times.

Australia's relationship with the United States: The case for greater independence

A number of recent events-especially attempts to negotiate a bilateral trade agreement and Australia's participation in the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq(1)-have thrown Australia's relationship with the United States into sharp relief. While this relationship has historically enjoyed strong bilateral endorsement, such uncritical support is beginning to unravel. At the very least, the relationship is being subjected to a renewed, more critical scrutiny. This paper argues that a dispassionate analysis of the relationship is appropriate and overdue. Not only are the benefits that accrue to 'Australia' from the relationship debateable, even when judged within the limited calculus of the 'national interest', but Australia's uncritical support for US foreign policy is also helping to entrench potentially damaging aspects of American foreign policy and somewhat ironically-undermining the legitimacy of its pre-eminent 'hegemonic' position.

American hegemony: the view from Australia

Australia and the United States have been extremely close allies since World War II. The engagements in Afghanistan and Iraq have continued this tradition. Yet even before the bombings in Bali and the confrontation with Iraq, an important debate about the costs and benefits of the relationship with the United States was underway in Australia. At a number of levels—economic, political, and even strategic—increasing numbers of Australians were critically reassessing the relationship and questioning the supposed benefits. Recent events have accelerated this process and thrown the relationship into even starker relief. This paper argues that the increasingly unilateral nature of American economic and strategic policy is imposing major costs on even its most loyal allies, a situation that threatens to undermine the legitimacy of, and support for, U.S. hegemony.

Responsibility to protect or Trojan Horse? The crisis in darfur and humanitarian intervention after Iraq

What does the world's engagement with the unfolding crisis in Darfur tell us about the impact of the Iraq war on the norm of humanitarian intervention? Is a global consensus about a "responsibility to protect" more or less likely? There are at least three potential answers to these questions. Some argue that the merging of strategic interests and humanitarian goods amplified by the intervention in Afghanistan makes it more likely that the world's most powerful states will act to prevent or halt humanitarian crises. Others insist that the widespread perception that the United States and its allies "abused" humanitarian justifications to legitimate its invasion of Iraq has set back efforts to build a global consensus about humanitarian action. A third group argues that the "responsibility to protect" inhibits the potential for abuse and, as a result, consensus is likely to strengthen post-Iraq for precisely this reason. Through a detailed study of the international engagement with Darfur, I suggest that the latter two arguments have merit but need to be adjusted. I argue that the humanitarian intervention norm has changed in two subtle ways. First, while the strength of the norm itself has not changed, the credibility of the United States and U.K. as "norm carriers" has been significantly undermined. Second, while the "responsibility to protect" has been invoked to support international activism, it has also re-legitimated anti-interventionist arguments.

Greetings from the cybercaliphate: some notes on homeland insecurity

One of the paradoxical effects of the 7 July bombings in London was to expose the ambivalence in the British government's attempt to wage war on terror by forcefully prosecuting war against those who resort to jihad abroad, actively participating in coalitions of the wining whether in Afghanistan or Iraq, while affording some of Islamism's key ideologists and strategists a high degree of latitude in the United Kingdom itself. This indicates a number of contradictions in official policy that simultaneously recognizes the globalized threat from violent Islamic militancy while, under the rubric of multiculturalism, tolerating those very strains of Islamist radicalism, some of which draw upon the interdependent and transnational character of conflict, to render the UK vulnerable to those very same violent forces. Consequently, the British authorities displayed a studied indifference towards this developing transnational phenomenon both during the 1990s and in some respects even after the London bombings. To explore the curious character of the government's response to the Islamist threat requires the examination of the emergence of this radical ideological understanding and what it entails as a reaction to modernization and secularism in both thought and practice. The analysis explores how government policies often facilitated the non-negotiable identity politics of those promoting a pure, authentic and regenerated Islamic order both in the UK and abroad. This reflected a profound misunderstanding of the growing source and appeal of radical Islam that can be interpreted as a consequence of the slow-motion collision between modernity in its recent globalized form and an Islamic social character, which renders standard western modernization theory, and indeed, the notion of a 'social science' itself, deeply questionable.

Editorial

Presents an article on the impact of continuing military occupation on women in Iraq or Afghanistan. Punishment imposed on prostitution; Work opportunities for Iraqi women; Increase in the restrictions on women's movements.