Visualising clientelism in the Indonesian political tabloids 1998-2001

The thesis uses a discourse analysis approach to examine the visual grammar and the political meanings of the front cover designs of the Indonesian political tabloids in the period 1998-2001 and argues that the meanings show that Indonesian politics operates on the basis of clientelism.

The leaders and the press

Overall, as in 2001 and 2004, the print media provided substantial coverage of the election campaign; and, as in recent campaigns, the Prime Minister received greater coverage than the Opposition Leader. As in previous campaign coverage a small number of topics—including opinion polling—generated the majority of stories. Two features were different in the 2007 campaign, namely the gradual increase in the number of positive stories about the Opposition Leader; and an increase in the number of negative stories about and unflattering images of the Prime Minister.

Authoritarian deliberation : the deliberative turn in Chinese political development

Authoritarian rule in China is now permeated by a wide variety of deliberative practices. These practices combine authoritarian concentrations of power with deliberative influence, producing the apparent anomaly of authoritarian deliberation. Although deliberation is usually associated with democracy, they are distinct phenomena.Democracy involves the inclusion of individuals in matters that affect them through distributions of empowerments such as votes and rights. Deliberation is a mode of communication involving persuasion-based influence. Combinations of non-inclusive power and deliberative influence—authoritarian deliberation— are readily identifiable in China, probably reflecting failures of command authoritarianism under the conditions of complexity and pluralism produced by market-oriented development. The concept of authoritarian deliberation frames two possible trajectories of political development in China: the increasing use of deliberative practices stabilizes and strengthens authoritarian rule, or deliberative practices serve as a leading edge of democratization.

Reading in brown paper : Beckett's budget and the sensationalist press in interwar Sydney

This article addresses the audience reception of sensationalist newspapers in interwar Australia through a case study of Sydney weekly Beckett's Budget. During a libel trial brought against Beckett's in 1928, readers came to its defence and their testimony reveals overlaps between reading and political allegiances: reading Beckett's equated with voting Labor. While histories of sensationalist media in Australia have rightly emphasised illicit sexuality and public outcry, connections between sensationalism and working-class political movements remain on the margins of academic interest. Responding to the question 'Do you read Beckett's?' readers' evidence at the trial constitutes an audience response and invites debate over the ways gender and class could inform political engagement in the 1920s. Viewing Beckett's Budget outside of 'brown paper' and beyond the sensationalist genre reveals a shift in Australian political culture as party strategists embraced a broader electorate, using Beckett's Budget to tap into the culture and concerns of interwar society.

Political Islam and human security

In the wake of the September 11 and subsequent terrorist attacks, the academic and media commentaries on Islam the religion and Islam the basis for political ideology haves received an unprecedented high level of exposure and attention. The acts of political violence by extremist groups and the omnipresent war on terror have added fresh uncertainties to an already complex global order. Just as terrorism and counter-terrorism are locked in a mutually re-enforcing symbiosis, the sense of insecurity felt by Muslims and non-Muslims alike is mutually dependent and has the potential to escalate. This general assessment holds true for Muslims living in the Muslim world and beyond. The pervasive sense of being under attack physically and culturally by the United States and its allies has contributed to a growing unease among Muslims and re-enforced deep-seated mistrust of the ‘West’. Public articulation of such misgivings has in turn, lent credence to Western observers who posit an inherent antipathy between the West and the Muslim world. The subsequent policies that have emerged in this context of fear and mutual distrust have contributed to the vicious cycle of insecurity.

Constructing girlhood through the periodical press, 1850-1915

Focusing on six popular British girls' periodicals, Kristine Moruzi explores the debate about the shifting nature of Victorian girlhood between 1850 and 1915. During an era of significant political, social, and economic change, girls' periodicals demonstrate the difficulties of fashioning a coherent, consistent model of girlhood. The mixed-genre format of these magazines, Moruzi suggests, allowed inconsistencies and tensions between competing feminine ideals to exist within the same publication. Adopting a case study approach, Moruzi shows that the Monthly Packet, the Girl of the Period Miscellany, the Girl's Own Paper, Atalanta, the Young Woman, and the Girl's Realm each attempted to define and refine a unique type of girl, particularly the religious girl, the 'Girl of the Period,' the healthy girl, the educated girl, the marrying girl, and the modern girl. These periodicals reflected the challenges of embracing the changing conditions of girls' lives while also attempting to maintain traditional feminine ideals of purity and morality. By analyzing the competing discourses within girls' periodicals, Moruzi's book demonstrates how they were able to frame feminine behaviour in ways that both reinforced and redefined the changing role of girls in nineteenth-century society while also allowing girl readers the opportunity to respond to these definitions.

After Charlie: free speech and the political economy of communication

Three significant events at the start of 2015 have put freedom of speech firmly on the global agenda. The first was the carry-over from the December 2014 illegal entry to the Sony Corporation’s file servers by anonymous hackers, believed to be linked to the North Korean regime. The second was the horrible attack on journalists, editors, and cartoonists at the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo on 7 January. The third was the election of leftwing anti-austerity party Syrzia in Greece on 25 January.While each event is different in scope and size, they are important to scholars of the political economy of communication because they all speak to ongoing debates about freedom of expression, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. I name each of these concepts separately because, despite popular confusion, they are not the same thing (Patching and Hirst, 2014) . Freedom of expression is the right to individual self-expression through any means; it is an inalienable human right. Freedom of speech refers to the right (and the physical ability) to utter political speech, to say what others wish to repress and to demand a voice with which to express a range of social and political thoughts. Freedom of the press is a very particular version of freedom of expression that is intimately bound with the political economy of speech and of the printing press. Freedom of the press is impossible without the press and, despite its theoretical availability to all of us, this principle is impossible to articulate without the material means (usually money) to actually deploy a printing press (or the electronic means of broadcasting and publishing).Freedom of expression is immutable; freedom of speech subject to legal, ethical and ideological restriction (for better, or worse) and freedom of the press is peculiar to bourgeois society in that it entails the freedom to own and operate a press, not the right to say or publish on a level playing field. Access to freedom of the press is determined in the marketplace and is subject to the unequal power relationships that such determination implies.It is fitting to start with the Charlie Hebdo massacre because the loss of 17 lives makes this the most chilling of the three events and demands that it be given prominence in any analysis. No lives have been lost yet because Sony’s computers were hacked and the election of Syriza has not (yet) led to mass deaths in Greece.

The De-Baathification of post-2003 Iraq: purging the past for political power

In addressing the broader de-Baathification question at the intersection between politics and law in post-2003 Iraq this chapter outlines the efforts by Iraqi lawmakers to codify de-Baathification in Iraq’s new constitution of 2005 as well as in subsequent pieces of more detailed legislation. The chapter then goes on to study the actual implementation of these laws in relation to the Iraqi parliamentary elections of 2010 and 2014, as well as the local elections of 2013. Throughout the chapter, special emphasis is given to the considerable discrepancies between the principles enshrined in the formal de-Baathification legislation and the way those principles are applied in practice. Finally, this chapter concludes by suggesting that Iraq needs to openly and honestly deal with its Baathist past if it is ever to move beyond patterns of politicalsectarianism, violence and autocracy.

Shattering the Shia: a Maliki political strategy in post-Saddam Iraq

This chapter argues that one key legacy of the US effort to bring democracy to Iraq has been that many elements within Iraq’s Shia Arab political elite have viewed democracy through the lens of a cynical majoritarianism and manipulated it to catapult themselves to power. This has had a further legacy, enabling the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to utilise his incumbency to maintain the veneer of democracy while becoming increasingly dictatorial and authoritarian. In doing so, Maliki’s government shares much in common with other ‘hybrid regimes’ in which governments hijack nominally democratic mechanisms such as elections, media freedoms, political opposition and civil society as part of their strategy to retain, rather than diffuse, power (Dodge 2012b, 2013). Although Maliki hasdeployed a host of different strategies along these lines – including blatant sectarianism, undermining key state institutions, the creation of a shadow state loyal to himself, and the concentration of military and political power in his own hands – this chapter focuses on Maliki’s less well-known efforts to shatter the unity of his Shia Arab political opponents. It focuses on his first two terms in power and examines the ways in which he has been able to systematically fracture the Shia political elite to such an extent that once tenuously united factions now stand bitterly divided. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the reasoning behind such an approach and the prospects of Iraq’s democracy moving beyond the blatant power grab of the incumbent Malikigovernment.

Political life writing in Papua New Guinea: what, who, why?

This book aims to reflect on the experiential side of writing political lives in the Pacific region. The collection touches on aspects of the life writing art that are particularly pertinent to political figures: public perception and ideology; identifying important political successes and policy initiatives; grappling with issues like corruption and age-old political science questions about leadership and ‘dirty hands’. These are general themes but they take on a particular significance in the Pacific context and so the contributions explore these themes in relation to patterns of colonisation and the memory of independence; issues elliptically captured by terms like ‘culture’ and ‘tradition’; the nature of ‘self’ presented in Pacific life writing; and the tendency for many of these texts to be written by ‘outsiders’, or at least the increasingly contested nature of what that term means.

Book review: Review of 'John Connor, Anzac and Empire: George Foster Pearce and the Foundations of Australian Defence' (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press), 2011. ISBN10 1107009502 (Hb) pp. 248. $59.95, cloth.

Anzac and Empire is the remarkable story of George Foster Pearce – a carpenter who became one Australia's most influential politicians, and the man central to how Australia planned for, and fought in, World War I. The nation's longest-serving defence minister – holding the portfolio before, during and after the Great War – Pearce saw no contradiction in being both a fierce Australian nationalist, and also a loyal subject of the British Empire.Anzac and Empire is the first full-length biography of this extraordinary Australian. Written by one of Australia's leading military historians, this book shows that to understand Australia in the Great War, you must understand the man behind it.