The politics of ancient Mesopotamia

Conventional wisdom asserts that the empires of ancient Mesopotamia were ruled by blood-thirsty tyrants with a penchant for megalomania and a lust for power.

However, archaeological work conducted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has begun to unearth a more sophisticated political landscape. Many of the empires of ancient Mesopotamia can be seen to have practised forms of governance remarkably similar to the democratic systems employed by the Greeks many centuries later.

This lecture will examine the democratic tendencies of various Mesopotamian empires and trace their influence on later Grecian developments.

The Assyrians

This chapter seeks to extend earlier works on Mesopotamian democracy to a civilisation that is not only typically excluded from such discussions of democracy in the ancient Near East, but generally considered to be among the region’s most bloodthirsty and bellicose: the Assyrians. On the one hand it cannot be denied that the Assyrians went through periods of aggressive expansion, that they were cruel to at least some of their enemies and that the more militant Assyrian kings struck fear into the hearts of men and women across the region (I:106-110, 113; II:1, 54-6 in: Grayson 1991: 201). On the other hand, however, it is peculiar that the intermittent war-mongering of the Assyrians is seen not only as ‘a modern myth exaggerated beyond all proportion’ (Parpola 2003: 1060), but also seen to exclude them from practicing any form of democracy. This is starkly inconsistent with the contemporary assessment of other societies of the ancient world, such as the Greeks or Romans who were both belligerent and at least nominally democratic. To give one example of this double standard, Jana Pecirkova argues that while the Greek polis enabled the birth of science, philosophy and the rule of law, the Assyrians were not able to distinguish ‘between the rational and the irrational, between reality and illusion’ (Pecirkova 1985: 155). The reason for this, according to Pecrikova, is simple: their ‘only alternative to monarchy … was anarchy … Political decisions were arbitrary in character and not governed by any laws or generally acknowledged and accepted rules’ and the ‘people were the passive subjects of political decision-making’ (Pecirkova 1985: 166-8). This chapter, while cautious not to over-state the democratic tendencies of the Assyrians, takes Pecirkova’s argument to task by examining the complex functioning of power and politics, the checks and balances on monarchical authority, the rule of law and the sophisticated intellectual scene of the three key epochs of ancient Assyrian civilisation.

The politics of Ancient Mesopotamia : prelude to democracy?

Conventional wisdom asserts that the empires of ancient Mesopotamia were ruled by blood-thirsty tyrants with a penchant for megalomania and a lust for power.
However, archaeological work conducted during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has begun to unearth a more sophisticated political landscape. Many of the empires of ancient Mesopotamia can in fact be seen to have practised forms of governance remarkably similar to the democratic systems employed by the Greeks many centuries later.
This lecture will examine the democratic tendencies of various Mesopotamian empires and trace their influence on later Grecian developments.

The Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions : protests and public power in post-Saddam Iraq

Since the democratic elections held across Iraq in 2005 and 2010 much attention has understandably been paid to the new Iraqi government. Unfortunately, it has become increasingly clear that much of Iraq’s political elite are practising the type of governance referred to in the literature on other Arab states alternatively as ‘liberalised autocracy’ (Brumberg, 2002), ‘semi-authoritarianism’ (Ottaway, 2003) or ‘pluralised authoritarianism’ (Posusney & Angrist, 2005). That is to say, that the Iraqi government actually utilises (and controls) nominally democratic mechanisms such as elections, media freedoms, political opposition and civil society as part of their strategy to retain power. This is perhaps best demonstrated via the nine month political stalemate that followed the March 2010 elections and PM Maliki’s refusal to step down despite having narrowly lost the election. Not surprisingly, the Iraqi people have become increasingly disillusioned and critical of their political leaders – hence the mass protests that have swept across Iraq in the context of the popular Arab Revolutions of 2010-11.

However, these latest Iraqi protests are only the most recent and overt sign of the hidden geographies that are agitating towards democracy in this deeply troubled and increasingly authoritarian state. Since the invasion of 2003, a complex array of political, religious and ethno-sectarian factions have formed civil society movements; uncensored news has been consumed across the nation; ordinary citizens have taken to the streets to protest key government decisions; and various local councils have been formed, deliberating on key decisions facing their immediate communities (Davis, 2004, 2007). Given this context, this chapter focuses on the specific case of the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions (IFOU), Iraq’s largest and most powerful independent workers union. The IFOU has repeatedly taken the Iraqi government to task over their poor pay and the dangerous nature of their work, as well as the government’s initial kowtowing to US plans to privatise the entire Iraqi oil sector. To do this, the IFOU have utilised a variety of very democratic mechanisms including peaceful strikes and protests, media campaigns and political lobbying. Such moves have met with mixed results in Baghdad – at times the central government has pandered to the requests of IFOU, but it has also gone as far as issuing arrest warrants for its senior members. The IFOU therefore serve as an interesting example of public power in Iraq and may well pose one of the greatest challenges to rising authoritarianism there.

Why is the tetrahedral bond angle 109°? The tetrahedron-in-a-cube

The common question of why the tetrahedral angle is 109.471° can be answered using a tetrahedron-in-a-cube, along with some Year 10 level mathematics. The tetrahedron-in-a-cube can also be used to demonstrate the non-polarity of tetrahedral molecules, the relationship between different types of lattice structures, and to demonstrate that inductive reasoning does not always provide the correct answer.

The novel as social satire: 60 years later, the wind done gone and the limitations of fair use

The absence of the doctrine of fair use from Australian copyright law has been a bone of contention in Australia after the Australia-United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA). As the Australian government reformed the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth) in the aftermath of the FTA it eschewed the option of adopting fair use. Instead, Australia chose to incorporate a version of fair use into its existing fair dealing framework. Accordingly, the Copyright Amendment Act 2006 (Cth) inserted ss 41A and 103AA into the Copyright Act. These provisions provide that a fair dealing with a copyright protected work does not constitute an infringement if it is done for the purposes of parody or satire. These provisions codify part of the ratio of the United States Supreme Court in the seminal case of Campbell v Acuff Rose Music. However, the parameters of these new provisions are unexplored and the sparse nature of fair dealing jurisprudence means that the true meaning of the provisions is unclear. Moreover, two cases from the United States, SunTrust Bank v Houghton Mifflin and Salinger v Colting, underline just how important it is to have legal rules that protect literary ‘re-writes’. Both cases involved authors using an original novel to ‘write back’ to the original author and the broader culture. ‘Writing back’ or the ‘re-write’ has a firm basis in literature. It adds something invaluable to our culture. The key question is whether our legal landscape can allow it to flourish. This paper examines the interaction between fair use and literary re-writes.

Understanding the sources of uncertainty to reduce the risks of undesirable outcomes in large-scale freshwater ecosystem restoration projects: an example from the Murray–Darling Basin, Australia

There are a growing number of large-scale freshwater ecological restoration projects worldwide. Assessments of the benefits and costs of restoration often exclude an analysis of uncertainty in the modelled outcomes. To address this shortcoming we explicitly model the uncertainties associated with measures of ecosystem health in the estuary of the Murray– Darling Basin, Australia and how those measures may change with the implementation of a Basin-wide Plan to recover water to improve ecosystem health. Specifically, we compare two metrics – one simple and one more complex – to manage end-of-system flow requirements for one ecosystem asset in the Basin, the internationally important Coorong saline wetlands. Our risk assessment confirms that the ecological conditions in the Coorong are likely to improve with implementation of the Basin Plan; however, there are risks of a Type III error (where the correct answer is found for the wrong question) associated with using the simple metric for adaptive management. 

Boats on the roof of the house: the shadowy flux of alterity

Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ focuses upon the relationship between the signs, in the surface content of the dream, and the operation of thought that produces these signs, in the latent content of the dream. Freud’s analysis is a means for tangling with a discontinuous narrative style because Freud’s analysis provides a methodological approach to the question: how does the novel bear witness to the writer’s subjective consciousness?

Why is there nothing rather than something? An essay in the comparative metaphysics of nonbeing

The paper is an essay in the comparative metaphysics of nothingness that begins by pondering why Leibniz thought of the opposite question as the preeminent one. In Eastern philosophical thought, like the numeral ‘zero’ (śānya) that Indian mathematicians first discovered, nothingness as non-being looms large and serves as the first quiver on the imponderables they seem to have encountered (e.g. ‘In the beginning was neither non-being nor being’ RgVeda X.129). The concept of non-being and its permutations of nothing, negation, nullity, receive more sophisticated treatment in the works of grammarians, ritual hermeneuticians, logicians, and their dialectical adversaries, variously across Jaina and Buddhist schools, in respect of the function of negation /the negative copula, nãn, fraying into ontologies of non-existence and extinction; not least also the suggestive tropes that tend to arrest rather than affirm the inexorable being-there of something. After some passing references to interests in non-being and nothingness in contemporary (Western) thinking, the paper dwells at some length on Heidegger’s extensive treatment of nothingness in his 1927 inaugural lecture ‘Was ist Metaphysik?’, published later as What is Metaphysics? The essay however distances itself from any pretensions toward a doctrine of Nihilism.

Thirty Years and Counting: Do We Still Need the ICIS Women’s Breakfast?

This article discusses an important panel held at ICIS 2011 in Shanghai to mark over thirty years of an ICIS institution, the ICIS Women’s Breakfast. The panel addressed the controversial question—is there still a need for the ICIS Women’s Breakfast? Panelists were asked if the ICIS Women’s Breakfast could be seen as divisive, and if, women’s issues are different from issues of diversity such as race or sexual  orientation. They were also asked why they thought women were still  underrepresented in our academic community, and if the lack of women at senior levels was a concern for the community. Finally, the panelists were asked what practices the community would need to adopt to combat what could be seen as structural discrimination in our community, which we believe reflects the wider world we live in. We frame the debate and the ensuing discussion in the literature about women in academia, and conclude with some practical and constructive  recommendations for the community as a whole.

Rethinking Chinese power : a conceptual corrective to the 'power shift' narrative

A growing body of literature has focused on an alleged “power shift” from the United States to China (and from the West to the East more generally). For all its complexities and nuances, much of this power-shift literature continues to unreflectively hold onto a conventional way of conceptualizing power as a type of quantitatively measurable and zero-sum property possessed by the state.  Without critically engaging with the conceptual question of what power means, however, the power-shift debate is both inadequate and misleading. Drawing on some alternative ways of conceptualizing power, I aim to illustrate the contingent and socially constructed nature of “Chinese” economic power and, in doing so, problematize the widely held view of a US-China power shift. I contend that insofar as power is socially constructed, how it is conceptualized matters for international relations. The need to rethink power is at the core of building a new type of major power relationship.

The Assyrians

This chapter seeks to extend earlier works on Mesopotamian democracy to a civilisation that is not only typically excluded from such discussions of democracy in the ancient Near East, but generally considered to be among the region’s most bloodthirsty and bellicose: the Assyrians. On the one hand it cannot be denied that the Assyrians went through periods of aggressive expansion, that they were cruel to at least some of their enemies and that the more militant Assyrian kings struck fear into the hearts of men and women across the region (I:106-110, 113; II:1, 54-6 in: Grayson 1991: 201). On the other hand, however, it is peculiar that the intermittent war-mongering of the Assyrians is seen not only as ‘a modern myth exaggerated beyond all proportion’ (Parpola 2003: 1060), but also seen to exclude them from practicing any form of democracy. This is starkly inconsistent with the contemporary assessment of other societies of the ancient world, such as the Greeks or Romans who were both belligerent and at least nominally democratic. To give one example of this double standard, Jana Pecirkova argues that while the Greek polis enabled the birth of science, philosophy and the rule of law, the Assyrians were not able to distinguish ‘between the rational and the irrational, between reality and illusion’ (Pecirkova 1985: 155). The reason for this, according to Pecrikova, is simple: their ‘only alternative to monarchy … was anarchy … Political decisions were arbitrary in character and not governed by any laws or generally acknowledged and accepted rules’ and the ‘people were the passive subjects of political decision-making’ (Pecirkova 1985: 166-8). This chapter, while cautious not to over-state the democratic tendencies of the Assyrians, takes Pecirkova’s argument to task by examining the complex functioning of power and politics, the checks and balances on monarchical authority, the rule of law and the sophisticated intellectual scene of the three key epochs of ancient Assyrian civilisation.

Considering the ways in which anti-oppressive practice principles can inform health research

All research that investigates therapeutic practice should be conducted with the aim to develop and support good procedures of inquiry. An anti-oppressive practice approach within health research provides a way to systematically examine research procedures and motivations to increase the potential that the resultant research will yield ethical and just results. In this paper two music therapy researchers consider how anti-oppressive practices can address real life problems and be applicable to real life situations; from questions of participation, to developing the research question, recruitment, consent, and further steps of the research process. The goal of this paper is to examine issues arising when considering anti-oppressive practices and healthcare research practices from the perspective of the authors’ experience of music therapy research.

On-line dating; is a digital kiss and virtual wink the new way of finding love?

In 2007, I asked for a show of hands of people who ‘might consider online dating as a way of finding a partner’. Not a single hand went up and the lecture theatre was stony silent. The same question, some five years later resulted in a significant show of hands and a buzz of chatter. Something had changed and perceptions around online dating had shifted. Nielsen Research last year found most Australians (51 per cent) had either tried online dating or would consider doing so. RSVP and eHarmony claim to have 2 million members and more than 4 million people have apparently joined RSVP since it was launched 17 years ago. Online dating is experiencing significant growth in Asia as well, with the number of new web services (some, like ‘Muslima’, are tightly focused) growing exponentially. Online dating is a global phenomenon. This paper will use current media studies research literature and data from conversations with university students in Australia and Indonesia to explore how the changing world of online dating is helping/hindering young people as they shape and develop identity, represent themselves in the virtual world and ultimately, how they find love on line.

Between policy and a hard pedagogical place: the emotional geographies of teaching for citizenship in low socioeconomic schools

Reflecting an international trend, Australian education policy increasingly charges schools with fostering active citizens who have the will and capacity to improve the democratic fabric and drive needed social change. This policy prescription also resonates with some teachers’ critical commitments to pedagogical practices that encourage young people to see themselves as transformative citizens capable of engineering a more just and equitable society. In particular, in low socio-economic school contexts, however, the pursuit of such practices may be subject to the complex physical and emotional geographies that attend the project of schooling in such contexts. In this article, I consider the empirical data derived from my recent discourse analysis of two schools in which teachers have introduced what I have termed the pedagogies of active citizenship. Both of these schools are located in low socio-economic Australian communities, that is, communities where structural, socio-geographic and socio-economic forms of marginalisation are an issue. I consider what motivates, enables and authorises such teachers, as well as what risks may attend the championing of such pedagogies in contexts that are subject to conflicting or competing education discourses and priorities. Theoretically, I draw on ideas of risk as well as on a growing body of scholarship that is concerned with the emotional geographies of citizenship and schooling.