National interest in the theory of international relations

The concept of "the national interest" has been widely analysed by historians and political scientists. However, there has not been a systematic investigation of the term from the range of theoretical perspectives which comprise the discipline of International Relations. This dissertation fills this gap by examining how the term is variously understood by realist, Marxist, anarchist, liberal, rationalist and constructivist theories of International Relations. It is argued that far from having a clear and unambiguous meaning, "the national interest" is a problematic term which is largely devoid of substantive content.

Jungle, desert, ice

Between 1884 and 1920 the Society was part of an intense period of international geographical interest, imperialism and nationalism. This empirical history shows that the Society sought to explore New Guinea, Northern and Central Australia, and Antarctica, pursuing issues of land use, labour and commercial development of these regions.

Dream dolls : misogyny and political mythology in fin de siecle Australian culture

Examines Australian nationalism from the 1890s onwards through the interaction between cultural stereotypes of the feminine and issues of identity, citizenship and political constructions of "democracy". The employment of an idealised masculine aesthetic as catalyst to creating an imagined state was compared in Australia and Wilhelmine Germany.

Celluloid dreaming : cultural myths and landscape in Australian film 1970-1990

Examines the way in which cultural myths in selected Australian feature films of the 1970s and 1980s reflect changing attitudes towards nationalism, Australian identity, gender roles, mateship and how the Australian settler culture defines (or fails to define) its relationship with indigenous Australians.

Ko Un and the poetics of postcolonial identity

Ko Un is one of South Korea's most important writers of the past 50 years, and a poet whose work provides important insights into crucial linkages between language, identity and community. He lived through, chronicled and critically engaged most of the traumatic events his nation faced during the last century: a brutal colonial occupation by Japan; the division of the peninsula into communist North and capitalist South; an unusually devastating fraternal war; the integration of the divided peninsula into global Cold War politics; periods of authoritarian rule on both sides; and the more recent challenge to promote reconciliation. Some of these episodes challenged the very existence of Korea as a people, nation and state. Ko Un's poetry was part of a larger effort to regain a sense of being and national identity in the face of turmoil, war and globalisation. We argue that by engaging with these highly political issues Ko Un's work provides important clues about how to articulate notions of identity and community in a way that empathetically portrays other people and their identities. In doing so he offers an alternative to the prevailing inside/outside logic that often leads to problematic forms of nationalism.

Heritage and dialogue : using heritage conservation to strengthen the defences of peace

The Preamble to UNESCO's 1945 Constitution asserted that wars are created in the minds of men and that it is in the minds of men that the defences of peace must be built. Exploring this proposition was vital in the post World-War II years, but it is equally critical in the 21st century when world efforts towards peace continue to be undermined by intense forms of nationalism and ethnic rivalries that commonly use cultural differences as a justification for conflict.

However, while strengthening intercultural dialogue underlies the creation of UNESCO, its flagship World Heritage program under the 1972 World Heritage Convention seems to be losing touch with this motivating principle. In this paper I explore the politicization of the program and argue that a re-focus is needed if the program is to serve in improving intercultural dialogue, understanding and tolerance, and ultimately peace.

To this end it is suggested that ways in which the World Heritage program might provide a stronger focus on dialogue-creation should be prioritized. These include giving priority to new transnational inscriptions and developing new stratagies for interpreting sites in more cross-culturally sensitive ways.

New scalar politics : implications for education policy

This paper argues that globalisation has implications for research and theory in the social sciences, demanding that the social no longer be seen as homologous with nation, but also linked to postnational or global fields. This situation has theoretical and methodological implications for comparative education specifically focused on education policy, which traditionally has taken the nation-state as the unit of analysis, and also worked with 'methodological nationalism'. The paper argues that globalisation has witnessed a rescaling of educational politics and policymaking and relocated some political authority to an emergent global education policy field, with implications for the functioning of national political authority and national education policy fields. This rescaling and this reworking of political authority are illustrated through two cases: the first is concerned with the impact of a globalised policy discourse of the ‘knowledge economy’ proselytised by the OECD and its impact in Australian policy developments; the second is concerned explicitly with the constitution of a global education policy field as a commensurate space of equivalence, as evidenced in the OECD’s PISA and educational indicators work and their increasing global coverage. The paper indicatively utilises Bourdieu’s ‘thinking tools’ to understand the emergent global education policy field and suggest these are very useful for doing comparative education policy analysis.

国际关系发展中安全内涵的演变

This paper focuses on the origin of insecurity, safety and security of the content of the evolution of the concept of traditional security policy with the new security concept.The authors suggest that the contents of security and international relations with the social and historical development of evolving, evolve the main driving force of social progress of productive forces.In different historical periods, most representative of the level of productivity of the things often become the most valuable part of security.Compared with the past, modern security has the following characteristics: the scope of security beyond the region, for the first time the world has meaning; army in modern times to become the country's "principal basis"; to the ideology of nationalism as factors in the country on behalf of security policies and practices play a special role.But national security has an important strategic value of the field is not a qualitative change.Mid-century, the world entered the post-industrial society or information age, the concept of security from the content and form are undergoing a profound transformation.Economic, technological and other factors

Isolation of a novel Orientia species (O. chuto sp. nov.) from a patient infected in Dubai

In July 2006, an Australian tourist returning from Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), developed acute scrub typhus. Her signs and symptoms included fever, myalgia, headache, rash, and eschar. Orientia tsutsugamushi serology demonstrated a 4-fold rise in antibody titers in paired serum collections (1:512 to 1:8,192), with the sera reacting strongest against the Gilliam strain antigen. An Orientia species was isolated by the in vitro culture of the patient's acute blood taken prior to antibiotic treatment. The gene sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene (rrs), partial 56-kDa gene, and the full open reading frame 47-kDa gene was performed, and comparisons of this new Orientia sp. isolate to previously characterized strains demonstrated significant sequence diversity. The closest homology to the rrs sequence of the new Orientia sp. isolate was with three strains of O. tsutsugamushi (Ikeda, Kato, and Karp), with a nucleotide sequence similarity of 98.5%. The closest homology to the 47-kDa gene sequence was with O. tsutsugamushi strain Gilliam, with a nucleotide similarity of 82.3%, while the closest homology to the 56-kDa gene sequence was with O. tsutsugamushi strain TA686, with a nucleotide similarity of 53.1%. The molecular divergence and geographically unique origin lead us to believe that this organism should be considered a novel species. Therefore, we have proposed the name “Orientia chuto,” and the prototype strain of this species is strain Dubai, named after the location in which the patient was infected.

Popular consent and foreign policy choices : war against the Philippines and covert action in Chile

It is usually assumed that US policymakers need to generate popular consent in order to undertake regime change against another state. This article explores the ways in which contextual factors such as the joint democracy effect, popular values and public moods influenced efforts by elites in the United States to generate popular consent for regime change in the Philippines and Chile. Against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the United States undertook covert action in Chile due to public recognition of the target state's democratic credentials and a public mood opposed to further military ventures. In contrast, the absence of a strong joint democracy effect, a national mood infused with romantic nationalism qua militarism and social Darwinism facilitated efforts by US elites to generate consent for the invasion and occupation of the Philippines. Subsequently, this article contributes to understandings of the domestic-level factors that influence foreign policy decisions.

The trial of Albert Camus

The fiftieth anniversary of Camus’ death in 2010 was largely ignored in his native Algeria, reflecting the critical response to Camus’ writings that regards him as a colonialist writer and apologist for the French domination of his native Algeria. This critique also claims that Camus’ colonial attitudes are hidden and reinforced by a European attitude that sees him as dealing first and foremost with universal questions about the human predicament and existential isolation. However, Camus' journalism shows an Algerian closely identified with the destiny of all the peoples of Algeria, and his novel The Outsider contains sufficient indications that, whatever its existential importance, in the concrete situation of Camus’ Algeria the Arab has the precise status
of outsider.

Consumer-citizens of China : the role of foreign brands in the imagined future China

This book presents a comprehensive examination of Chinese consumer behaviour and challenges the previously dichotomous interpretation of the consumption of Western and non-Western brands in China.

Manipulating Islam and democracy in Iraq’s ‘Pluralised Authoritarianism’

With the realisation that the initial motives for the 2003 invasion of Iraq – Saddam’s alleged stockpile of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) and his links to Al-Qaeda – were grievous intelligence errors the Bush administration, with varying degrees of success, were able to spin the war’s rasion d’etre and redefine the parameters of victory. A central tenet of this approach was to begin speaking about democracy as if it had always been one of the aims of the war itself. For the first few years, the effort to democratise Iraq appeared to gain some credible momentum: a complex array of political, religious and ethno-sectarian factions formed political parties and civil society movements; uncensored news was enthusiastically consumed across the nation; Iraqi citizens took to the streets to protest key government decisions; and millions of Iraqis voted in relatively free and fair national elections (Davis, 2004, 2007, Isakhan, 2008, 2011b). Central to each of these developments were various Iraqi religious establishments – but especially those of the Shia Arab population of Iraq – who saw no distinction between their Islamic faith and the notion of democracy. Not surprisingly, a body of literature has emerged which has been very optimistic about Iraq’s engagement with both ‘Islam’ and ‘democracy’ in the post-Baathist period, while acknowledging the challenges it faces in creating a stable, egalitarian and democratic society (Al-Musawi, 2006, Cole, 2006, Davis, 2005, Dawisha, 2009, Isakhan, 2011a, Stansfield, 2007).

However, there have been virtually no studies which have sought to question this optimism in the light of more recent events. Addressing this lacuna, this paper documents the last few years (2006- 2011) which have seen many elements within the Iraqi political elite – most notably the Maliki government and his State of Law Coalition (SLC) – demonstrate what has been referred to in literature on other Arab states alternatively as ‘liberalised autocracy’ (Brumberg, 2002), ‘semi-authoritarianism’ (Ottaway, 2003) or ‘pluralised authoritarianism’ (Posusney and Angrist, 2005). That is to say, that these states consolidate their incumbency while putting in place measures that can be considered more or less liberal. To do this, the regime 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. Of particular interest here are the ways in which the Maliki government – and Shia Arab Iraqi political factions more broadly – have manipulated both ‘Islam’ and ‘democracy’ towards such ‘pluralised authoritarianism’.