Australia,India and the Uranium Question

This article examines the bipartisan nuclear ‘grand bargain’, namely that Australia would only export uranium to states signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), in framing Australian policy and debate towards India. India has not signed the NPT, and shows no willingness to do so. Since 2006 the domestic political and media debate regarding uranium sales to India shows that this grand bargain is fraying. This article explores the major arguments that have been elucidated by Australian political party leaders either for or against uranium sales to India and concludes with a discussion of the opportunities and challenges presented to Australia if it were to make an exception for India.     

The limits to optimism: Australia and the rise of China

The Australian government optimistically expects that China's rise can be easily managed. They predict US–China relations will be cooperative, and reject concerns that Australia may face hard choices between them. This optimism seems to be based on the view that as China grows it will become increasingly integrated into a US-led global system. That overestimates America's power, and underestimates China's ambitions. The best we can hope for instead is that China and the US will cooperate in a concert of power, but the US will be very reluctant to make the necessary concessions to China for that to happen. So there is a real risk of even worse outcomes: Chinese primacy, sustained US–China hostility, or war. Australia therefore needs to try to persuade America to work with China in building a new ‘Concert of Asia’.     

Australia and India: the Indian Ocean and the limits of strategic convergence

Many Australian observers see Australia and India as ‘natural’ partners whose strategic perspectives are likely to become ever closer in coming years. This article will examine recent developments in the Australia–India security relationship and consider some possible limits to the strategic convergence of Australia and India, particularly in Indian Ocean security. It argues that Australia's challenge in coming years will be not only to address areas of common interest but to also actively engage with India on the interests and expectations of littoral states and extra-regional powers in the security of the Indian Ocean.     

Decentring the state: perspectives from the encounter between India and Australia

This introduction makes a case for assembling an archive of approaches taken individuals and groups independently of the state to rethink the nature of the Indo-Australian relationship. It situates the project in the scholarship of different knowledge formations – most of all international relations – about the future of the nation-state and the modern state system. Our contributors write from a postcolonial standpoint in support of minority knowledges, subordinated peoples and reform of the global system. It is argued that postcolonialism has a natural affinity with the everyday, although in practice the relationship is not so cut and dried. This essay concludes by suggesting some of the ways in which each essay contributes to the collective project.     

A special responsibility to protect: the UK,Australia and the rise of Islamic State

In the summer of 2014 Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) emerged as a threat to the Iraqi people. This article asks whether the UK and Australia had a ‘special’ responsibility to protect (R2P) those being threatened. It focuses on two middle‐ranking powers (as opposed to the US) in order to highlight the significance of special responsibilities that flow only from the principle of reparation rather than capability. The article contends that despite casting their response in terms of a general responsibility, the UK and Australia did indeed bear a special responsibility based on this principle. Rather than making the argument that the 2003 coalition that invaded Iraq created ISIS, it is argued that it is the vulnerable position in which Iraqis were placed as a consequence of the invasion that grounds the UK and Australia's special responsibility to protect. The article addresses the claim that the UK and Australia were not culpable because they did not act negligently or recklessly in 2003 by drawing on Tony Honoré's concept of ‘outcome responsibility’. The finding of a special responsibility is significant because it is often thought of as being more demanding than a general responsibility. In this context, the article further argues that the response of these two states falls short of reasonable moral expectations. This does not mean the UK and Australia should be doing more militarily. R2P does not begin and end with military action. Rather the article argues that the special responsibility to protect can be discharged through humanitarian aid and a more generous asylum policy.     

沛谯英雄的两次崛起与汉王朝的兴亡

沛谯又称谯沛,汉魏二祖和自己的功臣集团两次从这一地区崛起,于400年间,一首一尾,书写了汉王朝从建国到终结的历史。沛谯地方位于黄淮海平原。这里自战国晚期起,已经拥有富足的经济基础和充备的文化资源。楚文化的长期积累,在这里形成了新的重心。汉初梁国的文化优势,也对这里的人才形势有所影响。刘邦集团和曹操集团虽然都崛起于沛谯,而前者多布衣、白徒、亡命无赖,往往只是以个人身份追随刘邦,后者则以诸夏侯曹为代表,以宗族势力参与政治军事争搏,且其中颇有豪富。这一情形与东汉豪族势力的兴起有关。     

Laonikos Chalkokondyles and the rise of the Ottoman Turks

Abstract

While most Christian writers who described the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 regarded the disaster as divine retribution for the sins of its inhabitants, carried out through the agency of the barbaric and infidel Turks, the historical work of Laonikos Chalkokondyles takes a very different approach to the problem. It argues that nations rose or fell partly through luck, but also according the virtue they possessed, so that the Turks, rather than being mere agents, could in fact take the credit for their success. In this approach, Chalkokondyles reflects not classical Greek literature, but a western tradition to be found in Livy and Cicero, a strand of thought that he may have adopted as a result of contacts with Renaissance Italy.     

Two places and three times: fragments retrieved of India and Australia in the 1950s, 1960s and 1980s.

This article uses memory and specifically my memories to build up a sense of how Australians perceived India in the second half of the 20th century. I focus first on the late 1950s to consider Australian perceptions of India as seen through my eyes as a university student. I then present my observations as a student studying in India in the first half of the 1960s to track the limited awareness of Australia in India. The final section, based mainly on newspaper clippings of the late 1980s, assesses how India featured in Australian perceptions some two decades on and in the very different world of the day – one that was much more knowledgeable but not necessarily significantly more involved.