The image of the city in modern literature

This article considers the meanings attached to refugeehood, repatriation and liberal citizenship in the twentieth century. Refugees are those who have been unjustly expelled from their political community. Their physical displacement is above all symbolic of a deeper political separation from the state and the citizenry. ‘Solving’ refugees’ exile is therefore not a question of halting refugees’ flight and reversing their movement, but requires political action restoring citizenship.

All three ‘durable solutions’ developed by the international community in the twentieth century – repatriation, resettlement and local integration – are intended to restore a refugee's access to citizenship, and through citizenship the protection and expression of their fundamental human rights. Yet repatriation poses particular challenges for liberal political thought. The logic of repatriation reinforces the organization of political space into bounded nation–state territories. However, it is the exclusionary consequences of national controls over political membership – and through this of access to citizenship rights – that prompt mass refugee flows. Can a framework for repatriation be developed which balances national state order and liberal citizenship rights?

This article argues that using the social contract model to consider the different obligations and pacts between citizens, societies and states can provide a theoretical framework through which the liberal idea of citizenship and national controls on membership can be reconciled.

Historical evidence suggests that the connections in practice between ideas of citizenship and repatriation have been far more complex. In particular, debate between Western liberal and Soviet authoritarian/collectivist understandings of the relationship between citizen and state played a key role in shaping the refugee protection regime that emerged after World War II and remains in place today. Repatriation – or more accurately liberal resistance to non-voluntary refugee repatriation – became an important tool of Cold War politics and retains an important value for states interested in projecting and reaffirming the primacy of liberal citizenship values. Yet the contradictions in post-Cold War operational use of repatriation to ‘solve’ displacement, and a growing reliance on ‘state-building’ exercises to validate refugees’ returns demonstrates that tension remains between national state interests and the universal distribution of liberal rights, as is particularly evident when considering Western donor states’ contemporary policies on refugees and asylum. For both intellectual and humanitarian reasons there is therefore an urgent need for the political theory underpinning refugee protection to be closely examined, in order that citizenship can be placed at the centre of refugees’ ‘solutions’.     

Britain,the Old Commonwealth and the Problem of Rhodesian Independence, 1964–65

This article uses new sources from the National Archives of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to examine the consultation and cooperation between Britain and the Old Commonwealth in dealing with the problem of Rhodesian independence. It demonstrates that Canada developed a proactive approach towards the Rhodesian problem but Britain, Australia and New Zealand gave only limited encouragement to Canadian initiatives to avert Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). This article also argues that problems in British policy formulation – especially the weakness of its attempts to deter Rhodesia from unilateral action and its hesitant contingency planning for a UDI – strained the relationship with its Old Commonwealth partners. This is significant because it belies the impression that the problem of Rhodesian independence divided the Commonwealth simply along racial lines.     

Gender,Work and Fears of a ‘Hybrid Race’ in 1920s New Zealand

The 1929 New Zealand Committee of Inquiry into the Employment of Maori on Market Gardens affords insight into the ways in which masculine fears of racial degradation through miscegenation – of a ‘hybrid’ Chinese/Maori race – operated within a hierarchy of race, gender and Iwi (tribal) interests. The participation of Maori men in national politics contributed to a new articulation of ‘National Manhood’, in which Maori men and white men combined to express fears about women's work and sexuality and young women's potential to undermine a fragile and contested hierarchy of racial purity. Maori women, silenced in the cacophony of voices lamenting their plight, were at the centre of debates between Maori men, Pakeha (white New Zealander) employers, Chinese market gardeners, Anglican and Methodist interests and Pakeha women's groups. I argue that the Inquiry was about commerce, both in a business and a sexual sense. As a historical episode, it also serves to complicate the picture of New Zealand as a historically bicultural society, made up only of Maori and Pakeha, by signalling the importance of the Chinese in debates about national belonging.     

2Precious2Mine: Post‐politics,Colonial Imaginary,or Hopeful Political Moment?

Radical democrats and geographers have argued that democracy requires a vibrant contestatory politics to challenge the contemporary “post‐political” conjuncture. Despite suggestions of post‐political processes in Aotearoa New Zealand, there are signs of a more vibrant politics. In 2010 an environmental campaign called “2Precious2Mine” captured the national geographic imaginary. Drawing on this example, we argue that although a space was opened for a vibrant contestatory politics, its effects were paradoxical. The campaign both reinforced the hegemonic narratives of neoliberal (post)colonial Aotearoa New Zealand, and simultaneously produced moments that challenged this apparent post‐politicising trajectory. While we argue that such frameworks are useful, there is a risk that without cognisance of the situated nature of politics and closure, they both lose their political and academic explanatory purchase. Post‐politics becomes at risk of constructing that which it seeks to describe, while radical democracy ends up falling short of its aims.     

Better than an Ironclad: Leonard Isitt,Temperance and Greater Britain

The English-born New Zealand temperance activist, the Rev. Leonard M. Isitt, undertook a number of temperance ‘missions’ in Britain between 1895 and 1905, offering historians a deeper insight into the lived reality of the ‘British world’ and ‘Greater British’ identity. Addressing several areas of imperial historiography, the article uses newspapers from both New Zealand and Britain to acquire a truly ‘Greater British’ perspective of an imperially mobile individual, from which can be drawn lessons about imperial identities and ‘networks’. Isitt's participation in a self-consciously imperial temperance movement highlights the development of a New Zealand identity that depended upon both contrast and commonality with Britain, but it also points to a politics of imperial peregrination, with the temperance reformer's visits to the ‘Mother Country’ factoring in the highly divisive drink question in both New Zealand and Britain. The article concludes with reflections on the nature and limitations of a ‘Greater British’ politics.     

Nuclear free New Zealand and rogernomics: The survival of a labour government

New Zealand's fourth Labour government, elected to power in 1984, has become known most generally for two of its policies: a refusal to accept nuclear warships in New Zealand waters, and the vigour and consistency with which it has pursued market orientated economic policies. A post‐election near‐national survey of 1013 respondents is employed to measure the extent to which the two policies may have aided Labour's re‐election in 1987. Contrary to most interpretation hitherto, we find that defence and economic policy opinion were at least of equal importance. But there is further evidence to indicate that defence policy opinion was the more important It is concluded that the expression of “post‐materialist” values through anti‐nuclear politics may have perversely allowed a new materialism to conquer New Zealand politics.     

Ta‘isi O.F. Nelson and Sir Maui Pomare Samoans and Māori Reunited

ABSTRACT

This paper unearths the friendship between Samoan nationalist leader Ta‘isi Olaf Frederick Nelson and Māori politician Sir Maui Pomare during the early period of New Zealand's administration of Samoa. It examines the role this friendship played – especially as a line of communication between the Samoan protest movement or Mau, of which Nelson was a leader, and the highest echelons of the New Zealand government – in those years of fraught relations between Samoa and New Zealand. It also explores the significant historical connections that were made, or remade, through this friendship. The relationship between these two men brought Polynesian peoples together in new ways and also directly linked Parihaka, a 19th-century Māori community known for its non-violent resistance against European colonialism, with the later Samoan Mau.     

The Ties that Unwind: Civic and Ethnic Imaginings in New Zealand

Abstract. This paper argues that examining the interweaving of ethnic and civic elements best explains current tensions in ethnic politics in New Zealand in elite state and nation‐building and how these shape patterns of inclusion or exclusion of aboriginal and immigrant minorities. Theories of ethnic and civic nationalism are discussed briefly and the distinctiveness of settler societies is explored. Recent trends promoting biculturalism and multiculturalism are examined. A discussion of legal citizenship since 1840 reveals the linkages and persistence of three historical trajectories – the decolonising of aboriginal people (Maori), the de‐colonial movement among Pakeha (‘white Europeans’), and the partial de‐alienising of immigration. These trajectories, I conclude, reflect in‐built tensions between different historical and current ethnic and civic representations of the New Zealand nation‐state.     

Australia’s Detention Centre and the Erosion of Democracy in Nauru

Since 2013, the Nauru government has undermined democracy by reducing the independence of the judiciary, treating opposition MPs as potential traitors, curbing freedom of speech and restricting visits by variously defined groups of people who include journalists, Australians and New Zealanders. New Zealand responded by suspending its aid to Nauru’s justice and border control department. Australia, by contrast, has said little. The Nauru government would not have acted so boldly in curbing civil freedoms and weakening the rule of law if Australia had been less dependent on its goodwill to act as host for Australia’s Regional Processing Centre, which houses asylum seekers who have attempted to reach Australia by boat. Australia’s reliance on Nauru – driven by urgent domestic political considerations – has fostered an atmosphere where the principles of good governance can be flouted with little fear of significant criticism from Canberra.     

Crafted within liminal spaces: Young people's everyday politics

This paper examines how high school-aged young people from New Zealand are crafting their everyday political subjectivities within the liminal status and liminal spaces they occupy in society. With a specific focus on schooling and the citizenship education curricula in New Zealand, three vignettes are introduced which examine young people's less reflexive and ‘everyday’ forms of political action in the interstitial liminal space between Public/private, Formal/informal and Macro/micro politics. These vignettes underline how young people's everyday politics were embedded within spatial and relational processes of socialisation with adults within their schools and communities, yet, also showed both agency and resourcefulness with these spaces. Young people's liminal status and occupation of liminal spaces provided them with unique perspectives on social issues (such as bullying, racism, water conservation, and obesity) and enabled them to respond in ways that were ‘different’ to adults' Politics, yet nonetheless showed their political and tactical selves (de Certeau, 1984). A focus on young people's political practices in liminal spaces allows for new possibilities and understandings of the political.     

Harry Holland's ‘Samoan Complex’

ABSTRACT

‘Harry’ Holland, one of the early leaders of the parliamentary Labour Party in New Zealand, was an anomalous figure in early 20th-century New Zealand politics. In addition to a principled adoption of militant socialism, he stood apart from the rest of the House of Representatives due to his pronounced interest in Samoan affairs. This interest was so acute that one of his Labour colleagues, John A. Lee, remarked that he possessed a ‘Samoan complex’. This paper addresses the lack of critical attention paid to this facet of his career. Even though Holland's attitudes towards Samoa were sometimes couched in the same vocabulary as the coloniser, he always stood on the side of the colonised. His endorsement of Indigenous self-government was ahead of its time, and his campaigning played a key role in the Samoan struggle for independence. At a broader level, Holland was possibly the most significant of a cohort of colonial critics who questioned New Zealand's right to govern Pacific Islanders and who sought to rein in New Zealand's more overbearing Pacific Island administrations.     

What Remains: Repatriating and Entombing a Canadian Unknown Soldier of the Great War in the Nation’s Capital

This article chronicles and contextualizes the creation of a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Canada’s capital. In so doing, it traces the myriad considerations, as well as complexities — political, procedural, and practical — that abounded in bringing this major memorial installation into being, namely the repatriation, from a Commonwealth War Graves Commission cemetery in France, of a Canadian unknown soldier of the Great War and his ceremonial reburial in Ottawa. Moreover, it argues that the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, situated within an existing monumental space, functions, in the coinage of geographer Owen Dwyer, as an allied symbolic accretion to the National War Memorial.     

Feminist geographies in Aotearoa New Zealand: cultural,social and political moments

Abstract

Aotearoa New Zealand is a nation of promise, potential and enigma: it was the first country in the world where women gained the vote in 1893 and now boasts the youngest woman world leader in 2017. It is also a postcolonial nation where structural racism, homophobia, and sexism persist, yet it has also given legal personhood to a river. Our Country Report foregrounds Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship that responds to, reflects, and sometimes resists such contrasts and contradictions at the national scale. We employ the lens of the 2017 national election to critically engage with current gendered and indigenous politics in the country. Analyzing these politics through three ‘feminist moments,’ our paper highlights the breadth and scope of current Aotearoa New Zealand feminist geographic scholarship and directions.     

Electoral instability and the modern campaign: New Zealand labour in 1987

This essay explores the theme of the rise of the ‘modern campaign'—the electoral focus on polling, targeted appeals, and the professional, managed use of the media—as the strategic response by parties to the exigencies of electioneering in an era of increasingly fluid, weakly partisan electorates. Given New Zealand Labour's unparalleled policy‐reversals since 1984, which rocked a political system noted for its stable, loyal partisan politics, it is argued the 1987 campaign constitutes a threshold election in which Labour's executive consciously embraced the modern campaign to deflect reactions to its unorthodox policies, and to allow appeals to newly heterogeneous bases of electoral support. Interviews with key figures in New Zealand's Labour and National parlies afford the chance to examine this strategic tactic as a considered response to electoral uncertainty.     

The Political Dynamics of Tobacco Control in Australia and New Zealand: Explaining Policy Problems,Instruments, and Patterns of Adoption

Recent comparative studies of the politics of tobacco control have ranked Australia and New Zealand as two of the most restrictive regimes in the world. Yet traditionally Australia and New Zealand were tobacco-growing countries in which the government supported tobacco agriculture with a variety of subsidies. Despite a slow start in comparison to some other countries, by the 1990s these two had developed strong tobacco-control regimes. This paper addresses the rise of tobacco as a policy agenda problem, what policy instruments were utilised to deal with it, the pattern of adoption of policies between the two countries, and what explains the rapid progress of tobacco-control restrictions in these two countries, based on a comparative perspective.     

An Exemplary Leader?: New Zealand and Decolonization of the Cook Islands and Niue

ABSTRACT

New Zealand is proud of its decolonization record: Prime Minister Peter Fraser’s role in developing provisions for non-self-governing territories in the United Nations; New Zealand’s support for the 1960 declaration on colonialism; its leadership on decolonization in the Pacific; the innovative decolonization solution of self-government in free association with New Zealand adopted by the Cook Islands in 1965, and similar arrangement by Niue in 1974. This record is ascribed to a New Zealand belief in self-determination. Closer examination shows many officials, ministers and parliamentarians were opposed to self-government for the Cook Islands, and concerns lingered about Niue. The arrangements reached reflected New Zealand’s reluctance to let go. Yet self-government was granted, in the context of a reassuring New Zealand view of itself as the centre of the South Pacific region. With new competition for influence in the region, it is important that New Zealand does not seek to constrain the Cook Islands’ and Niue’s self-government and potential future self-determination.     

Bodies that sweat: the affective responses of young women in Wollongong,New South Wales,Australia

I argue that people's bodily sensations of sweat – smell, touch and sight – can provide insights to the relations between subjectivity and space. I draw on feminist ideas of the body as a physiological, psychological and sociological assemblage out of which spatially situated knowledge, ethics, subjectivities and social relations are forged. Empirical evidence is drawn from self-reflexive accounts of 21 young women living in Wollongong, New South Wales, Australia. Their narratives convey how sweat and sweatiness are integral to negotiating everyday life. First, participants' narratives illustrate the way the sweaty body-as-seen is bound up with gendered identities and self-disgust. Second, visceral experiences of the materialities of sweat and sweatiness often give rise to a heightened sense of bodily awareness, self and spatial marginalisation in the course of everyday lives. Third, participants' narratives highlight the tensions of spatial experience of sweat and sweatiness that simultaneously attract and repel bodies. Visceral experiences of sweat and sweatiness are central to better understanding of the spatiality of subjectivity.     

‘Homes’ and being ‘at home’ in New Zealand: women's place-making in internationalised higher education

Research on students' experiences in internationalised higher education largely assumes students' autonomy and privileges their public selves. New Zealand research is no exception. Little attention has been paid to students' lives beyond classroom contexts; how national policy and institutional practices shape students' everyday experiences and ‘home’ lives similarly and differently. In addition, gender is afforded scant attention or considered only as a secondary concern, and people whose partners or family members are international students are invisible. This article endeavours to address the relative inattention to gender in international education research and the invisibility of women whose partners are international students. It draws on data from interviews with 17 women involved in a broader doctoral research project during 2005 and 2006. The women were either migrant or international students or had partners enrolled as international students. The article uses ‘home’ as a lens for examining women's situated and transnational place-making and factors that promoted or precluded a sense of belonging in New Zealand. It draws connections between women's accounts of ‘home’ and feeling ‘at home’, and broader politics, policies and institutional practices in New Zealand higher education.     

Foreign and comparative politics in the Australian Journal of Political Science: A review

This article reviews analyses of foreign and comparative politics published in the Australian Journal of Political Science over the past 50 years. The article uses a thematic approach, reviewing five broad regional areas: the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe; New Zealand and the Pacific; Canada, the USA and Western Europe; China and the rest of Asia; and Africa and the Middle East. The article assesses changes in the attention given to particular regions and countries over time, and highlights countries that have received relatively little attention. The article uses a Presidential address in 1985 by David Goldsworthy as a key reference text for assessing the study of foreign and comparative politics in Australia since 1966. The main shifts in overall attention since the early 1990s have been a decline in the historical study of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and increased attention to New Zealand.     

From confusion to confusion: The 1981 general election in New Zealand

The 1981 New Zealand general election was fought against a background of electoral upheaval and uncertainty that had characterized New Zealand politics during the 1970s. The preceding three years had also witnessed the rise in popularity of the country's leading minor party, the Social Credit Political League. It was difficult to predict how the League would fare in terms of capturing seats in the election. The election was held in the wake of the socially divisive rugby tour by the South African Springboks and in the midst of debate over the National government's new growth strategy. It was not entirely surprising, then, when the election produced a very close and curious result. The National Party won the election narrowly, but both major parties made substantial gains in some areas and substantial losses in others. Social Credit made major gains of votes from both National and Labour but failed to win further seats. The electorate was seemingly still in deep confusion.