Separation of Powers in Australia

This article argues that the nature and character of separation of powers in Australia has been fundamentally shaped and defined by the High Court, which chose a Blackstonian, common law conception of separation of judicial powers in preference to the principles elaborated in The Federalist and articulated in the American Constitution. But the Court's recent jurisprudence, including its admission that it makes the law, has presented unprecedented theoretical and political challenges to the concept of separation of judicial power in Australia, including a transformation in the role of the attorneygeneral, the creation of new institutions and a move towards an American conception of checks and balances. Thus this article suggests that the Court continues to exercise a profound influence on the formulation of separation of powers in Australia.     

Exploring Collaborative Civic Leadership Among Young Tunisians: Inviting Despair,Creating Hope

This article explores how civically engaged youth in Tunisia are approaching collaboration with noncivically engaged youth to promote greater levels of civic participation. This article is based on qualitative research conducted in Tunis, Tunisia during the summer of 2015 with 16 youth, all under the age of 35. This article will explore youth attitudes regarding civic engagement and barriers to participation in postauthoritarian Tunisia. This article also explores how civically engaged youth utilize informal social spaces such as coffee shops, universities, and social media sites to stir a sense of hope and pride in activism. This research provides a rich snapshot of civically and noncivically engaged youth who comprise 51% of Tunisia's population and led the 2011 revolution that burgeoned the so‐called Arab Spring in North Africa and the Middle East. These findings bring into question labels such as “politically inactive” and “potential ISIS fighters” that are employed in the dominant narrative on Tunisian youth. Finally, this research suggests that Tunisian youth wield powerful leadership skills that will continue to play a critical role in the transformation of civic and social norms.     

High Court review 2003: the centenary year

2003 marked the Centenary year of the High Court, an anniversary which provides an opportunity to revisit debates about its role in the Australian system of government. The first section of this article canvasses debates around this question, culminating in a consideration of the High Court's ‘new politics’. This sets the framework for an examination of events in 2003 from the perspective of the interaction between the judicial and other branches of government, in particular the executive. The article analyses the implications of executive interventions in relation to the judiciary, as well as important cases brought before the High Court. It argues that conflict between the executive and judicial branches is only likely to increase where contradictions of purpose arise between international legal norms and obligations, the rule of law and domestic policy objectives. This article is the third in a series of reviews of the High Court from a political‐science perspective published in the Australian Journal of Political Science.     

Protecting Human Rights Through Constitutional Adjudication ‐ Jordan as a Case Study

This article aims at defining the role of constitutional courts in protecting the fundamental human rights of individuals, by relating the importance of constitutional judicial review and the established international standards related to the way it is performed. The study also provides an in‐depth analysis of the structure and working mechanism of the new constitutional court in Jordan with regard to its main functions described in the constitution of providing oversight of the constitutionality of laws and regulations in power, and interpreting provisions of the constitution. The study concludes that current statutory provisions with respect to the court proceedings and the method of undertaking its judicial work serve as safeguards that strengthen the role of the court in promoting individuals’ human rights. The study defines a vision of what is anticipated from the new constitutional court of Jordan and other courts in the field of defending human rights from the contemporary threats the world is facing, which only serve to increase fears among individuals that their basic rights are subject to serious attacks and violations.     

Ulama in Islamic Law‐Making and Adjudication in Contemporary Egypt

The article examines the legislative and judicial tasks of Islamic jurists and how they carried it out in constitutional or general legal structure. While the Pakistani experiment was inspired by the Iranian model of jurists' involvement in legislatures, Egypt took a different path by not recognizing any official role for Islamic jurists with ambiguous recognition of Islamic jurisprudence. The legislative role could take the form of incorporating Islamic jurists into the legislature, establishing a committee partially made up of Islamic jurists, or handing over some legislative task to an Islamic jurisprudential institution. Despite the fact that Islamization was intended to respond to the people's requests, it employed autocratic and authoritarian mechanisms. The project attempted to replace the typical class of socially recognized jurists with appointed committees entrusted with Islamic codification. The experiment was challenged for its operation and its Islamicity but never introduced Shari'a courts or Islamic clerical legislation.     

Policy Styles and Degenerative Politics: Poverty Policy Designs in Newfoundland and Quebec

This article examines the proposal suggesting that policy designs are consistent with the social construction of target groups. Associated with policy design theory, the proposal pessimistically suggests that underprivileged citizens will be targeted with policies that do little to help them, creating a vicious circle of degenerative politics. This article argues that the prevalence of degenerative politics depends on policy styles. Significant where the adversarial style prevails, degenerative politics is less common in consensual systems. This proposal is examined through a systematic content analysis of action plans to reduce poverty in Newfoundland and Quebec.     

Vengeance, justice and the reactions in the Revolutionary Midi

This article explores the nature of political conflict, violenceand justice in the Midi provençal during the French Revolution.It emphasizes the continuity of conflict between rival factionsdividing most communes in the region throughout the Revolutionarydecade, conflict that frequently issued in individual and collectiveviolence, most notoriously the prison massacres of the WhiteTerror (or the Reaction, as it was known among contemporaries)at Aix, Tarascon and Marseille in the spring of 1795. Thesemassacres, among the most spectacular expressions of collectivevengeance and popular justice in the Revolution, presented thenascent judicial system of the Revolution with some of its greatestchallenges in the pursuit and punishment of these crimes, notleast because of the political partiality of the judicial authorities.This article further illustrates how the phenomenon of multipleReactions between warring factions, representing fundamentalsocio-economic differences and competing visions of the Republic,provides an understanding of the whole Revolutionary processin the region.     

A Free Trade Area of the Americas in 2005?

In the second presidential summit of the Americas, which took place in April 1998 in Santiago de Chile, 34 heads of states of the Americas announced that they were ready to start negotiating a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), to be concluded by 2005. This article briefly discusses the current trend in favour of regional preferential trade agreements, describes how the proposal for an FTAA came about, explores more than three years of negotiations that made it possible and assesses the probability of its success.     

New Institutions for Transatlantic Trade?

In late 1994 and 1995, senior figures on both sides of the Atlantic advocated a transatlantic free trade area: in December 1995 the EU and the United States signed the New transatlantic agenda and the Joint EU–US action plan in Madrid; in March 1998, the European Commission proposed 'a new transatlantic marketplace', which was vetoed by France in the following month; and in September 1998 the Commission offered its latest plan–the Draft action plan for transatlantic economic partnership . This article examines the political and economic case for new institutions, drawing on the arguments the Commission used to support its proposal for a new transatlantic marketplace. These arguments are found to be unpersuasive. For an EU stance in trade policy matters to be improved by a French veto may be unprecedented. That is what has happened, however. The French veto actually led to the Draft action plan which provides transatlantic trade relations with a better framework than the proposal for a new transatlantic marketplace could possibly have done.     

MEASURING JUDICIAL PERFORMANCE IN TRIAL COURTS: CONCEPTUAL,EMPIRICAL, AND POLITICAL PROBLEMS*

This article explores some of the issues associated with evaluation of judicial performance. It is argued that measuring judicial performance in trial courts, as the basis for subsequent evaluation, is fraught with problems of definition, counting and interpretation. These problems result from the diversity of judges' work in trial courts, uncertainty as to the importance of speedy resolution of cases and the political environment within which judging takes places.     

The contentious politics of nationalism and the anti‐naturalization campaign in Tunisia, 1932–1933

This article asks how, when, and why people came to mobilize en masse in the name of the Tunisian nation against French Protectorate rule. Rather than taking anti‐colonial nationalism as an inevitable response to the imposition of colonial rule, the account offered here insists that it is an outcome to be explained. Building on more recent theoretical directions that stress the processual, relational, and eventful dynamics of nationalism, the article shows that nationalism and nationalist mobilization cannot be attributed simply to the workings of nationalist intellectuals, to long‐standing grievances, or to larger macro‐level transformations. Rather, seeing nationalism as part of struggle and as a domain in which various forms of contentious politics are played out, I show how attention to a particular contentious event in the anti‐naturalization campaign can help us to understand how a certain version of the nation becomes salient as a mobilizing rubric for mass‐level mobilization and how various forms of contention coalesce to produce nationalist outcomes.     

Towards a Democratic Bill of Rights

This paper examines two different bill of rights models for Australia: the Dialogue model and a Democratic model. The Dialogue model aims to protect rights through a bill of rights, strong political review mechanisms, intergovernmental dialogue, and rights-based judicial review. The paper argues that, despite its popularity, there are serious problems with the legitimacy and effectiveness of the Dialogue model and it outlines an alternative model, a ‘democratic bill of rights’, which attempts to avoid these problems by strengthening democratic institutions and political review mechanisms without adopting rights-based judicial review. The paper concludes that a democratic bill of rights is likely to be an effective and more democratically legitimate way of protecting and promoting human rights in Australia.     

“From One Shore to the Other”: Other Revolutions in the Interstices of the Revolution

This interview with Imed Soltani and Federica Sossi focuses on the campaign of the families of the missing Tunisian migrants, “From One Shore to the Other: Lives that Matter”. The campaign started in 2011 to demand that Italian and Tunisian institutions be held accountable for the disappearance of young Tunisian migrants who crossed the Mediterranean to Italy. The campaign brought together the families of Tunisian migrants and the Italian feminist collective “Le Venticinqueundici” as part of a migration struggle that involves the entire region but is rarely taken up as a cross‐shore militant campaign. The conversation between Soltani and Sossi illustrates the strengths of the campaign and the difficulties that arose in running it across shores, and offers a theoretical reflection on the notion of political recognition in an effort to decolonise the gaze on what counts as political subjectivity and political struggle.     

晚清政府与罗马教廷的外交历程

1881-1892年,以李鸿章为主的清政府官员,一致主张联络罗马教廷,废除法国保教权,稳定中国基督教局势。总理衙门采纳这种主张,并努力将其付诸实践,却由于法国政府的干扰而未能成功。1892年后,清政府官员对联络罗马教廷的主张发生分化。陈其璋等人建议继续实践,而薛福成等人则认为不能将解决中国教案问题的希望寄托于罗马教廷,主张另辟蹊径。总理衙门的意见与薛福成等人相似,自1896年后放弃与罗马教廷建交通使的计划。19021906年,吕海寰等官员发起建议联络罗马教廷的新高潮,但清政府未予采纳。     

Teaching Geographic Information Systems in a Problem-Based Learning Environment

How, where and why GIS is taught has been debated heavily in the geography literature. This article is a contribution to that debate, because it offers a new perspective from which to teach GIS: problem-based learning. In a problem-based learning classroom, theoretical foundations and the real world of problems are understood as constitutive of one another, rather than theory being prioritised over the real world of experience. In this paper, the author describes an introductory-level GIS class in which GIS was taught with a problem-based learning pedagogy. The problem around which the class focused was a proposal to add a new school district in the San Antonio, Texas metropolitan region. This article describes the class, including the nature of the problem and the way GIS skills were sequentially taught and integrated into the analysis of that problem.     

Sauvons le Luxembourg: urban greenspace as private domain and public battleground, 1865-1867

This article examines the way in which public response to a municipal proposal concerning greenspace reduction in Paris during the Second Empire reflected not only political antipathy but also an ever-increasing understanding of public urban greenspace as part of the private domain. By examining archival records concerning the proposal, essays, newspaper accounts, and memoirs, this article argues that a particular proprietary sensibility, fomented by expansive public greenspace development in Paris, intersected with extant social constructs and political tensions to create a public, coordinated, and sustained challenge to the authoritarian regime. Thus, the battle over the Luxembourg Garden became more than just a fight to prevent a reduction in size of a particular public urban greenspace. Rather, public debate surrounding alteration of this garden underscores the extent to which public greenspace, in general, was urban space that blurred the public—private boundary and presented unique opportunities for community formation, social integration, and political action.     

(Post)Colonial [1] Encounters: gendered racialisations in Australian courtrooms [2]

This article identifies how the Australian legal system has generated knowledge about ‘traditional’ gender relations in Aboriginal Australia. Using a sample of artefact cases from the Australian judicial system, constructions of Aboriginal gender relations are mapped. By tracing knowledge production in these cases, it demonstrates how the non-Aboriginal Australian legal system has fabricated its own versions of ‘Aboriginal Customary Laws’, or Aboriginal ‘traditions’ about violence committed by Aboriginal men, against Aboriginal women. (Post)colonial understandings about the Aboriginal ‘other’ have occupied spaces in legal understandings and then been enforced in law. The Australian judicial system itself is therefore guilty of perpetuating and privileging the ‘colonial’ in these encounters.     

Waste Not Want Not? Australia and the Politics of High-level Nuclear Waste

During 1999 and 2000, Australian governments rejected a proposal put forward by Pangea Resources to place an international high-level radioactive waste repository somewhere on the Australian continent. The decision was marked by tensions between competing political objectives, and was driven partly by an unusual alliance between pro-uranium mining governments and anti-nuclear non-government organisations (NGOs). The article begins by placing Australia's current nuclear policies in historical context, focusing on the stances taken by the major political parties. The second section briefly describes the Pangea proposal and the Australian response. The third section considers why Australia might have reacted differently. The fourth section critically reviews some of the reasons why the Pangea proposal elicited such hostility. Finally, the article discusses key policy barriers to the proposal, concluding that these are unlikely to disappear and that as a result Pangea and any other similar organisations would have little chance of pursuing their objectives in Australia.     

A question of blood, race, and politics

This article explores the political and intellectual context of a controversy arising from a proposal made at the 1959 meetings of the American Society of Blood Banks to divide the blood supply by race. The authors, a group of blood-bankers and surgeons in New York, outlined difficulties in finding compatible blood for transfusion during open-heart surgery, which they attributed to prior sensitization of their patient, a Caucasian, by a previous transfusion from an African American donor. Examining the statistical distribution of blood-group antigens among the various races, they concluded that risk of adverse hemolytic reactions and the cost of testing could be reduced by establishing separate donor pools. The media reported the suggestion, which, given the political climate of the day, rapidly became a public issue involving geneticists, blood-bankers, physical anthropologists, and the African American medical community. Liberals condemned it, whereas eugenically inclined segregationists used the finding to support their views concerning evolutionary distance between the races and the dangers of miscegenation. Here we examine the contribution of comparative racial serology to this affair, the arguments and background of the main players, and the relevance of the debate to discussions about the role of "race" in post-genomic medicine.     

Slipping through the cracks: museums and social inclusion in Australian cultural policy development 2007–2010

This article explores the actions taken by the Australian Government during the period of 2007–2010 in regard to its proposal to develop a new national cultural policy. Despite its stated commitment to the creation of opportunities for the re-articulation of existing publics and the formation of new ones, the newly elected federal government’s social inclusion and productivity policies did not, at any stage, seek to draw a positive or causal association between museums and social change. This was despite the museum sector’s numerous attempts to communicate its value in precisely these terms to government. It was also despite the precedents for this policy initiative that existed internationally, particularly in the UK. This article explores the actions taken by the Australian Government during the period of 2007–2010, the international context within which these occurred, and the reactions generated by the museum and collections sector in response to the events.