‘Just and lawful war’ as genocidal war in the (United States) Northwest Ordinance and Northwest Territory, 1787–1832

This article focuses on the United States Northwest Ordinance of 1787's profession of ‘utmost good faith’ towards Indians and its provision for ‘just and lawful wars’ against them. As interpreted by US officials as they authorized and practised war against native communities in the Northwest Territory from 1787 to 1832, the ‘just and lawful wars’ clause legalized wars of ‘extirpation’ or ‘extermination’, terms synonymous with genocide by most definitions, against native people who resisted US demands that they cede their lands. Although US military operations seldom achieved extirpation, this was due to their ineptness and the success of indigenous strategies rather than an absence of intention. When US military forces did succeed in achieving their objective, the result was massacre, as revealed in the Black Hawk War of 1832. US policy did not call for genocide in the first instance, preferring that Indians embrace the gift of civilization in exchange for their lands. Should Indians reject this display of ‘utmost good faith’, however, US policy legalized genocidal war against them.     

Going to war democratically: lessons for Australia from Canada and the UK

This article addresses the role of democracy in Australia’s foreign policy formation. It argues that public debate and deliberation on foreign policy is a normative good. When there is a lack of debate on a government decision, a democratic deficit occurs. Such a deficit is evident in the way Australia goes to war; however, the examples of Canada and the UK show that reforming parliamentary practice is possible. In the context of the ‘war on terror’, this article compares Australia, Canada, and the UK from 2001 to 2015 with regards to ‘war powers’. Drawing from debates recorded in Hansard, it finds that while Canada and the UK took steps to ‘parliamentarise’ their foreign policy formation, the war-powers prerogative of the Australian government remained absolute. It concludes that increasing the role of parliament may go a long way towards democratising the decision of when Australia goes to war. This has practical as well as normative benefits, since it may prevent governments from entering wars that are unsupported by the public. At minimum, it will compel governments to engage more thoroughly in public debate about their proposed policies, and justify their decisions to the nation.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

Trumping foreign policy: public diplomacy,framing, and public opinion among middle power publics

Even as the world’s sole superpower, the United States requires the cooperation of other states to achieve many of its foreign policy objectives. The President of the United States thus often serves as ‘Diplomat in Chief’ in public diplomacy efforts to appeal directly to publics abroad. Given Donald Trump’s antagonistic approach to foreign relations and widespread lack of popularity, what are the implications for support for US policy among publics abroad – particularly among middle power states allied to the US? While previous research on public opinion relying on observational data has found that confidence in the US President is linked to support for American foreign policy goals, the mechanisms at work remain unclear. Using original data from survey-based experiments conducted in Canada and Australia, this article seeks to clarify the effect of ‘presidential framing’ (presenting a policy goal as endorsed or not endorsed by Trump) on attitudes toward key policy issues in the Canada–US and Australia–US relationships. Results point to a negative ‘Trump framing’ effect in Canadians’ and Australians’ trade policy attitudes, but such an effect is not observed in other policy domains (energy policy in Canada, and refugee policy in Australia).     

Canada and colonial genocide

This introductory article offers an overview of debates about genocide and settler colonialism in Canada. The argument is presented that Canada, although a marginal case to genocide studies, provides important insights and challenging questions, particularly with respect to the need to decolonize the field of genocide studies.     

Re-examining risk factors of genocide

This article assesses the risk factors of genocide. Drawing upon previous research on genocide and the United Nations’ Atrocity Prevention Framework, it employs an event history analysis of over 150 countries between 1955 and 2005. While existing frameworks emphasize general upheaval, this article disaggregates the type of upheaval, finding that economic upheaval—such as resource scarcity or population pressure—does not influence the odds of genocide. Instead, political upheaval that enables a repressive leader to come to power (including coups, assassinations, civil wars and successful revolutions) and political upheaval that directly threatens those in power (including coup attempts, campaigns against the state, unsuccessful revolutions and civil wars that do not coincide with regime change) have the strongest influence on the onset of genocide. These findings are consistent with previous findings that emphasize political upheaval and threat but specify numerous indicators of these broad phenomena. This article also highlights the role of discrimination and exclusion, although it casts doubt on many other risk factors included in recent case studies and in the United Nations’ Atrocity Prevention Framework.     

Advocating the rules-based order in an era of multipolarity

Faced with eroding United States hegemony and the rise of a more multipolar distribution of global power, Australia has embraced a new foreign policy platform built around advocacy for a ‘rules-based global order’. In this essay I first argue that the emerging characterisation of multipolarity overemphasises the centrality of the United States and overlooks the legacies of Asian colonisation, decolonisation, state-building and local norm development. I then consider the reasons for the embrace of the rules-based global order construct, locating it as an instinctive reaction to issues arising from the South China Sea dispute, the raw use of power, and the inclination to share the ideas of a close ally. I note, however, that linking Australia closely with the United States approach to global rules has drawbacks, given the United States’ explicit attempts to reserve a right to use force outside the UN Charter. I suggest that Australia would be better served by clearly delineating a separation between its military alliance with a United States, a policy for worst-case scenarios, from its support for international law and institutions, which should form the mainstay and leading edge of its foreign policy.     

Genocide and frontier violence in Australia

Did frontier conflict in Australia amount to genocide? Answers to this question have revolved around topics such as contemporary understandings of the conflict, intent, the applicability of the term to Australian history and considerations of Indigenous agency. In this historiographical article, we argue that ‘genocide’ is a useful framework with which to understand the frontier experience in the Australian colonies. From that perspective, we provide a critical review of the literature up to the present.     

Political opportunity structures,evangelical Christians and morality politics in Canada,Australia and New Zealand

Politically active evangelical Christian populations are found in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Yet their patterns of activism differ not only from the exceptional United States experience, but also one another. This paper applies a political opportunity approach to explain these variations, demonstrating how differences in denominational identities and linkages and political institutions shape evangelical activism, and illustrating these opportunity structures through an examination of the struggles over same-sex marriage in each country. This approach offers a variety of further avenues for the comparative study of ‘morality politics’ in different countries, moving beyond bilateral comparisons with the United States.     

‘And starvation is the grim reaper’: the American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive and the genocide question during the Nigerian civil war, 1968–70

The American Committee to Keep Biafra Alive (ACKBA) was the largest and most influential organization in the United States that formed in response to the Nigerian civil war. While historians have pointed to the committee as an important source of activism that pushed the American government towards supporting more vigorous humanitarian relief, this is the first article to explore the development of the group from its inception and to look specifically at its claims of genocide. Not everyone at the time agreed that the Nigerian government was committing genocide against the people living in the secessionist state of Biafra, and that debate continues today. The ACKBA, appealing to genocide prevention and human rights, argued that the debate about the semantics of genocide got in the way of actually helping those that were suffering from famine as a result of the war. In the process, the committee offered a redefinition of genocide that wedded conceptions of Biafran identity to the Biafran state, which made the maintenance of ‘one Nigeria’, in the eyes of committee members, an act of genocide. In the end, this redefinition of genocide failed to bring more people in the United States towards supporting Biafran secession and might have, in the end, led to more confusion about genocide during the conflict. An analysis of the committee's activism highlights the often tenuous relationship between self-determination and genocide in the developing world and illustrates the growing limits of American political intervention in the global south.     

The Australian National University's Department of International Relations: the early years

This article is a contribution to the re-evaluation of the formative years of the emergent international relations discipline. Work on this topic, extensive over the past decade and a half, has overturned a number of the foundational myths of the global discipline, especially regarding the period between the two world wars. The literature on international relations in Australia, slow to reflect this re-evaluation, generally still locates the first important developments in the 1960s, and characterises the scholarship that emerged as predominantly ‘realist’. This study both pushes back the boundaries and challenges the theoretical perspectives used to categorise thinking in Australia at that time. A student of C. A. W. Manning and thus conversant with British ideas of ‘international society’, George Modelski's early exposure to theoretical work in the USA and his endeavours to give his department a strongly regional focus gave his work a richness and multifaceted character not easily captured by the ‘realist–rationalist’ dichotomy. Modelski went on from the Australian National University to become a major figure in international relations in the USA, contributing to the original debates on globalisation and best known for his work on ‘long cycles’ in world politics.     

A research agenda for the economic study of genocide: signposts from the field of conflict economics

In the field of conflict economics there is surprisingly little research on genocide and mass killing relative to war and terrorism, which I call the ‘genocide gap’. This article critically evaluates the potential for scholarship in conflict economics to help fill the gap with new research on economic aspects of mass atrocities. The article begins with an overview of the principal subject matter and methodologies of conflict economics and key interdependencies between economics and conflict. Relatively new civilian atrocity datasets and trends are then evaluated followed by a critical assessment of empirical economic risk factors for mass atrocities. The remainder of the article points to how three richly researched areas in conflict economics can serve as signposts for new quantitative research on economic aspects of genocide and mass killing. The three signposts critically assessed are: (1) empirical study of economic risk factors for civil wars; (2) promise and limits of rational choice theory; and (3) economic consequences of civil wars. This analysis is complemented by a tentative discussion of economic insights derived from a foundational work in genocide studies, Raphael Lemkin's Axis rule in occupied Europe, that could profitably serve as the foundation for future research on the economic study of genocide.     

Australia’s China policy of strategic ambiguity: navigating between big fish

History, little understood, shows that for 55 years a policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ about the application of the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty to Taiwan, a flashpoint in Asia, served Australia well. Return to it could lessen the risks of embroilment in any Sino-American war in East Asia, and enhance Australia’s middle-power options.     

Fearing social and cultural death: genocide and elimination in settler colonial Canada—an Indigenous perspective

This article reviews recent works on Indigenous politics and history in the Canadian context to produce insights about genocide in the Canadian context. The article is situated primarily in the field of Indigenous studies while also drawing on the field of settler colonial studies. It begins with contemplation of the concept of genocide and related terms in the Canadian context. The author suggests that it is useful to apply the concept of elimination developed by Patrick Wolfe to studies of genocide. The article then turns to Mohawk Interruptus with significant emphasis placed on how author Audra Simpson theorizes the concept of ‘refusal’ and the ‘fear of social and political death’. The last part of the article focuses on two books that examine the late nineteenth-century northern plains: Metis and the Medicine Line by Michel Hogue and Clearing the Plains by James Daschuk. These books succeed in detailing the great changes that occurred as the fur trade era fell away and a settler colonial regime emerged on the Canadian plains. For Indigenous peoples, these changes had, and continue to have, devastating consequences. Drawing heavily on the insights of Simpson, the second half of the article argues that studying the late nineteenth-century northern plains produces important methodological insights about the study of genocide in Canada.     

Settler colonialism in Canada and the Métis

Although the literature on settler colonialism intends to identify what is specific about the settler colonial experience, it can also homogenize diverse settler colonial narratives and contexts. In particular, in Canada, discussion of the ‘logic of elimination’ must contend with the discrete experiences of multiple Indigenous groups, including the Métis. This article examines relationships between Métis people and settler colonialism in Canada to distinguish how Métis histories contribute to a broader narrative of settler colonial genocide in Canada. Cast as ‘halfbreeds’ and considered rebels by the newly forming Canadian nation-state, Métis peoples were discouraged from ‘illegitimate breeding’. Moreover, their unique experiences of the residential school system and forced sterilization have heretofore been underexplored in historiographies of genocide and settler colonial elimination in Canada. These social, political and racial divisions in Canada are magnified through genocidal structures and they reach a critical juncture between colonialism and mixed ethnicities. At that juncture, groups like the Métis in Canada are within a metaphorical gap or, more accurately, a jurisdictional gap. Colonial treatment of the Métis demonstrates, in part, the broad reach of colonial control and how uneven it is, often to the detriment of the Métis and Indigenous groups in Canada.     

From Coombs to Crean: popular music and cultural policy in Australia

The many bodies administering Australian arts activity were incorporated within the Australia Council, established in 1973 by the Whitlam Labor Government to oversee Commonwealth arts policy under the direction of H.C. ‘Nugget’ Coombs. This article takes the establishment of the Australia Council as a starting point in tracing changing attitudes towards the practices and funding of popular music in Australia and accompanying policy discourses. This includes consideration of how funding models reinforce understandings of ‘high’ and ‘low’ art forms, the ‘cultural’/‘creative’ industries debates, and their effects upon local popular music policy. This article discusses the history of local music content debates as a central instrument of popular music policy and examines the implications for cultural nationalism in light of a recent series of media and cultural reports into industries and funding bodies. In documenting a broad shift from cultural to industrial policy narratives, the article examines a central question: What does the ‘national’ now mean in contemporary music and the rapid evolution of digital media technologies?     

In/out of Nigeria: transnational research and the politics of identity and knowledge production

Abstract

This article explores the murkiness of fieldwork and writing that often comes with simultaneous positioning as insider/outsider. I engage with two key themes: First, identity, legitimacy and representation and, second, the gray spaces between theory and reality. The first theme examines the contradictions of being perceived as both an insider and outsider; the complexities of identity and language while at ‘home’ in the field, and the challenges of performing the native informant role while back ‘home’ in Canada. The second theme explores the uncomfortable dilemma of engaging with the ‘Rush to Theory’ from the global south. I will examine how the theories are sophisticated and provocative, yet prove unsatisfactory in terms of having practical applications. I conclude the article by positing that, despite the challenges of doing transnational work, transnational subjects invariably contribute to the creation of a new politics of knowledge production and to the attainment of social justice.     

Truth and Decolonization: Filling the Educator Achievement Gap Darn It!

Public attention on the systemic oppression of Indigenous people in Canadian Residential Schools raised by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) marks a possible turning point for Canada to enter a respectful relationship with First Nations. Calls for widespread education initiatives that promote Indigenous perspectives indicate a path to reconciliation. However, access to this path is obstructed by two barriers: 1) recurring colonial approaches to enacting Indigenous education policies; and 2) teachers’ bewilderment upon facing such a steep learning curve. In an attempt to overcome these barriers, I designed a workshop to assist educators and I approached teachers to engage on a grassroots level. The workshop developed from a combination of critical policy analysis and autoethnography to provide an accessible overview of Canada’s legacy of colonialism. Delivery of the workshop revealed participants’ readiness to learn about colonization in Canada, while exposing the need for capacity building within the Ontario public education system for Indigenous leadership to direct TRC initiatives.     

The UK and ‘genocide’ in Biafra

In late August 1968, following a British proposal, Nigeria announced that it would allow an international observer team into the country to show that it was not pursuing a campaign of genocide in Biafra. This article analyses why the United Kingdom pushed for the creation of the observer team, and shows how the team's work was incorporated into the British government's justifications for its support of the Nigerian government. The experience of the observer team illustrates the difficulties of providing an ‘objective’ view regarding whether or not genocide is taking place.     

Not told by victims: genocide-as-story in Aboriginal prison writings in Canada, 1980–96

When criminalized Aboriginal peoples serving time in Canadian prisons wrote in penal presses, they often used genocide as a framework to discuss both their personal life histories and the colonial history that led to overrepresentation of Aboriginal peoples in prisons. Genocide, though, is not a straightforward idea, and the ways that Aboriginal prisoners wrote about genocide differed significantly from how scholars or politicians used the term. By interpreting these writings within Aboriginal storytelling traditions, this article illuminates the lived experience of genocide, how those experiencing incarceration viewed genocide within their belief structures, the ways that genocide became a critique against the Canadian government, and the spiritual basis for discussion of genocide. By reading Aboriginal prison writings as valuable intellectual pursuits, we can begin to interpret genocide within frameworks that differed from the insights from academia. First, genocide was experienced as part of both colonial and personal processes, meaning it was experienced at the community level and in personal violence in pre-carceral lives. Second, by telling stories of genocide, prisoners asserted their own survival, which reflected the goals of their organizations and functioned as a political critique against the Canadian government. Third, genocide became an identity-shaping force in the lives of criminalized Aboriginal peoples, which in turn shaped their experience of incarceration. Finally, genocide was not uniformly experienced, as it had important gendered differences. This article shows the nuance in prisoners' discussions of genocide by proposing a new way of interpreting genocide within Aboriginal history in Canada by analysing penal publications as part of Aboriginal storytelling traditions, what the author refers to as ‘genocide-as-story’.