The Rise and Fall of Non-Aligned Mediation, 1961–6

From its inception, the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) considered itself to be a moderating force in the cold war and in the post-colonial world. In September 1961, in the wake of the Belgrade Conference and at the height of the Berlin crisis, it dispatched emergency missions to Washington and Moscow, with Sukarno and Keita journeying to Washington and Nehru and Nkrumah flying to Moscow. Yet, by the decade's end, the movement had moved away from that mission. Paying particular attention to key turning points of the mid-1960s such as the 1964 Congo crisis and the Americanisation of the Vietnam War, this paper interprets the abandonment of cold war mediation as a product of the Vietnam War, rising anti-colonial sentiment, and organised non-alignment's corresponding shift toward a more militant stance on the world stage. This shift helped to foster a newly antagonistic relationship between the United States and the NAM.     

The National Union of Students and transnational solidarity, 1958–1968

In 1968 student activism and the international connections between students became a source of interest and concern throughout the world. These international connections, however, were far from new. Internationalism has always been at the core of the National Union of Students of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (NUS), the largest student organisation in the UK. The NUS represented the majority of British students, although their policies were never universally accepted but were the outcome of sometimes vociferous debate. In the years between the end of the Second World War and 1968 the NUS was deeply involved in setting up two international student organisations, the International Union of Students (IUS) and the International Student Conference (ISC), as well as developing their own bilateral connections with students around the world. The membership and leadership of the NUS were clearly interested, and concerned, about students internationally. However, the extent to which this interest and concern should be seen as solidarity or is more rightly a new manifestation of older British traditions of paternalism and liberal internationalism is questioned in this article.     

Policy Agendas in Australian Politics: The Governor-General's Speeches, 1945–2008

The Policy Agendas Project collects and organises data from official documents to trace changes in the policy agenda and outputs of national, sub-national and supranational governments. In this paper we use the policy agendas method to analyse the changing contents of those Australian Governor-General's speeches delivered on behalf of incoming governments between 1945 and 2008. We suggest that these speeches provide an important insight into how the executive wishes to portray its policy agenda as it starts a new term of government. In mapping the changing agenda in this way we address four questions: which issues have risen or fallen in importance? When and in relation to what issues have there been policy ‘punctuations’? How stable is the Australian policy agenda? How fragmented is the policy agenda? We find evidence of a number of policy punctuations and one turning-point: the election of the Whitlam government.