The Australian 2016 Defence White Paper,great-power rivalry and a ‘rules-based order’: an imagined correspondence between Carr,Bull and Bell

This piece is an imagined email correspondence between three renowned international relations scholars, E. H. Carr, Hedley Bull and Coral Bell, who are discussing the Australian 2016 Defence White Paper. The purpose of such an exercise is to reflect on the ‘big-picture’ international relations questions posed by what might otherwise be thought of as a relatively technical defence policy document. In particular, the correspondence between the three focuses on the central importance of the White Paper’s assumptions of a ‘rules-based global order’ and the relationship between this order and US power. In their time, all three authors spoke directly to questions of power, law and order in their scholarly work, which had been deeply influenced, in all three cases, by periods spent working at the ‘coalface’ of these issues in government in Britain and Australia. As such, Carr, Bull and Bell have much to say about how Australia is positioning itself for a post-unipolar world.     

Australian aid after the ‘Golden Consensus’: from aid policy to development policy?

ABSTRACT

In the decade preceding the election of the Abbott Coalition Government in 2013, a so-called ‘golden consensus’ governed Australian aid policy. During this period Australia’s aid spending increased by over 80% in real terms. However, after winning government the 2013 Federal Election, the Abbott Government made a series of significant and unexpected aid policy decisions, cutting the aid budget three times in fifteen months and integrating AusAID, Australia’s aid agency, into the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. This article considers the future role of aid in Australia’s diplomacy primarily by engaging with a prior question: how was it possible for the golden consensus to be uprooted so easily? Conducting a post-mortem reveals that Australia’s development constituency bears some responsibility for the fragility of the consensus. This analysis also reveals the critical role the development constituency will play in determining the extent to which Australia is able to embrace the ‘beyond aid’ agenda. To meet this contemporary challenge, the development community must heed the lessons of the collapse of the golden consensus and, in particular, overcome its reticence to engage in broader foreign policy debates.     

Entrenched Disbelief: Complex Hunter-Gatherers and the Case for Inclusive Cultural Evolutionary Thinking

Advocates of traditional, agriculture-based models of sociopolitical evolution argue that the adoption of domesticates is requisite for developments such as sedentism, village life, ascribed status, hereditary leadership, and other features that underpin institutionalized political complexity. We counter in this essay with a well-documented suite of politically complex hunter-gatherer (CHG) societies that exhibit these same features, thereby demonstrating that reliance on agriculture per se—or any other specific food regime such as fishing—should be excised from explanations of emergent political complexity. Despite the failure of the agricentric model to account for a significant number of cases of institutionalized complexity, some of its architects remain entrenched in their disbelief and rigidly ignore the implications of CHG studies. By continuing to situate farming as foundational to everything complex, they perpetuate not only a story of human cultural evolution over the last 10,000 years that is incomplete but also a narrative that is incorrect. We reject subsistence (domesticates) as the central organizing principle and introduce here a new forum for thinking about how societies operate and evolve. We propose a model consisting of integrated platforms of societal dynamics that are inclusive (encourage discourse of all societies), nonprogressive, and serve as an organizational structure to discuss cultural evolution in any comparative or singular ethnographic context. The platforms are nonhierarchical and not fixed in order or importance. They are (1) agency and authority, (2) social differentiation, (3) participation in communal events, (4) organization of production, (5) labor obligations, (6) articulation of ecology and subsistence, and (7) territoriality and ownership. All sociopolitical cases and all topics can be productively discussed on these platforms, from bands to the largest empires, comparatively or diachronically. In the present article, we use the platforms to examine political evolution. We assemble considerable evidence that a variety of dietary regimes are associated with the emergence of institutionalized political complexity. Rather than diet, it is the ways people integrate and use labor that demands our attention.     

“Special Forces”: A Stereotype of Benjaminite Soldiers in the Deuteronomistic History and Chronicles

This article explores one point of contrast between the characterizations of Benjamin-Judah relations in the DtrH and Chronicles. The argument is that the Deuteronomist offers a stereotype of Benjaminite “special forces,” which the Chronicler then co-opts in service of his own agenda. The remarkable aspect of this cooption is that the Chronicler does not retain or adapt any of the Deuteronomistic material that contributes to this Benjaminite stereotype, only the stereotype itself—i.e., the stereotype only manifests itself in the Sondergut material. The article suggests that the Chronicler repurposes the stereotype in service of a conciliatory agenda: the reincorporation of wealthy Benjaminites into the Jerusalem temple’s sphere of influence.

The irony of “Benjaminite” left-handedness is not a new observation; this essay suggests that they should be linked to the motif of “skill with long-distance weapons.” The two motifs are linked in three ways: 1) in practice, they represent a deviation from “regular” hand-to-hand warfare; 2) they overlap within the narratives; and 3) both are specifically linked to Benjaminites—left-handedness by the irony of the name, and long-distance weaponry by the fact that Benjaminites are characterized uniquely among the tribes by that skill (i.e., whenever Benjaminites are noted in a tribal list as having skill with the sling or bow, they are the only tribe that possesses that skill).     

‘The Men Have Come’: Gender and Militarisation in Kampala, 1966–86

This article explores the gender implications of the militarisation of the Mengo neighbourhood of Kampala. It analyses how the hyper‐militarisation under post‐colonial regimes, particularly those of Milton Obote and Idi Amin, marked a significant gender reversal. The military presence in Mengo emasculated civilian men, who were attacked and abused by soldiers, and led women to assume the roles of ‘protectors’ who safeguarded men, children and their homes. Women volunteered for the most dangerous tasks at the household and community levels and faced constant dangers, including rape, violence and other forms of abuse. Using oral histories collected from the residents in Mengo in 2014, I examine this reconfiguration of gender roles and its reverberations in contemporary Mengo. Interviews with the women and men from Kampala describe the various ways women protected people and spaces and at the same time stress men's vulnerability. This article therefore challenges popular conceptions of women as weak and vulnerable and in need of men's protection in militarised situations.     

Mapping Value in a ‘Green’ Commodity Frontier: Revisiting Commodity Chain Analysis

Analysis of commodity chains has provided important insights on how power, resource and market access mediate the distribution of benefits and risks. Given this analytical potential, Commodity Chain Analysis (CCA) is now being applied to the study of biofuels and carbon markets to gain systematic insight into the circumstances, relationships and transformations involved in their production and exchange. By building on and adapting this approach to three distinct case studies (biofuels in Madagascar and forest carbon in Cambodia and Laos), this article contributes new insights on the emergence of value within market environmentalism. The analysis highlights methodological challenges in applying CCA to commodified forms of nature, and the significance of knowledge and value negotiations. All three cases illustrate that it remains highly uncertain whether or not market exchange can ultimately be realized. As in the case of traditional commodities, pre‐existing conditions of power and access shape modes of production and network configuration. Parallel and intersecting commodity networks (e.g. for land and timber) also require us to think beyond the traditional single‐commodity focus. Thus, the authors call for an expanded analytical focus in applying CCA to non‐material ‘green’ commodities which places greater emphasis on value negotiations and connections within new ‘commodity frontiers’.     

An Investigation Into the Relationship Between Funerary Treatment and Bacterial Bioerosion in European Archaeological Human Bone

A central problem in funerary archaeology is interpreting how the corpse was manipulated in the immediate post mortem period. The extent of bacterial bioerosion to the internal bone microstructure has been proposed as a means to infer the early post mortem history of a corpse, as it has been suggested that this form of bone diagenesis is produced by an organism's putrefactive gut bacteria. Under this model, different forms of funerary treatment would be expected to leave characteristic signatures of bioerosion in archaeological bone. Here, we tested the extent to which bacterial bioerosion of ancient human bones reflected funerary treatment, through histological analysis of 301 archaeological human bone thin sections from 25 European archaeological sites. We found that bioerosion was significantly influenced by whether a bone originated from a neonatal individual or an anoxic context. When these remains were excluded, bioerosion was controlled by archaeological phase in a manner consistent with known early post mortem treatment and forensic models of bodily decomposition. These findings suggest that microscopic analyses of bone have useful applications in reconstructions of funerary processes and provide some insight into factors that may control the persistence of organic biomolecules and fossilization.     

Cultural Niche Construction and Remote Sensing of Ancient Anthropogenic Environmental Change in the North Coast of Peru

Archaeological land use results in the modification of natural environments according to cultural templates and strategies. Deeply entrenched environmental legacies can result from such “niche construction,” influencing subsequent cultures and continuing to resonate in modern ecological function. These changes can be better understood through archaeological remote sensing.Here, I describe spectral responses of densely vegetated sugarcane fields in the Chicama Valley (north coast of Peru) to archaeological features and associated anthropogenic soils (anthrosols). Ongoing satellite remote sensing documents approximately 440 previously unrecorded major archaeological monuments and smaller features within a 310 km² sample of the Chicama Valley The majority of these date to the Moche–Chimu periods (ca. AD 300–1400), with others dating to the Cupisnique–Colonial periods. The newly recorded features are significant for accurately reconstructing the socio-ecological history of anthropogenic environmental change in the region.In addition to advancing analyses of archaeological settlement, these results reveal how prehispanic land use legacies result in persistent anthropogenic niches that can affect modern agricultural potentials. The relationships between anthropogenic features and sugarcane development can be directly evaluated through vegetation indices and physically based image transforms. Phenological response is linked to long-term alterations in soil texture, organic-matter content, and moisture capacity. Past land use thus has a significant impact upon contemporary ecological function, resulting in anthropogenic microenvironments. As sugarcane increasingly is an important industrial crop, these results have the potential to be widely applied to archaeological and agronomic problems, including reconstructions of archaeological landscapes, understanding persistent anthropogenic environments, and mitigating heritage loss while potentially improving precision agriculture.     

Identifying sites at risk from illicit metal detecting: from CRAVED to HOPPER

Archaeological sites are at risk from acquisitive crime: this paper focuses in particular on illicit metal detecting. The effects of theft in this context are not merely financial, but have devastating impact on our knowledge and understanding of the site. Even where items are later recovered, we lose the vital clues about the precise context of an object. We therefore need to reduce the risk of theft occurring in the first place.

This paper draws on case studies from England and presents a new methodology to assess which archaeological sites may be at risk from illicit metal detecting: ‘HOPPER’ identifies the characteristics of sites likely to be targeted by offenders looking for antiquities. In brief: History (a history of finds at the site); Open (the site has physical public access, and/or is documented in the public domain); Protection (protected status can act as a beacon for offenders); Publicity (site is known about or receiving new attention); Evasion (there are known ways to escape apprehension); and Repeat victimisation (The site has been a target before). The impact of HOPPER will be its use in the field to develop a pragmatic risk assessment applicable both in a local and international context.