Return to reason: reviving political realism in western foreign policy

Twenty‐first‐century political crises stretching from Europe to the Middle East and the Asia–Pacific have undermined the worldview that governed post‐Cold War western thinking about a liberal end of history. This worldview assumed that shared norms and transnational institutions would transform the state based‐order. In this context, the use of force is considered appropriate only for humanitarian ends meeting a set of predetermined axioms laid down in chapter 7 of the UN Charter. Yet for any strategy to be effective—in an international order subject to change—a clear political aim is required, which might deviate from the general rule. Preoccupied with universal postulates, legal normativism has lost sight of the particular. The argument put forth in this article is that the failure of contemporary western foreign policy in the twenty‐first century to address this limitation or to prioritize political ends has led to strategic confusion from Afghanistan to Syria and Ukraine. In this context, it might be useful to reappraise the utility of abstract rationalist approaches to global governance and return instead to an earlier understanding of statecraft that avoided premature generalizations and treated norms as maxims of prudence rather than axioms requiring universal application.     

Mediterranean heritage: ancient marvel,modern millstone

ABSTRACT. The wealth, variety and seaborne accessibility of Mediterranean societies since late prehistory have made the region's cultural heritage the world's most widely acclaimed. But since the fall of the Roman Empire the Mediterranean has been increasingly disadvantaged, its history compromised, its legacy beleaguered. Two millennia of invasion and rapine, religious vendetta, foreign conquest, imperial dominion and colonial subjugation have left Mediterranean peoples with fewer resources and weaker infrastructures than those of transalpine and transatlantic nation‐states. The consequences for the care and control of Mediterranean heritage are parlous. That heritage is both the region's self‐defining pride and its economic mainstay, yet a crippling burden to protect and maintain, let alone to interpret and celebrate. It is everywhere beset by natural and human attrition. Weathering and erosion, illicit excavation and pillage, tomb robbery and the international antiquities market exact tolls that legal codes and police forces are all but impotent to stem. Recent social and political trends suggest potential remedies for some of these dilemmas.     

Professionalism and Australia's Security Intellectuals: Knowledge,Power, Responsibility

This article examines critically the systemic 'professionalism' which has overtaken Australia's defence and security community in the 1990s. It focuses on the unhealthy convergence of academic security studies at the Australian National University with an overriding foreign policy priority of the Australian Government: the formation of a new regional identity based on themes of 'engagement' and 'enmeshment' with Asia. It argues that the main consequence of this 'professionalist' trend is a mode of inquiry that expunges politics, ethics and responsibility from academic discourse on security. The article also addresses briefly an emerging postmodern politics of dissidence in the disciplines of security studies and political geography which has transformed our understanding of the role and social responsibility of security intellectuals.     

THE LOCATION OF THE TREASURY OF ATREUS

Summary.   The Treasury of Atreus, the largest and most impressive of the nine tholos tombs found at Mycenae, stands by itself at the southern edge of a bowl in the east slope of the Panagia ridge. This paper argues that the tomb was constructed on this particular spot so that it would be seen from the trackways/roads that led to Mycenae from the east, south-east and south-west and from the main pathway to the palace. The view of the acropolis hill and Mt. Profitis Ilias from the space occupied by the earthen mound above the tholos also appears to have influenced the choice of location. It is suggested that the position of the Treasury of Atreus was, like the tomb itself, a political statement, calculated to show that the ruler who built the tomb succeeded in extending the territory of Mycenae across the central Argolid.