In defence of Australian foreign policy: common themes,assumptions, and challenges

ABSTRACT

While interrelated issues and challenges can only expand, the study of foreign policy in Australia is not a very healthy discipline. While not wholly wedged on life-support, there are genuine grounds for concern about the decline of Australian foreign policy (AFP) as a subject for serious academic concentration and its position as a marginalised topic of analysis. Unfortunately, attempts to reinvigorate the field continue to contend with a number of ingrained biases. AFP can be incorrectly dismissed as muddled and marginal while major debate points in the field are often glibly portrayed as broadly settled. This is despite the that fact that it can provide unique insights into policy-making in the twenty-first century while teaching students the benefits of problem-solving through a multi-disciplinary lens. Additionally, there is an ever-changing, contested set of knowledge that future leaders will need to consider in order to be successful, critical thinkers in a multi-agency environment. This will continue to incorporate an evolving variety of significant issues that constitute both conventional and unconventional threats to national interests.     

Comparisons and the Case for Interaction among Neanderthals and Early Modern Humans in the Levant

There is good reason to believe that both archaic and anatomically modern humans occupied south-west Asia at the same time. On the assumption that this was indeed the case, this paper attempts to draw comparisons between the Neanderthals and their modern contemporaries and to examine the possibilities of interaction between the two.     

Polycrisis: Prompts for an emerging worldview

Taking the realms of business, finance and economic history by storm, polycrisis captures the complexity of an increasingly uncertain world in a state of flux and transition. Proponents of the polycrisis model, such as prominent economic historian and Financial Times contributing editor Adam Tooze, propose polycrisis as a marker of our age, capturing overlapping and interconnected crises beyond cause and effect. In his article, the authors offer some prompts for considering the usefulness and limitations of polycrisis for the anthropological toolkit. The authors cautiously welcome the polycrisis trope as a multidimensional means to account for the consequences of interrelated crises in an unprecedented era.