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.     

The Abbott government and the Islamic State: a securitised and elitist foreign policy discourse

This article analyses the foreign policy discourse that surrounded the Abbott government’s 2014 decision to fight the Islamic State (IS). An analysis of parliamentary Hansard reveals that the debate featured three prominent axes: the legacy of the 2003 Iraq War; the strategies and objectives of the 2014 mission; and Australia’s domestic terror threat level. Throughout, the Abbott government not only marginalised dissenting views, but also justified its renewed engagement in the Middle East via a highly securitised and elitist foreign policy discourse. This finding has consequences beyond the battle against the IS. It reveals a deep-seated tension between the ideals of democratic pluralism and the reality that securitised and elitist foreign policy discourses protect governments from serious scrutiny.     

Harold Laski's International Functionalism: A Socialist Challenge to Federalism

Harold Laski argued for international functionalism from his distinctive socialist perspective. He opposed the existing international system based on the principle of state sovereignty. He also criticised the international federalism proposed as an alternative to the existing system. Although Laski began to devise and present his functionalist case in the 1920s, the circumstances of the following decade led him to adopt and adapt some Marxist ideas and to place less emphasis on functionalism. During and after the Second World War he reconsidered the possibilities for international functional organisation. Although fragmented and undeveloped, his functionalist theory was innovative. By the end of the 1940s he had expressed it in a variety of publications as he reflected on the international conditions of that decade. Unlike what is probably the most well-known functionalist case of the early to mid-twentieth century – that of David Mitrany – Laski's argument bears affinities with the later neofunctionalist theorists. Laski's functionalism was underpinned by the critique of sovereignty which made his political philosophy distinctive. Reasons can be detected for the changes in his attitude to and emphasis on functionalism.     

Masculinities and geography,moving forward: men’s bodies,emotions and spiritualities

Geographical work on men and masculinities has expanded and diversified since the 1990s. Gender, Place and Culture has been, and continues to be, a significant outlet for this research. Geographies of masculinities now range across diverse sub-fields – social, cultural, economic, health, post-colonial, urban and rural geographies. We provide a brief overview of this scope, including the expansion of geographies of masculinities beyond the Anglo-American sphere. We then focus on two vibrant fields of research on geographies of men and masculinities, which cut across the various sub-fields of the discipline: men’s embodied and emotional geographies, and their experiences in relation to religion, faith and spirituality. We discuss these fields, suggesting further productive developments for geographies of masculinities, which include work on the body and wellbeing, body size, male care giving, men’s experiences in diverse faith communities, and men and alternative spiritualities. Ongoing development of geographical work on men and masculinities is important for helping to contest patriarchal structures and knowledge production.     

How Legislative (In)Activity,Ideological Divergence,and Divided Government Impact Executive Unilateralism: A Test of Three Theories

During the past two decades scholars from a variety of different fields (law, history, journalism, political science) have written extensively about the development and implementation of the Unilateral Presidency. Because several explanations for unilateral action have been posited, we provide a thorough test of three theories of executive unilateral action. Applying a newly-developed methodology to the most comprehensive dataset of unilateral presidential directives to date, results of the Bayesian Poisson Vector Autoregressive model suggest that although executive orders, memoranda, and proclamations are all strategic tools that presidents utilize to unilaterally alter policy, fundamental differences exist between them, as well as the inter-dependence among them. More important, our results show that whereas the percentage of bills passed is related to presidential proclamations, legislative activity actually depends on the number of executive orders issued. However, CQ success scores are related to both executive orders and presidential proclamations. We also find that presidential ideology and congressional ideology are related to executive action, whereas the impact of divided government is at best only weakly related.     

Public Policy and the Idea of the Vietnamese State: The Cultural Political Economy of Domestic Water Supply

Using Rural Water Supply (RWS) policy practices as a case study, this article shows that the disjunction between implementation as formally conceived and informally practised is not a question of ineffective policy cycle dynamics, but rather an inherent feature of Vietnam’s Cultural Political Economy. Drawing on critical realist approaches to social and state theory, we argue that formal and informal RWS policy practices, as a set of two interconnected spheres, serve as key, separate but connected, mechanisms for reproducing the distribution of material resources (primarily through the informal sphere) and the hegemony of ideas (primarily through the formal sphere) in Vietnamese society. We conclude that the formal, administrative practices of RWS policy are primarily to be understood in their function of reproducing the idea of the state and state legitimacy. RWS administrative practices function to sustain the core social and political order in Vietnam as institutionalised in “the state”, rather than being primarily oriented to improving rural water supply. The findings raise questions for donor-supported programs that focus on formal administrative institutions and practices for improving the performance of the water sector.     

Exotericism and the Untroubled Race for the Future

Abstract

The simple case against the philosophic practice of exoteric writing is that it takes too long. Especially short of time are those who would contribute to or even attempt to keep up with the advance of what used to be called natural philosophy. The assumption of progress in science has been purchased with the relentless specialization of its practitioners. In theory transparent to inquiry, in practice specialized, science may be not just anti-exoteric but esoteric.