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.     

SUSTAINING INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES: SYMBOLIC AND INSTRUMENTAL DIMENSIONS OF PASTORAL RESOURCE USE IN SHIMSHAL, NORTHERN PAKISTAN

The paper describes livestock herding in Shimshal, an indigenous mountain community in Pakistan, with particular attention to the considerations that inform herding decisions. Ethnographic fieldwork in Shimshal reveals two main categories of consideration: instrumental and symbolic. Habermas' theory of communicative action provides a basis for reformulating these categories into a set of conceptually integrated ideal types of resources and for arguing that instrumental and symbolic resources provide motivations toward consumption and conservation, respectively. Two examples of outside interventions to Shimshal's pastoral ecology reveal the limitations of conceptualizing indigenous resource use in purely instrumental terms. The paper concludes with a call to conceptualize indigenous community sustainability in instrumental and symbolic terms.
Cet article traite des troupeaux de bétail à Shimshal, une communauté indigène montagnarde au Pakistan en insistant sur des considérations qui influencent les décisions au sujet des troupeaux. La recherche éthnographique sur le terrain de Shimshal nous révèle deux grandes catégories: instrumental et symbolique. La théorie de l'action communicative d'Habermas fournit une base pour la reformulation des catégories en regroupant d'une façon conceptuelle des types de ressources idéales et permet de constater que les ressources instrumentales et symboli-ques motivent la consommation et la conservation respectivement. Deux exemples d'intervention externe à l'écologie pastorale de Shimshal révèlent les limites de la conceptualisation des ressources indigènes dans les ter-mes instrumentaux. Cet article conclut en suggérant le besoin d'une communauté indigène en termes instrumentaux et symboliques.     

The governance bank

While the cancellation of a number of high‐profile loans because of corruption concerns has made headline news, the World Bank's principal approach to poorly governed countries is lending in order to support reforms. Although designed to be an apolitical technocratic development financier, increasingly the Bank has focused its attention and resources on promoting good governance in its borrowers. Bank lawyers and presidents have attempted to hive of apolitical aspects of governance by arguing a distinction between the rule of law and the political character of government, but this distinction is illusory. The Bank's inability to address the political embeddedness of poor governance in neo‐patrimonial governments skews risk assessments and impedes the formation of effective strategies. Reform of the charter would not eliminate the Bank's bureaucratic and political constraints.     

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.     

Bushfires,Human Health Economics,and Pyrogeography

Bushfires (landscape fires) are a key Earth system process that affects humans and our societies and economies. In a recent article, we explored the coupling of humans to landscape fire through the lens of human health impacts of bushfire smoke. We noted that such an approach demands recognition of the indirect impacts and costs of bushfires that cannot be captured by simplistic proxies such as deaths directly attributable to a fire front. Evaluation of direct and indirect economic costs of bushfire disasters, and bushfire fire management remains a poorly developed research frontier that demands collaboration of expertise from a broad cross‐section of fields that often have limited experience of collaborating together. The need for such synthetic thinking about fire's place on Earth has spawned the discipline of pyrogeography.     

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.