This 2023 John Gee Memorial Lecture will be delivered by Professor Toni Erskine. 

A series of webinars created by the Hothouse at ANU, discussing the intersections between climate change, inequity, and human health. The focus is on actions that enable transformative change away from the harmful consumptogenic system to systems that promote good health, social equity and environmental wellbeing.

This episode featured Dr Annabelle Workman, Research Fellow at Melbourne Climate Futures.

The health and other impacts of climate change highlight an imperative for urgent climate action. The health community continues to increase its efforts in raising the alarm on climate-related health impacts and emphasising the health and economic benefits of ambitious and timely action. Yet, projections based on the analysis of current policies and action see us remain on a dangerous path of global warming over 2°C. Using insights from the political economy literature, this seminar will explore what strategies might exist to secure the urgent action needed to develop healthier climate policies.

DISCUSSING AI, AUTOMATED SYSTEMS AND THE FUTURE OF WAR SEMINAR SERIES

This seminar series is part of a two-year (2023-2025) research project on Anticipating the Future of War: AI, Automated Systems, and Resort-to-Force Decision Making, generously funded by the Australian Department of Defence and led by Professor Toni Erskine from the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs.

Join the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Coral Bell School to discuss Afghanistan today: The humanitarian situation, the strength and resilience of the people of Afghanistan, as well as ongoing efforts to address critical needs.

Join our panel discussion about the 2023 New Zealand election and its impact.

Since February 2021, the coordination for education aid in Myanmar has changed. Most aid agencies have resorted to no engagement policy with de facto authorities, resulting in no or very limited engagement with state ministries and education institutions when most of the educational institutions in Myanmar are state-owned. This has come at a time of unprecedented education needs in Myanmar after Covid19 and coup-related chaos. This context sees education aid agencies in Myanmar caught in the challenges of limited funds, limited coordination, and ethical considerations in delivering aid. The role of education aid in Myanmar is challenged in many ways with key areas being outreach, cooperation, and sustainability.

Dr Khaing Phyu Htut will summarise the scenario of education aid in Myanmar including their coping mechanisms and offer preliminary thoughts on aid effectiveness and accountability. Dr Khaing Phyu Htut will also explore with the audience how politics impact education in challenging contexts and how best education can be protected.

About the speaker
Dr Khaing Phyu Htut has been active in Myanmar education sector for more than 20 years. She has worked in various roles at the Ministry of Education, the British Council and Department for International Development (DFID) which is now known as Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO). Her current role as the Education Adviser of DFID involves overseeing the UK’s education support to Myanmar which focuses on teacher education, assessment, and marginalised communities. She is in Australia as the inaugural visiting Myanmar fellow of the ANU Myanmar Research Centre and the Myanmar Research Network, University of Melbourne.

Professorial Lecture Series

This public lecture marks the culmination of our Professorial Lecture Series this year, a captivating series of four presentations, all dedicated to honouring our distinguished academics while highlighting their profound contributions to research and education.

Pacific states and peoples inside global climate change negotiations (UNFCCC COP): from consensus, coherence to ‘climate updated’

Dyah Ayu Kartika addresses the impact of anti-gender movements on gender-related issues and policies in Indonesia and their broader implications for the country's democracy.

We have heard enough now about US-China rivalry in Asia but not enough about its implications for the region. Join us and our three panelists to unpack this and more.

Monty Pounder examines Indonesia's pursuit of military power, exploring factors driving acceleration and the contestation process.

PLEASE NOTE: This is a hybrid event and will take place in-person as well as on Zoom.

Fundamental to any research endeavour is the positionality and relationality of the inquirer, in terms of a person’s worldview and the political and social context of the research. The context embraces multiple fields including the sites in which knowledge is accrued and disseminated, of which academia has a significant place. The panellists share an interest and history of conducting research in the Pacific region, including Australia. They bring their own unique perspectives and experiences to bear in their work and to the discussion. This seminar is an opportunity to explore and consider the meaning and understandings of positionality and relationality, and reflect upon the challenging nature of fostering and undertaking ethical and considered research.

Chair

Soli Middleby is an author, accredited Partnership Broker and Director of Coconuts and Kurrajongs. She has lived and worked across the Pacific Region for the last 20 years, representing Australia as a diplomat and supporting Pacific-led development through partnerships approaches with AusAID, DFAT, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and as the CEO of the Australia Pacific Training Coalition. She is currently a PHD Candidate with the University of Adelaide and Massey University, exploring Pacific Regionalism.

In an increasingly complex world, it is more crucial than ever to have a full picture of how international peacekeeping can be a force for good, but can also have potentially negative impacts on host communities. After thirteen years of presence in Haiti, the highly controversial United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti has now withdrawn. The UN’s legacy in Haiti is not all negative, but it does include sexual scandals, the divisive use of force to ‘clean up’ difficult neighbourhoods as well as a cholera epidemic, brought inadvertently by Nepalese peacekeepers that killed more than 8,000 Haitians and infected more than 600,000.

This book presents a unique multi-disciplinary analysis of the legacy of the mission for Haiti. It presents an innovative account of contemporary international peacekeeping law and practice, arguing for a new model of accountability, going beyond the outdated immunity mechanisms to foreground human rights.

This book launch will bring in conversation Nicolas Lemay-Hebert (ANU Coral Bell School), Rosa Freedman (University of Reading), and Siobhan Wills (Ulster University) over their recently published book The Law and Practice of Peacekeeping: Foregrounding Human Rights by Cambridge University Press. Buy it here.

Guest speakers include Lisa Sharland (Australian Strategic Policy Institute) and Charles T. Hunt (Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology). Cecilia Jacob (ANU Coral Bell School) will facilitate this discussion.

Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the U.S. inaugurated the use of armed Unmanned Aerial Vehicles or drones to combat terrorists. Since then, drones have proliferated broadly. Over 102 countries and nearly 65 stateless groups now possess drones. This suggests that “drone warfare” is no longer merely a U.S. phenomenon focusing on counterterrorism. Rather, countries and other non-state actors are acquiring drones and using them differently.

Ukraine, for instance, has capitalized on drones to help block Russia’s seizure of Kyiv to install a puppet regime. Given this development, how do we understand emerging patterns of drone warfare globally? What is the evolving proliferation of drones for international security and global order? How do these consequences, in turn, shape policies to manage the emergence of automated and autonomous remote-warfare technologies?

The Asia Pacific is predicted to have the greatest proportion of people already exposed and vulnerable to concurrent extreme weather events and the intensification of climate change-related security risks. What can we learn from Asia Pacific women’s regional networks in ensuring existing risk mapping and analyses are ‘fit for purpose’ as simultaneous catastrophes become endemic globally?

Drawing on feminist and postcolonial approaches, this research seeks to examine how and why women’s regional networks in the Asia Pacific develop distinct perspectives and practices in responding to a multiplicity of crises. In bringing women’s regional networks to bear on the existing scholarship and policy agenda on climate change, this research situates their significance within 1) a longer history of conceptualising women’s insecurity within a matrix of oppressions fuelled by capitalism, colonialism/imperialism, and nationalism; and 2) genealogy of political thought as ‘Third World’ women who have distinctly experienced, interpreted, resisted and theorised the global order.

Dr Maria Tanyag is a Research Fellow / Lecturer at the Department of International Relations at the ANU Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, and a Resident Women, Peace and Security Fellow at Pacific Forum. Her most recent publications are Sexual Health and World Peace in the Routledge Handbook of Feminist Peace Research, and A Feminist Call to Be Radical: Linking Women’s Health and Planetary Health in the journal Politics & Gender. In 2020, Dr Tanyag was one of the contributing authors to the global report entitled Gender, Climate and Security: Sustaining Inclusive Peace on the Frontlines of Climate Change published by UNEP, UN Women, UN DPPA, and UNDP.

This seminar is the eighth of the Women in Asia-Pacific Security Research Seminar Series 2020-21, jointly supported by the Graduate Research & Development Network for Asian Security (GRADNAS) and the ANU Gender Institute. This seminar series showcases the cutting-edge academic research of women in the fields of Asia-Pacific security broadly-defined, and serves as an international platform for strengthening academic exchange, feedback, and mentorship. For more information, contact the Series Convenor, Professor Evelyn Goh evelyn.goh@anu.edu.au.

Professor Desmond Ball AO was the leading figure in strategic studies of his generation and made a major contribution to global scholarship in a field of vital importance in the Cold War by arguing that limited nuclear war was simply not credible. US President Carter said that Des Ball’s “counsel and cautionary advice based on deep research, made a great difference to our collective goal of avoiding nuclear war.” In over 40 years’ service at ANU, Des made a remarkable contribution to this university as a scholar, teacher, academic leader, and mentor. This lecture commemorates his legacy as an outstanding scholar.

America’s renowned geostrategist, Zbigniew Brzezinski, proclaimed four years ago that the most dangerous scenario facing the US would be a grand coalition of China and Russia, united not by ideology but by complimentary grievances. The thesis proposed by Emeritus Professor Paul Dibb is that such a grand coalition of China and Russia is now fast becoming a geopolitical fact in an era of growing tensions among the major powers.

China and Russia are the two leading revisionist powers leagued together in their contempt for the West. Both these authoritarian states see a West that they believe is preoccupied with debilitating political challenges at home. The evidence now is accumulating to suggest that the relationship between China and Russia is at its closest since the 1950s. If the China-Russia military partnership continues its upward trend, it will inevitably seek to undermine the international security order by challenging the system of US-centred alliances in the Asia-Pacific region and Europe. Moreover, both China and Russia have outstanding territorial ambitions they seem intent on pursuing.

So, what are the chances of Beijing and Moscow concluding that now is the time to challenge the West and take advantage of what they both consider to be Western weaknesses? Is the strategic alignment between China and Russia in effect now a de facto alliance or not? Paul Dibb will explore the pros and cons of this proposition and its implications for Australia.

Paul Dibb is Emeritus Professor of strategic studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. He was Head of the Centre from 1991 to 2004. His previous positions include Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence in the Department of Defence, Director of the Defence Intelligence Organisation, and Head of the National Assessments Staff in the National Intelligence Committee. He is the author of 5 books and 4 reports to government, as well as more than 150 academic articles and monographs about the security of the Asia-Pacific region, the US alliance, and Australia’s defence policy. He wrote the 1986 Review of Australia’s Defence Capabilities (the Dibb Report) and was the primary author of the 1987 Defence White Paper.

Panel 1
Supporting women’s agenda: Access to justice and security

Date: 6 December 2021
Time: 7-8pm AEDT
Venue: Zoom
Speakers: Habiba Sarābi, May Maloney, Samira Hamidi
Moderator: Farkhondeh Akbari

Watch panel 1 here

Panel 2
Prioritising actions with girls: Access to protection and rights

Date: 8 December 2021
Time: 7-8 pm AEDT
Venue: Zoom
Speakers: Fereshta Abbasi, Nicole van Rooijen Moderator: Bina D’Costa

Watch panel 2 here

To commemorate the ‘End Violence against Women’ campaign (25 Nov - Dec 10), join the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, ANU and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) for a two-part conversation on the importance of addressing this issue in Afghanistan.

Over the last two decades, the United States and other members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) have invoked the rights of Afghan women and girls to help justify their military engagement in Afghanistan.

Following the US and NATO withdrawal, and with the recent spate of violence it is clear, that women and girls are facing immediate threats, in the country and elsewhere. In this context, what is the responsibility of the international community? What roles could human rights defenders and practitioners play in supporting women and girls?

Our experts will share their insights to offer an overview of different manifestations of violence against women and girls.

Recognising the importance of this issue and the different needs and attributes of girls/children, we have divided the conversations into two parts.

Speakers

Habiba Sarābi was a member of the Afghan Government’s negotiation team, former deputy chair of High Peace Council and reformer during post-Taliban reconstruction in Afghanistan. In 2005, she was appointed as Governor of Bamyan which made her the first Afghan woman to become a governor of any province in the country. She previously served as Afghanistan’s Minister of Women’s Affairs as well as Minister of Culture and Education. Sarābi has been instrumental in promoting women’s rights and representation and environmental issues.

Samira Hamidi is Regional Campaigner for Amnesty International South Asia Regional Office. Her work focuses on human rights, peace process, women’s rights and transitional justice issues in Afghanistan. Previously she has worked with the EU delegation in Afghanistan, Norwegian Embassy, UN Women, CMI, Folke Bernadette Academy and Sweden Embassy as Freelance Consultant focusing on human rights, women, peace and security and civil society issues.

May Maloney is the Deputy Head of the Addressing Sexual Violence team for ICRC based in Geneva. She has over a decade’s experience addressing sexual and gender-based violence, gender and diversity and social inclusion in the human rights, community development, torture and trauma, and humanitarian fields. Her work focuses on technical field support and leading the Sexual Violence team’s humanitarian diplomacy priorities, operational research outcomes, and external relations.

Fereshta Abbasi graduated with an LLB in Law and Political Science from Herat University and an LLM in International Law and Strategic Studies from the University of Aberdeen. She is an accomplished human rights campaigner, and a vocal advocate for human rights. She has highlighted human rights abuses in Afghanistan for several years, especially as a researcher for Human Rights Watch.

Nicole van Rooijen is a Protection Programme Manager for Asia and the Pacific for the International Committee of the Red Cross. With over 16 years of experience at the ICRC, Nicole has worked in various contexts, including Zimbabwe, Colombia, Afghanistan, Jordan and Gaza. Now at the ICRC headquarters in Geneva, she oversees protection work in the Asia-Pacific region. Nicole holds a Masters in Human Geography from the University of Amsterdam and has experience in protection training, as well as working with internally displaced people, on sexual and gender-based violence, and on community protection.

Moderators

Bina D’Costa is a Professor at the Department of International Relations, ANU Coral Bell School of Asia-Pacific Affairs and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow. Through human rights framing, her research focuses on displaced children’s protection in global humanitarian emergencies in trafficking, child/early marriage, exploitative child labour and sexual abuse contexts. Previously, as a UN staff member, she has worked in the Middle East, Horn of Africa, and South Asia, including in Afghanistan and Pakistan with Afghan displaced communities.

Farkhondeh Akbari is a PhD student at the ANU Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. Her research focus is on diplomatic actors and peace settlements with non-state armed actors, looking at the negotiations with the Taliban in Afghanistan and the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Farkhondeh has worked at Afghanistan’s Independent Directorate of Local Governance, the United Nations Headquarters and Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

The experience of displacement has shaped the politics of many Muslim movements across Southeast Asia. This panel previews a special issue of Itinerario on coerced mobility, and the diverse responses of groups of Muslims in Siam’s incorporation of Patani, Dutch efforts to colonise Aceh, and anti-colonial movements like the Darul Islam in Java and the Communist Party’s Tenth Regiment in Malaya.

Dr Amrita Malhi (ANU Coral Bell School) and Dr Joshua Gedacht (Rowan University) are co-editors of Itinerario’s forthcoming next issue: Coercing Mobility: Territory & Displacement in the Politics of Southeast Asian Muslim Movements. They are joined by two other contributors, Dr Francis R. Bradley (Pratt Institute) and Dr David Kloos (KITLV), and hosted by Professor Robert Cribb (ANU Coral Bell School).

Norm scholarship in International Relations (IR) tends to investigate the contestation of actors operating at the peak of governance. It therefore overlooks the perspective of ordinary citizens who are directly affected by international norms and institutions. To address such shortcomings, Dr Ruji Auethavornpipat examines backlash against Rohingya refugees among grassroots actors in Malaysia.

In this presentation, Ruji captures backlash as a distinct and radicalized form of contestation. Backlashers do not merely target the validity of specific norms. They engage in normative re-ordering with a larger goal of dismantling existing societal fabric. He seeks to advance the norm literature by making two contributions. First, he integrates insights from backlash politics into IR norm research. Second, he surveys online hate speech to capture the reality of stakeholder engagement during COVID-19.

Dr Ruji Auethavornpipat is a Research Fellow in the Department of Political and Social Change, Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, the Australian National University. His research examines norm contestation and migrant protection in Southeast Asia. Details of his activities and recent work can be found here: https://researchprofiles.anu.edu.au/en/persons/ruji-auethavornpipat

Australia and Thailand are both middle powers and allies of the United States. Both are important players in the Indo-Pacific, with Thailand the second largest economy in ASEAN and Australia a founding member of the Quad. But there are also significant differences, including with respect to relations with China and respective political systems.

This panel session will explore divergences and convergences in Australian and Thai foreign policy, the worldviews underpinning those positions, and how and where the two countries can cooperate in an era of increasing strategic competition and increasing geopolitical uncertainty.

Speakers

Susannah Patton is Director of the Southeast Asia Program at the Lowy Institute and the Project Lead for the Asia Power Index. She has previously worked in various Southeast Asia-focused positions in the Australian government, including as a Senior Analyst in the Southeast Asia Branch at the Office of National Intelligence and as a diplomat in the Australian Embassy in Bangkok.

Jittipat Poonkham is Associate Professor of International Relations, Associate Dean for International Affairs and Director of International Studies Program in the Faculty of Political Science, Thammasat University. He is an author of A Genealogy Of Bamboo Diplomacy: The Politics of Thai Détente with Russia and China (ANU Press 2022) and a co-editor of International Relations as a Discipline in Thailand: Theory and Sub-fields (Routledge 2019).

Moderator

Greg Raymond is a lecturer in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs researching Southeast Asian politics and foreign relations. He is the author of Thai Military Power: A Culture of Strategic Accommodation (NIAS Press 2018) and the lead author of The United States-Thai Alliance: History, Memory and Current Developments (Routledge, 2021).

View the report here.

The fear of the malingering soldier or veteran has existed in Australia since its first nationwide military venture in South Africa. The establishment of the Repatriation Department in 1917 saw the medical, military and political fields work collectively, to some extent, to support hundreds of thousands of men who returned from their military service wounded or ill.

Over the next decades, the medical profession occasionally criticised the Repatriation Department’s alleged laxness towards soldier recipients of military pensions, particularly those with less visible war-related psychiatric conditions. In 1963 this reached a crescendo when a group of Australian doctors drew battle lines in the correspondence pages of the Medical Journal of Australia, accusing the Repatriation Department of directing a ‘national scandal’, and provoking responses by both the Minister for Repatriation and the Chairman of the War Pensions Assessment Appeal Tribunal.

Although this controversy and its aftermath do allow for closer investigation of the inner workings of the Repatriation Department, the words of the doctors themselves about ‘phony cronies’, ‘deadbeats’ and ‘drongoes’ also reveal how the medical fear of the malingering soldier, and particularly the traumatised soldier-malingerer, lingered into the early 1960s and beyond. This paper will analyse the medical conceptualisation of the traumatised soldier in the 1960s in relation to historical conceptions of malingering, the increasingly tenuous position of psychiatry, as well as the socio-medical ‘sick role’, and will explore possible links between the current soldier and veteran suicide crisis in Australia.

Effie Karageorgos is a Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle and Deputy Convenor of the UON Future of Madness Network. Her research focuses on histories of conflict, gender and psychiatry. Her monograph Australian Soldiers in South Africa and Vietnam: Words from the Battlefield was published in 2016.

Since the dawn of the atomic age, nuclear weapons have been central to the internal dynamics of US alliances in Europe and Asia. But nuclear weapons cooperation in US alliances has varied significantly over time and space. Partners in Deterrence goes beyond traditional accounts that focus on US policy regarding deterrence and reassurance, and instead places the objectives and influence of US allies at the centre of analysis. Through several case studies, Stephan Frühling (ANU Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs) and Andrew O’Neil (Griffith University) reveal that US allies have wielded major influence in shaping nuclear weapons cooperation with the US in ways that reflect their own, often idiosyncratic, objectives.

Chaired by the Director of the Griffith Asia Institute, Professor Caitlin Byrne, this event will celebrate the launch of Partners in Deterrence by Australia’s pre-eminent strategist Emeritus Professor Hugh White.

Purchase the book here. Watch the launch here.

Professor Stephan Frühling, Australian National University

Professor Frühling teaches in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre at the Coral Bell School, and has widely published on Australian defence policy, defence planning and strategy, nuclear weapons and NATO. Stephan was the Fulbright Professional Fellow in Australia-US Alliance Studies at Georgetown University in Washington DC in 2017. He worked as a ‘Partner across the globe’ research fellow in the Research Division of the NATO Defense College in Rome in 2015, and was a member of the Australian Government’s External Panel of Experts on the development of the 2016 Defence White Paper.

Professor Andrew O’Neil, Griffith University

Professor O’Neil is Acting Dean of the Graduate Research School at Griffith University. He has published widely in the broad areas of international relations and strategic studies and is currently chief investigator on projects focusing on the Australia-US alliance funded by the Australian Research Council and Australia’s Department of Defence. Andrew is a former member of the Australian Foreign Minister’s National Consultative Committee on Security Issues and is a member of the Australian Research Council’s College of Experts.

Professor Caitlin Byrne, Griffith University

Professor Byrne is Director of the Griffith Asia Institute. Caitlin’s research is focused on Australian Diplomacy with a special interest in Australia’s engagement in the Asia-Pacific region. Most recent research projects explore the role of leadership, soft power and public diplomacy – including people-to-people connections developed through international education, culture and sport – in developing Australia’s regional influence, relationships and reputation. Caitlin consults on occasion to government in the areas of strategic foreign policy and diplomatic practice.

Emeritus Professor Hugh White, Australian National University

Hugh White AO is Emeritus Professor of Strategic Studies at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. His work focuses primarily on Australian strategic and defence policy, Asia-Pacific security issues, and global strategic affairs especially as they influence Australia and the Asia-Pacific. Hugh has served as an intelligence analyst with the Office of National Assessments, as a journalist with the Sydney Morning Herald, as a senior adviser on the staffs of Defence Minister Kim Beazley and Prime Minister Bob Hawke, and as a senior official in the Department of Defence, where from 1995 to 2000 he was Deputy Secretary for Strategy and Intelligence, and as the first Director of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).

It is only natural that we see the ‘new Cold War’ through the lens of the old one. But how far is the new Cold War against China like the old one against the Soviet Union?

Today’s policies in Washington, Canberra and elsewhere are based on specific views of both the similarities and differences - views that underpin the prevailing optimism about how the contest will play out, and who will win.

In this lecture, Hugh will offer a different view of the similarities and differences which suggest that optimism about this new Cold War is misplaced.

A central question for the development profession is understanding why and how some countries consistently perform strongly according to the usual indicators of development progress. The World Bank’s East Asian Miracle study was a widely cited attempt to explain East Asian economic dynamism. Economists have employed ever more sophisticated econometric tools and larger databases, of the ‘I Just Ran Two Million Regressions’ genre.

In this elusive search, analytical parsimony has obvious attractions as an overarching template. ‘Why Nations Fail’, ‘The Bottom Billion’ and many other famous volumes are examples of this ‘big picture’ approach. The best of these studies draw on economics, political science, history, anthropology and much else to develop an analytical narrative around some unifying themes.

The question Hal asks in this presentation is whether such an approach is feasible and would facilitate a deeper understanding of contemporary Indonesian development dynamics. At least prior to the Covid-19 pandemic, we had a reasonably good understanding of the main aspects and drivers of the country’s economic development in the democratic era. The deeper question is whether one can develop a workable, comprehensive analytical framework that guides us towards an understanding of the country’s development outcomes.

Hal Hill is H.W. Arndt Professor Emeritus of Southeast Asian Economies at The Australian National University. He works mainly on the economies of Southeast Asia. Details of his activities and recent work can be found here: https://crawford.anu.edu.au/people/visitors/hal-hill

Robert Cribb is currently undertaking the writing of a chapter that delves into the historiography of modern Southeast Asia for the upcoming edition of the Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, scheduled for publication in 2024. The field of modern Southeast Asian history, encompassing the era from around 1800 onwards, possesses distinctive characteristics within the broader discipline of history. Notably, it is characterized by a notable dominance of scholars from outside the region, its roots in interdisciplinary area studies, and a lack of a centralized geographical focal point.

In the process of elucidating this field, Cribb has made a deliberate choice to steer away from emphasizing prominent figures and celebrated works. Instead, the focus is directed towards the identification of four prevailing metanarratives that form the basis of most historical writings concerning the period since 1800: Modernist, autonomist, internationalist, and discursive. The chapter concludes by venturing into speculative territory, deviating from the conventional historical approach, as Cribb explores potential future developments in the field with an open and non-traditional perspective.

Robert Cribb is Professor of Asian History in the Department of Political and Social Change. He is a historian of Indonesia with broader interests in Southeast Asia and in Asia as a whole. His interests include political and environmental history, the history of violence and historical geography.

Over the past 30 years, Indonesia has witnessed the growing public prominence of a number of transnational Islamic revivalist movements. These have had a considerable impact on political culture, as the popularity of these movements has gone hand-in-hand with increasingly sectarian views across segments of Indonesian society.

Yet how do such movements successfully transmit their ideas at the grassroots level and present them in ways that influence national political opinion? Chris aims to address this question by focusing on Indonesia’s largest Salafi-influenced organisation, Wahdah Islamiyah, and their activism in the city of Makassar, South Sulawesi.

This talk will illuminate how Wahdah Islamiyah have grown their local network of mosques and schools, and the subtle practices they deploy to frame their Islamic message in ways that both relate to the anxieties of their audience, but also promote a Muslim majoritarian vision of society. More broadly, the talk will conclude by assessing the extent to which such activism can form the basis for broader socio-political mobilisation, and what it may tell us about the health of democratic debate and Islamic social movements in 21st century Indonesia.

Chris Chaplin is an Assistant Professorial Research Fellow at the Religion and Global Society Research Unit at the London School of Economics and a Visiting Fellow at the Department of Political and Social Change, ANU Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs. His research straddles between the fields of anthropology, sociology, and politics, and is particularly focused on exploring the convergence between global Islamic doctrines and local understandings of piety and faith, and how these come to inform civic values, concepts of religious and political belonging, and social activism within Southeast Asia. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge and has recently published the book Salafism and the State: Islamic Activism and National Identity in Contemporary Indonesia with NIAS Press.

The great American political scientist Seymour Lipset once said, “they that know only one country, know no countries”.

This panel addresses the issue of comparisons in our political discourse, and in particular “whataboutism” - the response China critics often make when it is pointed out that other countries have committed egregious actions similar in kind, if not scale, to China. By this, they mean that the comparison raised is a distraction from dealing with China’s actions. But this approach arguably sits uneasily with our desires to avoid double standards. This panel of experts will discuss the ethical and political aspects of “whataboutism”, with a focus on China.

Speakers

Ian Hall is a Professor in International Relations and the acting Director of the Griffith Asia Institute at Griffith University. He is also an Academic Fellow of the Australia India Institute and a co-editor (with Sara Davies) of the Australian Journal of International Affairs.

Van Jackson is a political scientist and former Pentagon strategist specialising in Asia-Pacific security, the politics of US foreign policy, and the theory and practice of grand strategy. He is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Victoria University of Wellington, a Distinguished Fellow at the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Centre for Strategic Studies in Wellington, New Zealand.

Yun Jiang is the inaugural AIIA China Matters Fellow. Prior to this, she was the co-founder and editor of China Neican, and a managing editor of the China Story blog at the Australian Centre on China in the World.

Moderator

Gregory Raymond is a lecturer in the Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs researching Southeast Asian politics and foreign relations. He is the author of Thai Military Power: A Culture of Strategic Accommodation (NIAS Press 2018) and the lead author of The United States-Thai Alliance: History, Memory and Current Developments (Routledge, 2021).

The modern legal system in Thailand was established in the early twentieth century not as much to save the country from colonialism as to secure the absolutist power of Bangkok’s rulers. It was not the Rule of Law, but a legal system intended to privilege the state, especially for the sake of its security. As the semi-absolute monarchy has been ascending in Thailand today, Thai jurisprudence has shown its true colors.

Thongchai Winichakul is Emeritus Professor of History at University of Wisconsin-Madison and Research Fellow Emeritus at Institute of Developing Economies (IDE-JETRO), Japan. He is the author of Siam Mapped (1994) and Moments of Silence: The Unforgetting of the October 6, 1976, Massacre in Bangkok (2020), and has published eight books in Thai. He received the John Simon Guggenheim Award in 1994, was inducted to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2003. He was also President of the Association for Asian Studies in 2013/14. His research interests are in the intellectual foundations of modern Siam under colonial conditions. He is also a critic of Thai political and social issues.

Henry's seminar examines the historical approach of the ANZUS alliance towards Taiwan using declassified documents from Australia and the United States. He argues that Australia's obligations in defending Taiwan are minimal, suggesting that the potential consequences of Australian inaction within the alliance have been exaggerated.