Water,Sheikhs and Dam Builders: Stories of People and Water in the Middle East

Edward Said's idea is that intellectuals should be ‘amateurs’, in the French sense of the term, in order to be involved with knowledge production out of their passion and keen interest, rather than as a duty-bound job. This should generate excitement and create dedication in their explorations and activism in and out of their professional fields. Following this idea, I argue in this paper how Egypt's radical feminist, Nawal el Saadawi, a physician by profession but humanist by passion, became a key dissident figure inside her country and abroad. I discuss her writings and activism that contribute towards advancing social justice for all, especially repressed women under patriarchy. Further, I argue that Saadawi's writings take part in a Gramscian hegemonic war against power in order to assert non-coercive knowledge in opposition to power's discursive formation. In doing so, Saadawi is guided by her moral principles. The combination of these two aspects not only makes her a Saidian ‘amateur’ but also a voice of resistance to be reckoned with.     

Peacekeeping from Oceania: Perspectives from Australia,New Zealand and Fiji

Abstract

This article gives an overview of the involvement of Australia, New Zealand and Fiji in peacekeeping operations with attention to motives, experience and ‘lessons learnt’. Australia and New Zealand have been strongly influenced by regional considerations and an understanding of good international citizenship. Fiji’s contribution has been determined less by regional considerations and more by its position as a small developing country whose peacekeeping activities bring economic benefits, although it could be argued that by providing a basis for extending military forces they have contributed indirectly to political instability. Police contributions have been increasingly important to Australia and New Zealand and they have advocated a stronger role for police in other situations around the world.     

Australian Internment Life Stories: Recapturing Salvatore Ragonesi between the Public Record and Family Memories

Since the Archives Act of 1983 Australia's Second World War internees have had access to their wartime files, yet little attention has focused on whether they and their families have consulted these records, or on their responses to them. From the early 2000s historians and archivists began discussing the need for combining private oral testimony with official records as part of a wider discourse on the importance of life stories for deepening knowledge about the past. This article explores the impact of a father's official internment records on his son, through the son's sharing of memories, lived experience and his reactions to official documents, in order to provide a more complete story of his father's internment and life than either the public record or the oral testimony alone can produce. We argue that Sam Ragonesi's oral testimony, especially concerning his encounter with Salvatore Ragonesi's official records, contributes to a greater shared understanding of experiences of war on the home front by integrating social, cultural and family dimensions hidden from Salvatore's public history. In this way intergenerational experiences help both to contest the collective image of internment and create a more complex picture of the War.     

The Glass of Life: Medieval and Modern Stories on the Struggle to Gain and Maintain Honour

The drive to gain and maintain good reputation (honour, good name) in society functions as a primary core value in Middle Eastern and Asian societies. This phenomenon is best reflected in real-life stories. This article relates stories from the Persian world, selected from medieval Persian texts, as well as from twentieth- and twenty-first-century Iranian and Afghan short stories. While the modern story is written in a different context than the medieval epic poem or romance, the theme of gaining and maintaining the good name persists throughout. Medieval texts portray this all-encompassingstruggle in the life of the legendary heroic warrior, who models the struggle for protagonists in modern stories. For the protagonist, to have reputation means that society speaks well of them. A good name is to have a public name. But much more, the good name must include the larger family and one's tribe. It is the family name. Thirdly, the protagonist who seeks to gain and maintain a good name lives beyond themselves. Indeed, they gain a greater name. The stories are frequently laced with tragedy, as protagonists engage in what are considered to be dishonourable deeds in order to maintain their honour and good name.     

Rushing for Gold: Life and Commerce on the Goldfields of New Zealand and Australia

Rushing for Gold: Life and Commerce on the Goldfields of New Zealand and Australia. Edited by Lloyd Carpenter and Lyndon Fraser (Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2016), 396 pp. ISBN 978‐1‐877578‐54‐0, NZ$45.00 (pb).     

Political Parties,Australia and the U.S. Alliance: 1976-2016

ABSTRACT

What causes variation in the foreign policies of U.S. allies regarding their desired U.S. military role in their region and their troop commitments to U.S. military interventions? This paper addresses this question through documenting and explaining the sources of variation in Australia’s foreign policies regarding these issues over four decades. Treating the two major political parties in Australia and their respective leaders who self-select into them as endogenous, the paper argues that Australian foreign policy, whilst always supportive of the U.S. alliance, has systematically varied. This variation has correlated with the political party in power while the late Cold War and post-Cold War balances of power remained constant. While the Labor party has only been willing to send combat troops to large U.S. military interventions when the latter have a supporting United Nations Security Council Resolution, the conservative Liberal party has been willing to military intervene without this multilateral support. The Labor party, unlike the Liberal party, has also frequently proposed the formation and consolidation of multilateral regional institutions. These preferences render the U.S. to have been necessary for the Labor Party but sufficient for the Liberal party. Future Sino-U.S. armed conflict would provide a harder test of these hypotheses.     

Resisting the Global Slum: Politics,Religion and Consumption in the Remaking of Life Worlds in the Twenty‐First Century

The volatility of Latin American society is producing political challenges to neoliberal capitalism, but these are complicated by the transformations neoliberalism has wrought in everyday social life. This paper explores tensions between movements to ‘democratise democracy’ and politics orientated to controlling the national state, while also considering apolitical forms of ‘resistance’ to humiliating conditions of life and the impact of new religious movements. I argue that although no instant utopias are likely, there are positive as well as negative possibilities in the way that apparently contradictory developments are combining to transform the established historical contours of hegemony in the region.