Indigenous Military Inclusion: A Settler Colonial Critique of the Regional Force Surveillance Units

In the context of this special issue's inquiry into whether it is possible to decolonise Australian international relations, this article investigates the service of Indigenous people in the Australian Defence Force (ADF). The military is a crucial site to investigate the colonial state of Australian international relations not only because it is an institution that performs key international relations practices such as war and diplomacy, but also because it defines and projects the identity of the state both domestically and internationally. In the past two decades, there has been a sustained effort to include Indigenous people in the ADF. An inclusive and multicultural defence purports to represent a post-colonial state where Indigenous and non-Indigenous people stand next to one another for the defence of their shared country. However, in Australia, Indigenous people do not enjoy the wealth of the nation equally and remain dispossessed from their land and economically disadvantaged. Using discourse analysis of publicly available materials praising Indigenous military inclusion, this article argues that the inclusion of Indigenous people in the Australian Defence Force risks further entrenching the settler colonial project.     

From the State of Nature to Evolution in John Stuart Mill

John Stuart Mill's familiar ideas, such as the harm principle, the emphasis on the liberty of thought and discussion, and the extension of politics into the family and education, are all linked to a developmental and open–ended view of nature. To ground this perception of nature, Mill makes use of contemporary notions of evolution. For Mill, nature encompasses human civilisation and its higher products such as morality and justice. However, Mill recognises no benevolent guiding hand in the physical world, which the idea of evolution enables him to understand as self–propelled. Destruction and pain are part of the overall developmental movement, so that human lives always stand the danger of being crushed by nature. To minimise such risks, humans should use the distinctive features of their species, such as reason and morality, thus continuing nature while transforming it.     

Settler Colonial Strategic Culture: Australia,AUKUS, and the Anglosphere

Australia's history as a settler colony within the British Empire fundamentally shapes its sense of security within the Indo-Pacific region. Australia has consistently looked outside of its region for security and sought partners on the explicit basis of political, cultural, and ethnic similarity. What role does Australia's history play in shaping its foreign policy? We argue that these choices in foreign policy are inextricable from Australia's history as a settler colony on the farthest reaches of the British Empire. The AUKUS Agreement (AUKUS) is an example of how Australia operates to preserve racial hegemony in the face of non-white threat — real or perceived. This research utilises critical discourse analysis to interrogate elite-level discourse around AUKUS to ascertain the dominant narratives that inform its creation, the issues it seeks to address in Australian security policy, how it is structured by historical narratives of security, and how it functions to structure those narratives going forward. This article seeks to participate in the growing push to decolonise International Relations by illuminating the way Australia is ontologically and epistemologically invested in the preservation of racial hegemony.     

Jeremy Bentham,John Stuart Mill and the Secret Ballot: Insights from Nineteenth Century Democratic Theory

As part of a series of demands for political reform in Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, Jeremy Bentham famously made a case for use of the secret ballot in elections. The advocacy of Bentham and his disciples on this issue fed into broader and at times robust public debate, particularly in the 1830s. On the opposite side of this debate was another leading political theorist, John Stuart Mill, who opposed secret ballot reform. This paper re‐examines the contours of this debate, making the case that it has important implications for contemporary political theory and debates about democracy. Firstly, and in terms of making sense of the debate itself, it points to the need to make a distinction between the “voter intimidation” argument and the Benthamite preference aggregation argument. Secondly, it suggests that distinguishing between vote‐buying and voter's dependence provides support for defenders of the secret ballot. Thirdly, it demonstrates the potential application of the idea of voting held in “trust” to the so‐called boundary problem in democratic theory. Finally, it points to the potentially wide but overlooked application of the Chartist idea of open voting (allowing the oppressed to identify their allies) in contemporary political theory.     

The Road to Uluru: Constitutional Recognition and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have campaigned for reform to the Australian state for generations. Over the last decade, debate over constitutional recognition has assumed mainstream prominence as a series of parliamentary and expert bodies designed to raise awareness of the need for change, propose options for that change, and build a community consensus around those proposals, have been established. This article assesses the five public processes undertaken between 2010 and 2017. It explains that constitutional reform has been hampered by state ambivalence towards the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP). However, it argues that that same state ambivalence created space for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples to eventually take control of the debate, reframe it along their own priorities, and re-energise the movement for constitutional recognition. Even if prospects for a referendum remain uncertain, the Uluru Statement from the Heart has succeeded in building community consensus for a clear proposal because the UNDRIP informed and influenced its development.     

Between Indigenous Paramountcy and Democracy: How Differentiated Citizenship and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Could Help Fijian Self‐determination

Contemporary Fijian politics is shaped by a colonial legacy of extraordinary complexity and political tension. Since gaining independence from Great Britain in 1970, Fiji's history has been distinguished by incoherent and inconsistent accounts of political power. These concern the political rights belonging to indigenous peoples as first occupants vis‐à‐vis the claims to political recognition by the descendants of Indian indentured labourers. The relative power between the indigenous aristocracy and commoners is a further complicating variable. Following three coups (1987 and 2006) and a putsch (2000), indigenous paramount authority has been positioned against various forms of democracy and military oversight of the political process. However, none of these political arrangements has enhanced indigenous self‐determination. This article argues that indigenous self‐determination is more likely to be realised through a form of differentiated liberal citizenship consistent with the United Nations’ Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. This reasonably requires the extension of the Declaration's provisions to indigenous Fijians, who, as a recent majority indigenous population, are constrained by colonial legacy in a similar manner to the minority indigenous populations for whose benefit the Declaration was primarily adopted.     

Majority Rule,Compromise and the Democratic Legitimacy of Referendums

Cheneval and el‐Wakil ( 2018 ) defend referendums as a mechanism that allows a popular majority to express itself in situations where the standard channels of representative democracy fail to include the concerns of certain citizens and end up reflecting the views of a minority. By contrast, this comment argues that the likelihood of exclusion and settlement on a minority preference is much greater when policy choices are made by referendum. The reason lies in the plurality of policy options on many issues, and the fact that the most favoured policy may be a shared second or third best. The tendency for most forms of representative democracy to encourage politicians to build majorities through compromises among different coalitions of minorities is more likely to settle on the majority preference of diverse actors holding a plurality views than a referendum based on a binary choice.     

Indigenous Peoples in Commonwealth Countries: The Legacy of the Past and Present-day Struggles for Self-determination

Abstract

Although the UK has no indigenous peoples as understood by the UN, its earlier colonial policies in Africa, the Americas, Asia and the Caribbean have had consequences for today’s first peoples Colonial policies that deprived the native populations of their lands, resources and self-determination were generally pursued by the independent states that came in their wake. Today the world’s indigenous peoples are looking to bring to an end their colonial-type situations and re-establish control over their lands and futures. After more than 20 years, the United Nations adopted a Declaration setting out the rights of indigenous peoples, but several Commonwealth countries were unrelenting opponents. This article looks at the colonial heritage as it affects indigenous peoples in the Commonwealth countries, some of the contemporary struggles and situations that have marked the last years, and tries to understand why countries such as Australia, Canada and New Zealand were the last to accept that indigenous peoples had a right to self-determination.     

Neoliberal Indigenous Policy: Settler Colonialism and the “Post‐Welfare” State

Neoliberal Indigenous Policy: Settler Colonialism and the “Post‐Welfare” State. By Elizabeth Strakosch (Houndsmills and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. vii + 213, with index, £60.00 (cloth).     

Adaptation and Appropriation on the Colonial Frontier: Indigenous Leadership in the Colombian Chocó, 1670–1808

This article explores the consequences for the native population of the Colombian Chocó of the emergence, over the course of the eighteenth century, of an elite of caciques and indios mandones or principales whose functions of powers far exceeded those of the warrior chiefs that had traditionally acted as leaders of their people. Appointed for the purpose of facilitating the collection of tribute and the supply of labour to European settlers, caciques and mandones were almost universally rejected by native communities during the early phases of Spanish colonisation (c. 1630–1690), and they disappear from the historical record after Independence. Eighteenth‐century sources, however, not only record the existence of a clearly defined elite of mandones or principales in villages across the region, but show these individuals engaging actively with the colonial authorities, on behalf of their communities, at local and audiencia levels. This article argues that, at a time of a much strengthened European presence in the region, caciques and mandones came to understand their roles in ways that were entirely different from those intended by the Spanish, and in so doing acquired the legitimacy that had eluded their seventeenth‐century predecessors. Far from serving merely as intermediaries between settlers and indigenous populations, indios mandones acted as negotiators on behalf of the indigenous population, whose task was to defend and/or advance the interests of the communities they had been appointed to control.     

Beyond Domestic Violence Survivor Services: Refocusing on Inequality in the Fight against Gender‐Based Violence in the Americas

Despite a consensus in the Americas that gender‐based violence is rooted in inequality and historic precedent and exacerbated by socio‐economic hardship, government programmes and institutional evaluations of programmes to combat violence against women tend not to tackle the problem at source. Instead, governments and policy evaluations tend to focus on domestic violence survivor services. This article analyses current work to evaluate government efforts to fight violence against women and unpacks scholarly and policy consensus on the root causes of the violence. I then illustrate the disconnect between root causes of violence and government programmes, to emphasise the need to link programmes more closely to agreed‐upon causes of violence.     

Traditional Excluding Forces: A Review of the Quantitative Literature on the Economic Situation of Indigenous Peoples,Afro‐descendants,and People Living with Disability

Unequal income distribution in Latin America and the Caribbean is linked to unequal distributions of human and physical assets and differential access to markets and services. These circumstances, and the accompanying social tensions, need to be understood in terms of traditional fragmenting forces; the sectors of the population that experience unfavorable outcomes are also recognized by characteristics such as ethnicity, race, gender, and physical disability. In addition to reviewing the general literature on social exclusion, this article surveys several more specific topics: relative deprivation (in land and housing, physical infrastructure, health and income); labor market issues, including access to labor markets in general, as well as informality, segregation, and discrimination; the transaction points of political representation, social protection, and violence; and areas in which analysis remains weak and avenues for further research in the region.     

Defining Folklore: Mestizo and Indigenous Identities on the Move

This article analyses how the performance of folkloric music and dance defines and redefines ethnic/racial distinctions and identities in the Andes. It focuses on the promotional activities of urban-based institutions in Cusco called instituciones culturales, particularly how these activities have shaped folkloric performance. The article calls attention to the continuing importance of race as a central category of social differentiation, showing how folkloric performances embody ethnic/racial identities.