Social Safety Net in Islam: The Case of Persian Gulf Oil Exporters

The Persian Gulf oil-exporting countries have had a poor record of managing their oil wealth to meet the basic needs of their citizenry and have failed in insuring an equitable distribution of income and opportunities. Government expenditures in the social sector can be characterized as wasteful and subsidies as regressive and for the more-heavily populated countries simply unsustainable. Set within the paradigm of Islamic economics, providing both normative and ethical guidance on the development of a just economic order, the issue of reforms to the social safety net is analyzed and how these oil exporters can better address the needs of the disadvantaged in an Islamic context is suggested.     

Collective Security and a New World Order: Justifying Australia's Participation in the Persian Gulf Crisis, 1990-91

In response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990, Australia's Labor government committed a naval task force to participate in the enforcement of sanctions, and subsequently, the Gulf War to expel Iraq from Kuwait. The Australian government justified its response to the Persian Gulf crisis in various ways, including the threat it posed to national and international security, and by employing representations of Australian identity and the radical Otherness of Saddam Hussein. The paper considers these aspects, then focuses on two ostensibly complementary justifications. Firstly, the rapid commitment was represented as a necessary act of collective security connected to revitalisation of the United Nations. Secondly, it was justified as contributing to the development of a post-Cold War new world order (NWO), framed within Australian regional security interests and shaped by the US alliance. The paper argues that the Australian discourse melds the justifications, despite collective security, based on UN leadership, sitting uneasily with a NWO premised on US leadership, without having to attend to the tensions between the two justifications.