Connecting social and environmental policy in Australia: Collateral gains or collateral damage?

Climate change research relating to “co‐benefits” suggests that the facilitation of social‐welfare outcomes through environmental policy offers a powerful means of incentivising climate change action. Concerns about social‐welfare, however, are often used to undermine climate change policies, typically through political claims that low‐to‐middle‐income households should not shoulder the costs of greater policy alignment between social and environmental objectives. Integrating the social into the environmental can therefore, on the one hand, lead to “co‐benefits” as each agenda promotes the other in political discourse, or alternatively to collateral damage if the policy objectives are framed as incompatible. This article explores both scenarios through two case studies of energy policy in Australia. The findings show that social‐welfare concerns can be a powerful discursive tool with the potential to facilitate political consensus, but also that this potential is not being fully realised, primarily because environmental concerns suffer when attempts are made to integrate the two areas discursively.     

Hey,you, get off of that cloud?

If the final years of this decade are to be over-shadowed by a ‘credit crunch’ and a global recession, then the IT industry's recent focus on cost and resource efficiency via cloud-computing will increasingly seem pertinent to many businesses. This paper will explore some of the legal and practical risks any business will need to consider in their cloud-computing arrangements.     

An internal history of the communist party of Thailand

This is a translation of a history of the Communist Party of Thailand, written by a leading party member in 1978. The Thai original was published for the first time in early 2003. The document begins with a background analysis of Thai society, then traces the party's history from the 1920s, and ends with the “lessons” learnt. The document is especially detailed on the party's adoption and adaptation of the Maoist strategy of rural armed struggle.     

Critique,Use and World in Giorgio Agamben's Genealogy of Government

This article explores the implications of Giorgio Agamben's genealogy of government for our understanding of critique. Agamben argues that the providential government of the world of Christian theology has bequeathed to the West an ontology of will and command. Replacing the pantheistic world of Stoic late Antiquity, the Christian world must be other than it is. The lack that this introduces is central to Agamben's account of nihilism, as it was also for Nietzsche. But what does this mean for critique? Does critique belong to the nihilistic tradition of the West; occupying the still-warm seat of God inasmuch as it finds the world wanting as if from the outside? Does this mean we are left only with affirmation—passively acceding to the world as we find it? Or is this alternative of world-rejection/world-affirmation a false one? Agamben's concept of use seeks a way out of it.     

Did He Really Do It? Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev,Party Disloyalty,and the 1923 Affair

The article uses a variety of documents, published and unpublished, to explore the 1923 arrest, interrogation and ‘trial’ of Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, often considered the Bolsheviks' leading expert on Muslim affairs in the early Soviet period. Contrary to the historiography on this crucial moment in the development of Soviet nationality policy, I argue that Sultan-Galiev was not Stalin's ‘first victim’. Rather, responding to the vagaries of Soviet nationality policy, he did indeed violate party discipline in a number of ways, and was engaged in developing conspiratorial ties outside of the party. In fact, the party leaders, and Stalin in particular, treated him less severely than they could have.