School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemSelf-regulation : a conceptual frame for intervention with young offenders within the justice system in Singapore(University of Melbourne, 2006)
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ItemSelf-regulation : a conceptual frame for intervention with young offenders within the justice system in Singapore(University of Melbourne, 2006)
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ItemInstitutional innovation in global economic governance – a case study of the United Nations Global Compact in Australia( 2006)This thesis considers how successful the United Nations Global Compact has been as an institutional innovation that encourages transnational corporations and other global business enterprises to adopt a more proactive approach towards a series of international non-economic objectives. The Compact is a ‘voluntary leadership, learning and dialogue network’ comprised of UN agencies, transnational corporations, international labour bodies and non-governmental organisations. First mooted in 1999 by the United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Compact brings together these non-state actors with the objective of sharing and promoting mutually agreeable ways of supporting international human rights, minimum labour standards, greater environmental responsibility and of working against corruption. This study investigates whether the Compact’s inclusive, values-based approach has succeeded in providing an additional platform for the incorporation of non-economic objectives into the structures and processes that organise global economic activity. In addition to exploring the complicated relationships between its institutional purposes, design and consequences at an international level, this thesis pursues fresh insights into the Compact by presenting a case study of Australian government, private sector and civil society responses to and engagement with this ‘global corporate citizenship’ initiative…
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ItemA promethean legacy: late quaternary vegetation history of Southern Georgia, Caucasus( 2006)This dissertation presents new data on the vegetation history of the Caucasus, a region of high biodiversity and ancient human occupation. The aim of the study is to determine the causes of vegetation changes in Southern Georgia over the past 14,000 years by comparing well-dated pollen and charcoal records to evidence of past climatic change and human activity in the region. Pollen data from semi-arid and mountainous environments are often very difficult to interpret, a consideration which has hampered previous research in Southern Georgia. In this thesis I present a novel method to overcome this problem to allow the reconstruction of past trends in rainfall, temperature, forest cover and land-use. Reconstructed climatic parameters show that the study area’s climate was extremely arid and seasonally variable between 14,000 and 11,500 years ago. Precipitation increased slowly during the early Holocene, such that a rainfall pattern of more or less modern character was established in Georgia between 9000 and 8000 years ago. Conditions then became wetter and warmer during the mid Holocene, reverting to a cooler and drier climates during the late Holocene.
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ItemFielding genocide: post-1979 Cambodia and the geopolitics of memory( 2006-05)This thesis is about the relationship between place, memory and geopolitics. It examines public memorial sites in Cambodia dedicated to the victims of the genocide of 1975 to 1979. Scant attention has been paid to the geographies of Cambodia’s post-1979 reconstruction period. Where commentators have noted the existence of Cambodia’s dedicated spaces of memory they have characterised these sites as culturally and politically inauthentic or marginal (as ersatz religious monuments, or as political ‘propaganda’). Against these accounts, I contend that Cambodia’ s memorials are central to, and productive of, cultural, national and transnational politics of the past and present. Like many other late twentieth-century contexts, the Cambodian case demonstrates the link between the texts and practices of geopolitics and discourses of traumatic memory. The dissertation examines how various tropes of memory enact an imaginative topography of Cambodia, both locally and transnationally. I do this by analysing four memorial sites and practices: the development of the Choeung Ek ‘killing field’ site (Phnom Penh); tourism to Cambodia’s genocide sites as a popular geopolitical practice; and the global circulation and reception of photographs of Khmer Rouge victims. It is argued that these sites and practices of memory have been central to Cambodia’s redevelopment as well as constitutive of the geopolitics of Cambodia’s e-entry into an international state system.
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ItemOvercoming obstacles to reform? : making and shaping drug policy in contemporary Portugal and Australia( 2006-10)National drug policy development is essential for effective drug policies, yet the process through which they emerge, the role of evidence and the theoretical basis for drug policy development are poorly understood. The present research adopted a cross-national analytical-descriptive approach to examine drug policy development between 1994 and 2006 in two nations: Portugal and Australia. Through contrasting atypical reforms - namely decriminalisation in Portugal and the Illicit Drug Diversion Initiative (IDDI) in Australia – with the preceding periods of typical reform, it provides a detailed examination of how atypical reforms are proposed, negotiated and adopted. Moreover, it critically analyses the application of three public policy theories – Multiple Streams, Advocacy Coalition and Punctuated Equilibrium – to identify common drivers and processes underpinning the developments. Through a primarily qualitative approach involving interviews with 42 expert policy makers, supplemented with secondary sources and publicly available evaluations, this research demonstrates that the major drivers of atypical reform are policy advocates and their ability to convert opportunities into pragmatic responses. In Portugal policy entrepreneurs utilised the emergence of a problem opportunity, typified by a public health crisis in Casal Ventoso, to form an alliance between experts and politicians and adopt a paradigmatic change: decriminalisation. Policy entrepreneurs in Australia used the emergence of a highly politicised opportunity to convert what was initially a doctrinal solution of “zero tolerance” into a more humane response: drug diversion. The research reveals that the process of policy formulation has critical impacts upon the mechanism, implementation and potential outcomes of reform, most notably whether there is evidence-based policy or policy-based evidence. It concludes by identifying practical and theoretical implications for more effective drug policy development, including the need for greater application of the theory of Punctuated Equilibrium. The current research asserts that policy makers must have realistic expectations over the role of evidence in policy making, but that the likelihood of pragmatic reform may be enhanced through expanding attention from “what works” to include alternative tools of persuasion. It further recommends that greater attention to the latter may increase the likelihood of effective reform. Due to the formation of an alliance between politicians and experts the Portuguese policy making process facilitated a more pragmatic reform. However, a paradigmatic change – and hence the potential for effective drug policy – would not have been possible without advocacy for a new vision of the drug user as a citizen.
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ItemSexing up the international( 2006-10)This thesis takes sexuality as its subject matter and uses a methodology informed by postcolonial studies to explore new possibilities for thinking about the international, its construction, and its contemporary politics. I argue that postcolonial readings of sexuality can impel us to rethink the meanings and politics of international theory and to challenge notions that have come to appear fixed and unchanging. The thesis canvasses how such an intervention might occur – calling especially for a focus on the local and the everyday – and considers both the utility and the limits of the contributions sexuality might make to a rethinking of international theory. My arguments are made with reference to a series of specific examples from contemporary East and Southeast Asia: the nationalistically imbued gendered and sexed figures of the national serviceman and the Singapore Girl in Singapore; the political and social repercussions of the trial of former Malaysian Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim on charges of sodomy; newly emerging homosexual identities in Hong Kong; and the connections between sexuality and disease that inform the Thai response to HIV/AIDS.
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ItemThe violence situation: a descriptive model of the offence process of assault for male and female offenders( 2006-10)Previous research concerning violent offending has been fragmented considering different elements of violent offending separately. The aim of this thesis is to consolidate the different areas of previous research into one cohesive model of assault offenders and offences. This model will consider the developmental, cognitive, behavioural and environmental constituents of assault offenders and offences in a temporal framework. Interviews were conducted with 35 male and 13 female offenders who had a conviction for assault. Grounded Theory analysis was used to categorise the data and construct a model of assault including developmental factors, the time preceding the offence, the offence and the time after the offence producing the Pathways Model of Assault (PMA). Initial construction of the PMA was conducted using 25 of the male participant interview transcripts. The PMA was then validated across gender through inclusion of the 13 female participant transcripts. The PMA was also subject to an inter-rater reliability test, which provided high consistency between the coding of two researchers using the final 10 male participant transcripts and 10 randomly chosen female participant transcripts. The PMA consisted of 10 stages where the individual differences of the participants could be mapped, thus providing “pathways” through the model. Five major pathways were found. Further exploration of the PMA through quantitative analyses provided validation of four of the pathways, with significant associations found between two of the offender types and two of the offence types. The offender types reported were under-controlled, representing persistent repeat violent offenders and over-controlled, representing onetime violent offenders. (For complete abstract open document)
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ItemPartnership policing of electronic crime: an evaluation of public and private police investigative relationships( 2006-05)Law enforcement agencies worldwide, including those in Australia, have declared partnerships with the private sector to police e-crime as “critical”. However, this strategy faces uncertainties about appropriate formats and the potential for fostering corruption. Sarre and Prenzler’s (2000) Regulated Intersections model proposes that, to avoid corruption, cooperation must be limited and regulated closely. Consequently, this thesis examines the conditions under which investigative partnership policing of e-crime at the state police level can be mutually beneficial to police and the private sectors, while maintaining public interests. The thesis aims, therefore, to establish normative standards and guidelines for configuring effective and ethical public-private partnerships for e-crime investigation. An exploratory analysis of 3529 e-crime incidents, reported to and cleared by Victoria Police during 1999/00 to 2003/04, investigated the nature of reported e-crime, routine factors affecting its successful investigation and whether partnership was one of those factors. A pilot survey canvassed private sector responses to these issues and partnered e-crime investigation. Thirty-seven interviews were conducted with police, private investigators and e-crime victims. During the research, three Australian attempts at public-private investigative partnership formed to varying success, including the Joint Banking and Finance Sector Investigation Team (JBFSIT) at the Australian High Tech Crime Centre.
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ItemCitius, altius, fortius: a critical and exploratory analysis of sport and drugs discourses in Australian Football League( 2006-09)Performance enhancing drugs in sport typically evokes a strong negative response. To make sense of this response and the drug policies it spurns this thesis undertakes a critical exploratory analysis of the discourses which surround illicit drugs and sport and the intersections between them. It looks at the globalisation of these discourses, assessing its manifestations in the World Anti-Doping Agency. A review of the literature finds that the strong desire to prohibit performance enhancing drugs stems from the global recognition of the cultural import of sport as a conduit for collective representation. Drugs and their symbolic associations with deviance and boundary violation are interpreted as a direct threat to this cultural role and so are vociferously fought. However, this emotionally driven response distracts from the task of addressing the pressures within the competitive sporting world. An analysis of the global impact of these discourses on local context follows. A contextual analysis finds that the Australian Football League, can consume, resist and transform global discourses on drugs and sport. A content analysis of the press news looks at this process at work in a recent scandal of caffeine as a performance enhancing drug. It concludes that rather than simply accepting the direction of the WADA, the debate reflected that the Australian context both magnified the symbolism of drugs in sport and contradictorily attracted increased criticism of it.