School of Social and Political Sciences - Theses
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ItemIndigenous resurgence and self-determination in Southeast Asia( 2023-05)The UNDRIP is the most comprehensive international instrument setting out the rights of Indigenous peoples, including the right to self-determination. While it did not create new rights, the UNDRIP introduced what some theorists argue is a “relational” model of self-determination, whereby Indigenous peoples exercise their right to self-determination in relationship with states. Some Southeast Asian countries have substantive legal and constitutional recognition and protections of Indigenous rights, including self-determination. There are also examples of Indigenous-state multilevel governance arrangements that empower self-determination at the local level, particularly in land and resource management. However, despite some such innovations and commitments in international and domestic law, Indigenous peoples’ rights in the region are largely ignored by governments. Indeed, the experience of ongoing colonisation connects Indigenous peoples globally. Indigenous resurgence, a growing body of decolonisation literature from North America proposes radical alternatives to the colonial relationship between Indigenous peoples and states. Central to resurgence theory is the assertion that Indigenous peoples should disengage from the state in order to protect themselves from further colonial harm and instead focus energies on their nationhood-building priorities. Then, from positions of renewed strength, engage with states in order to achieve political relationships based on mutuality and autonomy. This thesis considers how Indigenous peoples in Southeast Asia are defining and pursuing their right to self-determination, and whether these definitions and efforts reflect the tenets of Indigenous resurgence. To undertake this investigation, two original theoretical frameworks based on resurgence theory are applied to empirical findings about how self-determination is defined and pursued in the region. The findings show that self-determination in Southeast Asia can be understood in three ways: as a movement, an objective and a “toolbox” of tactics for interacting with states. Evidence of an Indigenous resurgence occurring across the region is reflective of Indigenous resurgence movements taking place in settle-colonial countries. As an objective, self-determination is a multifaceted pursuit, ranging from a pathway out of poverty to political power, and broadly consists of three domains: socio-economic wellbeing, civil rights, and cultural 'thrival'. As a “toolbox”, self-determination is being exercised via a trend of nine tactics that Indigenous peoples are strategically employing in their interactions with states. This thesis shows Indigenous resurgence is resonant in these objectives and tactics and fills a gap in the literature about Indigenous peoples’ political aspirations in Southeast Asia, advancing understanding of how self-determination as a relationship between Indigenous nations and states might be realised in the region. To this end, a novel relationship model is presented as a guide for Indigenous-state political relationships. The thesis also demonstrates the global reach of Indigenous resurgence theory, contributing to the ongoing global dialogue on the transformational impact of Indigenous peoples’ right to self-determination in international and domestic political spheres.
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ItemHere, you can live well: Pollution, rural livelihood and the hardness of place on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia( 2022-11)This thesis gives an ethnographic account of how Quehuaya, an Aymara community on Lake Titicaca, Bolivia, is navigating a future circumscribed by water pollution, climate change and the policies of the Movement toward Socialism (MAS) government. As rural livelihoods such as fishing and agriculture become increasingly unviable, a collective life lived in dialogue with the landscape is coming under threat. In response, community members make use of emerging opportunities presented by the MAS indigenist-developmentalist program, the burgeoning urban economy of the nearby city of El Alto, and ongoing opportunities for migration. I develop an account of the hardness of place itself – its solidity in the face of flux – to foreground the dynamics underlying its ongoing but shifting role in this turbulent and threatening context. To unravel the dynamics underlying the hardness of Quehuaya as a place, I demonstrate how the community is reproduced through an Andean collectivism built on practices of livelihood, landscape ritual and syndical political organisation. I analyse how these express Andean ontologies of place, as enmeshed with collectivity and the non-human. Central to my argument is a dialogic theory of agency, which accounts for both individual and collective forms of agency as emergent from a prior intersubjectivity. The hardness of place in Quehuaya rests on the dialogue between the collective will and authorities responsible for establishing relations with the exterior worlds of both landscape and the institutional sphere. This is key to reproducing a cosmology of circulation that constitutes the community in place. This attention to dynamics enables an analysis of ontologies of place that avoids an excessive constructivism that would elide their determining power, without collapsing into essentialism. I demonstrate how in Quehuaya, the cosmology of circulation and the modes of personhood associated with it are threatened as its constitutive relations are disrupted. This is affecting the role of place as an anchor for collective identity and the political possibilities of response to the pollution crisis. I further demonstrate how community members strive to re-establish the stability of place through innovation in livelihood and engagements with state and development actors. These efforts promise to use the material, cultural and relational resources of place to renew the circulatory flows on which it depends, and thereby re-establish the authority of landscape. However, this pursuit of increased articulation with a wider world through novel forms of engagement with the global economy – such as tourism – and the contradictions of the MAS state exacerbates fundamental tensions between individual and collective forms of agency. While the scale of changes threatens to overwhelm the community’s ability to integrate them, I argue that the techniques of Andean collectivism are fundamentally oriented towards the maintenance and steering of collective trajectories in an inherently unpredictable and dangerous world, and a recognition of the unavoidable limits of human agency. This thesis thus offers a contribution to the theorisation of collective life in the context of a shared world becoming increasingly uncertain for all of us.
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ItemA resistance-led just transition away from coal: The case of Türkiye( 2023-07)Today, the idea of just transition is increasingly important to policymakers committed to phasing out coal. This remains a particular challenge for industrialising countries, such as Turkiye, that have a political commitment to increasing coal use. Current models of how a just transition can be achieved, too, largely emanate from the global North and tend to overlook challenges posed by ensuring a just transition in countries such as Turkiye. I investigate this problem by posing my central research question: Can a just transition unfold in Turkiye? If so, how? The analytical framework of ecological distribution conflicts underpins my research that explores the relationship between conflict over natural resources and just transition. Applying a qualitative case study approach, I explore whether and how the increasing protest and unrest over coal use, crystallised as land-based struggles, can undermine coal’s legitimacy in Turkiye and provide a potential pathway for communities to achieve a just transition. My thesis suggests coal-related harms can be used as political leverage for a just transition in Turkiye. In the country, where strong policies and support for technologies and markets that might facilitate decarbonization are absent, anti-coal struggles in Turkiye have yielded positive outcomes both in terms of justice and decarbonization. My research suggests public dissent, grounded in the injustices associated with coal in Turkiye —the disruption of traditional income generation, deterioration of public health and poor working conditions in the coal sector—has contributed to delegitimising the coal-dependent regime. More broadly, land-based protests have helped shift the public narrative of coal being critical to national development towards stronger recognition of its damaging ecological and social effects. This potential pathway to a just transition can be captured by the term "resistance-led transitions" (RLT). RLT captures the potential for a just transition in countries where the predominant political and economic enabling environment is not readily visible. Yet, whilst a resistance-led transition is possible, it is not inevitable. In Turkiye, significant systemic challenges, such as political entitlement and siloing of support to particular groups (such as those with access to land for subsistence agriculture) marginalising others, such as Kurds, Alevis and refugees (particularly women), remain. Marginalised people lack political leverage, access to land and are dependent on the meagre income coal supplies. Current land-based struggles overlook their plight. To achieve a just transition any pathway, including a resistance-led transition, recognition and alleviation of the hardship experienced by these disenfranchised groups are necessary.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableEveryday Harms and Extraordinary Crises: Exploring the edges of the city( 2023-05)Criminological work tends to centre on extraordinary events and harms. Although often the focus is on rather ordinary crimes, these constitute a minority of our everyday experiences. Edgework, for example, examines voluntary risk-taking activities such as motorbike riding or skydiving. In contrast, this green criminological research, drawing from the sociology of the everyday and Agnew’s concept of ordinary harms, emanates from the everyday acts of harm contained in urban spaces and atmospheres. Ordinary harms refer to everyday behaviours that cause harm to the environment, such as the use of petrol-driven vehicles and the heating or cooling of houses. Various social and environmental harms are located in the everyday, and this research pays attention to how the city is constructed to make such harms more or less prevalent. In particular, this is a concern relevant to the growing city as new spaces are added to the urban landscape in a way that causes additional harm to the more-than-human world. To investigate harms associated with such growth, this case study research is located on ‘the edges’ of Melbourne, Australia – the horizontal and vertical growth of the city perpendicularly through high-rise construction and outwards through urban sprawl. Hence, this research constitutes a different form of ‘edge work’ – in everyday life on the growing edges -. In addition to the everyday, this research is also, along more traditional criminological lines, concerned with the crisis. The ordinary and everyday are juxtaposed in this thesis with extraordinary fire events. Nonetheless, as this thesis demonstrates, the crisis is entangled with the everyday in various ways. Fires occur on both edges in the form of bushfires, and high-rise fires, representing a growing concern as the city expands volumetrically. Hence, this project picks up on the recent call by various urban scholars for the need to approach the city and its political struggles beyond flat and horizontal lines. Therefore, drawing on the concepts of atmospheres and space, this research considers what it means to expand the city upwards and outwards and the effects of this growth on urban air and what it contains. Drawing from a range of theoretical traditions, including green, urban and spatial criminology, state-corporate crime literature, sustainability studies, geography, urban studies and architecture, this thesis seeks to expand criminological thinking of everyday environmental and social harms in the city; topic area that, more often than not, have been relegated to the edges of criminological research. Using an ethnographic case study approach and a range of methods aimed at understanding the growth of Melbourne, this research explores the experience of living on the edges and the socio-political forces that continue to push the urban boundaries outwards and upwards, driving the city’s continued colonisation of land, resources, and air. Furthermore, it re-examines the fire/crime nexus by scrutinising the individualisation of responsibilities that distract attention from the collective and everyday causes of fire in the city. Finally, this narrative is extended to climate policy across cities and nations. In exploring climate policy in Melbourne, Australia, and beyond, this thesis argues that further attention must be placed on the everyday causes of climate change to mitigate the destruction of the planet. Hence, this thesis also starts to respond to the difficult question of what to do about climate change.
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ItemTurkey and the Arab Spring: A Global Historical Sociology of Turkish Foreign Policy and State Reformation 1923-2022( 2023-04)The Arab Spring was a transformative event for the Middle East. It has had direct implications for the foreign policy of numerous states in the region, most notably Turkey. The rupture caused by the Arab Spring moved across borders and potentially reshaped state formation processes while creating space for actors to exercise agency in remaking state-society relations and the region. Turkey’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) attempted to expand its influence and role as a regional leader by using opportunities created by the Arab Spring. Despite the array of research on Turkish foreign policy before and after the Arab Spring, there is little discussion on how the Arab Spring impacted and affected Turkish foreign policy and its specific effects on Turkish state formation processes. This thesis, therefore, examines How have the events of the Arab Spring reshaped Turkish foreign policy formation, if at all? This thesis examines Turkish foreign policy from 1923 to 2022, with a specific focus on Turkish foreign policy before and after the Arab Spring. This thesis finds that existing Turkish foreign policy discussions cannot adequately analyse state formation processes and transnational (or global) dynamics to answer the research question due to their tendency towards methodological nationalism. Therefore, this thesis employs Global Historical Sociology, Historical Institutionalism and Weberian Sociology resources to inspect the primary case study of the Arab Spring and Turkish foreign policy. It applies a comparative qualitative historical method and case study research. The primary case study of the thesis is Turkish foreign policy and the Arab Spring. It further examines two within-case variations of this primary case study: 1) formal foreign policy formation and 2) informal foreign policy formation. First, this thesis argues that events of the Arab Spring accelerated an existing set of changes occurring within Turkish state institutions and foreign policy that had been underway since 2002. Second, in addition to accelerating such processes, the Arab Spring led the AKP to pursue a more robust engagement with transnational actors (TNAs). The AKP’s deep relations with TNAs in the aftermath of the Arab Spring form a critical part of their foreign policy project, integrating them as an informal institution of the Turkish state. Turkey’s ‘new’ foreign policy is a departure from the historical practice of Turkish foreign policy. These processes highlight the often-complex effect of the Arab Spring on Turkish foreign policy, which is generally a story of continuity, not rupture. This study is significant as it offers a novel and alternative account of Turkish foreign policy. This thesis adds to the broader discourse on Turkish foreign policy and international relations by examining how the Arab Spring affected Turkish foreign policymaking, highlighting the importance of state formation and how critical it is to incorporate transnational and global actors and dynamics into the study of Turkish foreign policymaking. It demonstrates the utility of Global Historical Sociology as a tool for foreign policy analysis within the broader discipline of International Relations, Middle East Studies and Turkish politics.
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ItemHungry for Peace: Food and Posthumanist Peacebuilding in an Entangled World( 2023-04)Hungry for Peace explores some of the extraordinary and ordinary, but valuable, ways young people’s food practices in Melbourne, Australia produce and sustain conflict and peacebuilding. Food touches all aspects of life, yet its metabolical, political, and ecological impacts on conflict can be easily overlooked. Recent food shortages and unstable food supply chains – caused by pandemic lockdowns, economic volatility, and climate extremities – are stark reminders of how human survival and livelihood depend upon food. Drawing on peacebuilding, feminist peace studies, food research, and agential realism, this thesis considers how food affects peace and conflict. Over eight chapters, it develops a ‘posthumanist peacebuilding’ framework and adopts a ‘peace-led diffractive methodology’ whereby the understandings of peacebuilding and the foci of peace research are not restricted to human activities alone. Rather, food, bodies, animals, and other more-than-humans are envisioned as contributing agentically towards ‘becoming-peace’ as well. Informed by two years of participatory fieldwork with young people that included cooking, eating together, and interviews at food spaces like kitchens and supermarkets, this research investigates some of the ways that food facilitates ‘food peacebuilding’ and ‘food violence’. In adopting a posthumanist peacebuilding framework, Hungry for Peace’s unique intervention in peacebuilding is the foregrounding of food’s affordances in everyday peacebuilding. The central argument pivots on the notion that more-than-humans can become both instruments and active agents of peace and conflict (or ‘peace-conflict’) in a highly connected world. In advancing this conceptual shift, this thesis moves the locus of understanding peacebuilding beyond human actors to demonstrate how more-than-humans (like food, smells, tables, and atmospheres) are more than contextual features of food-related conflicts; they are, instead, key characters directly shaping how peace-conflict unfold. From this perspective, peace-conflict are more-than-human acts. Importantly, humans are not always positioned as perpetrators of violence and more-than-humans are not always situated as victims entitled to claims of innocence (and vice versa). This thesis invites peacebuilders to re-imagine more-than-humans as collaborators in peace work, resisting and producing peace-conflict beyond human consciousness. ‘We’ are all intra-connected and ordinary practices, like eating, hold opportunities for everyday forms of peacebuilding.
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ItemAfter the Empire - Governance, Planning and Sustainable Indigenous Development in Australia( 2022-08)This transdisciplinary thesis identifies six planning systems significantly impacting the Indigenous community in the Mid-West region of Western Australia to consider their compatibility with the community’s aspirations for self-determined sustainable development. Assessments are based on each planning system’s procedural and development theories and practices as well as their track record in producing desired outcomes. With their interactions conceptualised as a planning supra-system, this is also assessed on its ability to produce congruent outcomes. While some planning systems are found to be better than others in supporting Indigenous aspirations for sustainable development, none are assessed as adequately compatible or resourced to make sustainable Indigenous development probable. Five of the six fail to adequately involve the region’s Indigenous communities in the normative aspects of their planning, with other inadequacies varying between systems. Shortcomings include narrow planning scopes, reactivity rather than proactivity, analytical reductionism, fragmented strategies, and inadequate evaluation, learning and adaptation. Conclusions include the need for a structure of planning subsidiarity, with the regional level determined as the most appropriate scale for holistic self-determined, sustainable Indigenous development planning that covers its economic, social, cultural, environmental and governance dimensions. Optimally, Indigenous regional planning would provide a point of orientation for government sectoral policies and a point of articulation for associated and appropriately reformed planning structures. These conclusions about planning system redesign are potentially synergistic with current proposals for the establishment of Regional Indigenous Voices across Australia.
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ItemThe abuse of parents by their children: violence, silence, and complexity( 2022-12)Child-to-parent abuse (CPA) is a serious form of violence that diminishes families’ capacity to engage in day-to-day social life, causes harm to individuals, and can fracture family relationships. This research aims to understand how families experience this form of violence; how parents, siblings, young people, and support practitioners conceptualise it; the contexts in which it appears; and its effects on individuals and relationships. I use mixed qualitative methods: data gathered through in-depth narrative interviews and anonymous online public message board posts. In total, 156 individual narratives of CPA were gathered between 2019-2020. This data was supplemented with interviews and focus groups with 20 practitioners who encountered CPA in their work. I apply Urie Bronfenbrenner’s social ecological theory to explore the complexity of the CPA phenomenon, its multiple layers, and the interactions between a range of interconnected factors. A feminist lens complements this approach and elucidates the gendered experiences of CPA, a range of invisible forms of harm, and situates the experiences within the broader scholarly knowledge about domestic family violence. This research finds that CPA is indeed a serious issue that encompasses a spectrum of physical and non-physical harmful behaviours. Contemporary beliefs about adolescence as a period characterised by impulsive and unruly behaviour can result in abusive behaviours being minimised. Left unchecked, CPA has the potential to escalate in severity over a period of years, by which time the situation becomes a crisis. Families and practitioners contextualised CPA within a broad range of interconnected adverse life experiences and troubling behaviour (e.g., psychological disorders, school exclusion, and self-harm). This made it difficult for family members to live with the CPA and to know how to respond. Parents and siblings described living in fear of the young person’s violence, resulting in a significant loss of individuality and autonomy in the home, as family members constrained their own behaviour to reduce the risk of prospective violence. This research makes a novel contribution in the discovery that some parents experience ‘extreme exhaustion’, evident in their expressing a desire to run away or die. Another important contribution of this thesis is the finding that while shame and stigma are pervasive in the experience of CPA, many parents proactively seek external support to address the violence and their child’s interlinked wellbeing issues. Despite such extensive efforts to obtain help, the thesis shows that meaningful support was extremely difficult to obtain. In families’ interactions with the service sector, friends, and extended family, pervasive attitudes of blame were evident, conceptualising children’s violence to be indicative of a child’s abnormality or the result of ‘poor-parenting’. Such beliefs, combined with limited service provision and a lack of community awareness about CPA, reinforces families’ isolation.
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ItemWho is a Liberian Anyway? The claim for formalised identity by diaspora Liberians( 2022)This thesis examines Liberia’s complex history as a unique settler colony and the ramifications of this history for current attempts at constructing a collective identity. More specifically, it analyses diaspora Liberians’ claim for formalised identity and how Liberians in-country perceive these claims. I use the country’s dual citizenship debate as a lens through which to interpret the intricate narratives around how identity and belonging are being constructed in the post-war era. The project draws on document analysis and in-depth interviews with respondents from civil society, academia, government, media, and other professionals living in Liberia and the diaspora. The thesis contributes to knowledge by re-theorising Liberia’s formation as a settler colonial project and argues for the recognition of Americo-Liberians as colonisers. Liberia is often seen as yet another conflict-ridden African country that was never colonised. In fact, Liberia was colonised by Black settlers from America who established the nation-state in 1847. I draw on settler colonial theory to show that when the Americo-Liberians dispossessed and marginalised the Africans they met upon arrival, they established the antagonisms and enduring unequal structures that ultimately led to Liberia’s civil wars. I argue that the systemic inequality established by the settler regime continues to inform and shape contemporary debates over who can legitimately claim Liberian identity. The second part of the thesis seeks to understand a long, contentious debate about dual citizenship. Many Liberians recognise the economic benefits of allowing dual citizenship. They welcome the potential investments and skilled labour that dual citizens might contribute to Liberia’s post-conflict reconstruction and development agenda. And yet, there is widespread resistance to dual citizenship. This apparently illogical opposition is understandable in light of Liberia’s history as a settler society that entrenched inequalities to privilege the settler class. At the heart of the debate are conceptions of Liberianness. Diaspora Liberians are marginalised in both their home and host countries. They consider dual citizenship a practical strategy that formalises their Liberianness and provides them and their children a route back to their real home. In-country Liberians fear being colonised by a small, privileged group and purposefully conceptualise Liberianness as an exclusionary tool. I argue that structural inequality due to historical injustices and current poverty levels have eroded conditions of trust in Liberia’s political systems. Thus, the shifting and contested meanings of Liberianness that play out in the debate result from this lack of trust, generating conflictual and unstable expectations about the future behaviour of elites and the implications of this for the ordinary Liberian. Ultimately, when we consider the invisibility and enduring nature of settler colonialism, even in a supposedly post-colonial Liberia, we can understand the anxieties of in-country Liberians and why they may see dual citizenship as a recolonising tool and diaspora Liberians as the new settler-colonisers.
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ItemCultural Historical China: The Colonial Roots of Nationalism and Identity in Hong Kong( 2023)Based on four months of ethnographic fieldwork from April to July 2019 involving participant observation, in-depth interviews, walking ethnography, and autoethnography, this dissertation explores and examines the ideological, discursive, and psychological influences of British colonisation on Hong Kong people's sense of belonging to China. It reappraises the role of Cold War politics in shaping individual Hong Kongers' subjectivity and proposes a critical perspective of Chinese historiography for Hong Kong Studies and beyond.