School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemSueños náuticos en Australia (Australia's nuclear nautical dreams)(La Vanguardia, 2022-08-25)In a surprising statement with implications for nuclear weapons proliferation, Australia announced in October last year that it would pursue nuclear-powered and conventionally armed submarines. An eighteen-month study has to determine if and how the project is carried out. If it materializes, it would be done in collaboration with the United Kingdom and the United States, two traditional allies of Australia. The three countries have established the AUKUS partnership to strengthen defense and security cooperation in various areas, including, in addition to the submarine project, cyber capabilities, artificial intelligence and quantum technologies. In November 2021, the three countries signed an agreement that allows the exchange of information and visits to facilitate the study of submarines. The obstacles to Australia's submarine ambitions are legion. Among them, their astronomical costs (some estimates reach 14 billion Australian dollars per unit), Australia's limited technical capacity to build, operate, maintain and deploy such ships and the secrecy surrounding the nuclear propulsion technology that neither the UK nor the US will be willing to share with Australia. Although details are currently scarce, the most likely scenario is that Australia will try to build the submarines itself (probably eight) in the south of the country and import the nuclear reactors and highly enriched uranium fuel from the US ( UAE). The fuel would be sealed in the reactors before passing into Australian hands and returned to the US at the end of life for removal and disposal. One of the advantages of submarine reactors fueled by UAE is that they have cores that last the entire life of the submarine and do not require periodic recharging. Although there are undoubted military advantages to acquiring submarines that are quieter, can remain submerged longer, and have greater range than conventional submarines, there are also significant disadvantages.
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ItemLas paradojas del progresismo ecuatoriano: Una mirada crítica a su legado en lo social, económico y ecológico(Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales, CLACSO, 2020)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTransdisciplinarity and epistemic communities: Knowledge decolonisation through university extension programmes(Wiley, 2022-02)In Latin America, a legacy of colonisation is the pervasiveness of a Eurocentric approach to knowledge. This geopolitics of knowledge entails the prioritisation of “rational” scientific knowledge over the mosaic epistemology that characterises a population born from high mestizaje (cultural and ethnic heterogeneity). Alternatively, universities could advance global cognitive justice by means of knowledge decolonisation. This article explores one way to advance that project. Based on contributions from Luso‐Hispanic scholars, I propose university extension programmes be reformulated to include epistemic communities as ecologies of knowledges. Theoretical insights are contrasted with an Ecuadorian experience, where a centre originally created to disseminate georeferenced socioeconomic and ecological indicators has evolved into a knowledge community with potential to promote plural dialogue of knowledges and influence decision making.
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ItemWhat is in the 'People's Interest'?" Discourses of Egalitarianism and 'Development as Compensation' in Contemporary Ecuador(Berghahn Books, 2020)The left-wing Pink Tide movement that swept across Latin America seems now to be overturned, as a new wave of free-market thinkers emerge across the continent. This book analyses the emergence of corporate power within Latin America and the response of egalitarian movements across the continent trying to break open the constraints of the state. Through an ethnographically grounded and localized anthropological perspective, this book argues that at a time when the regular structures of political participation have been ruptured, the Latin American context reveals multiple expressions of egalitarian movements that strive (and sometimes momentarily manage) to break through the state’s apparatus.
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ItemFor a progressive realism: Australian foreign policy in the 21st century(ROUTLEDGE JOURNALS, TAYLOR & FRANCIS LTD, 2022-03-04)What ideas and concepts might be used to reinvigorate a progressive approach to Australian foreign policy? In contrast to the clarity of the international vision provided by right-wing movements, there is uncertainty about the contours of a progressive approach to contemporary Australian foreign policy. This article outlines the basis of a ‘progressive realism’ that can challenge right-wing accounts. Progressive realism combines a ‘realistic’ diagnosis of the key dynamics that underpin contemporary world politics with a ‘progressive’ focus on the redistribution of existing power configurations. Taken together, these two building blocks provide the foundations for a left-of-centre foreign policy agenda. We apply progressive realism to four policy areas: pandemic politics, aid and infrastructure in the Pacific, climate change, and a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. This analysis, in turn, highlights the challenges and opportunities for progressive political actors in crafting foreign policy both within and beyond Australia.
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ItemGreen democracy(Taylor & Francis, 2020-09-01)
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ItemGreen Theory(Oxford University Press, 2021)This chapter explores the ways in which environmental concerns have influenced International Relations (IR) theory. It provides a brief introduction to the ecological crisis and the emergence of green theorizing in the social sciences and humanities in general, and then tracks the status and impact of environmental issues and green thinking in IR theory. It shows how mainstream IR theories, such as neorealism and neoliberalism have constructed environmental problems merely as a ‘new issue area’ that can be approached through pre-existing theoretical frameworks. These approaches are contrasted with critical green IR theories, which challenges the state-centric framework, rationalist analysis, and ecological blindness of orthodox IR theories and offer a range of new environmental interpretations of international justice, democracy, development, modernization, and security. In the case study, climate change is explored to highlight the diversity of theoretical approaches, including the distinctiveness of green approaches, in understanding global environmental change.
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ItemGreat Expectations: The United States and the Global Environment(Oxford University Press, 2022-01-10)This chapter conceptually disentangles the relationship between environmental leadership and special environmental responsibilities that attach to the US as a great power and uses this framework to assess the US’s environmental diplomacy from the 1970s to 2020. It shows that the US has never fully accepted special environmental responsibilities because they cede economic advantages to rising powers and clash with the US-sponsored liberal economic order. The chapter also challenges the conventional narrative that US environmental leadership has been in general decline since the Nixon administration’s diplomacy at Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment in 1972. It identifies the conditions that are most conducive to US environmental leadership and shows that the high point of environmental leadership was the US’s ozone diplomacy under the Reagan administration, followed by the Obama administration’s climate diplomacy, while the Biden administration’s climate diplomacy may give rise to another high point.
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ItemEcological democracy and the rise and decline of liberal democracy: looking back, looking forward(Taylor and Francis Group, 2020)The critical environmental political theory (EPT) of ecological democracy emerged in the 1990s when liberal democracy and cosmopolitanism appeared to be on the rise. A quarter of a century later, as both went into decline in the western heartland, a new iteration of ecological democracy has emerged, reflecting a significant shift in critical normative horizons, focus and method. Whereas the first iteration sought to critique and institutionally expand the coordinates of democracy – space, time, community and agency – to bring them into closer alignment with a cosmopolitan ecological and democratic imaginary, the second has connected ecology and democracy through everyday material practices and local participatory democracy from a more critical communitarian perspective. The respective virtues and problems of each iteration of ecological democracy are drawn out, and the complementarities and tensions between them are shown to be productive in maintaining theoretical and methodological pluralism and enhancing the prospects for sustainability and a multifaceted democracy.
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ItemCapital Punishment in Singapore: A Critical Analysis of State Justifications From 2004 to 2018(Queensland University of Technology, 2020)This article examines state justifications for capital punishment in Singapore. Singapore is a unique case study because capital punishment has largely been legitimised and justified by state officials. It illustrates how Singapore justifies capital punishment by analysing official discourse. Discussion will focus on the government’s narrative on capital punishment, which has been primarily directed against drug trafficking. Discussion will focus on Singapore’s death penalty regime and associated official discourse that seeks to justify state power to exercise such penalties, rather than the ethics and proportionality of capital punishment towards drug-related crimes. Critical analysis from a criminological perspective adds to the growing body of literature that seeks to conceptualise social and political phenomena in South-East Asia.