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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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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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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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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ItemTruth Commissions are Political Too(Australian Institute of International Affairs, 2022)Truth Commissions have been celebrated as tools for remedying injustice. But behind the scenes, almost every detail has been determined by a rigorous political process, often hindering their true potential.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTransforming Nuclear Safeguards Culture: The IAEA, Iraq, and the Future of Non-Proliferation(MIT Press, 2022-06-21)In Transforming Nuclear Safeguards Culture, Trevor Findlay investigates the role that organizational culture may play in preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, examining particularly how it affects the nuclear safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the paramount global organization in the non-proliferation field. Findlay seeks to identify how organizational culture may have contributed to the IAEA's failure to detect Iraq's attempts to acquire illicit nuclear capabilities in the decade prior to the 1990 Gulf War and how the agency has sought to change safeguards culture since then. In doing so, he addresses an important piece of the nuclear nonproliferation puzzle: how to ensure that a robust international safeguards system, in perpetuity, might keep non-nuclear states from acquiring such weapons. Findlay, as one of the leading scholars on the IAEA, brings a valuable holistic perspective to his analysis of the agency's culture. Transforming Nuclear Safeguards Culture will inspire debate about the role of organizational culture in a key international organization—a culture that its member states, leadership, and staff have often sought to ignore or downplay.
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ItemSafeguards for the Future(T.M.C. Asser Press, 2022)Safeguards have evolved as a result of new circumstances, institutions, technologies and practices, including cultural phenomena. This chapter examines safeguards from a historical perspective as the product of a political process that resulted in the negotiation of safeguards instruments. In particular, the chapter addresses the IAEA safeguards from the perspective that adaptation of the legal framework for safeguards is necessary and often difficult. Major change will only occur through a political process, not a legal one, involving Member States of the IAEA. The change will be facilitated through the IAEA Secretariat’s role in strengthening safeguards implementation using the power and responsibilities afforded to it; the advancement of technology and techniques as a vital element of this process; and the non-technological aspects of safeguards, particularly the human element.
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ItemAustralia-China relations: analysing and responding to the challenge(WILEY, 2022-01-17)
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ItemReconstituting the Contemporary Corporation through Ecologically Responsive Regulation(Thomson Reuters (Professional), 2022)Corporate governance and regulation comprise two legal frameworks that operate together from, respectively, the inside out of the corporation and the outside in, to shape business conduct. This article critically analyses two different ways in which corporate governance and business regulation intersect. We argue that both fall short of addressing the ecological and social harms generated by business. The first intersection combines shareholder primacy with domain specific regulation. The second combines a stakeholder model of corporate governance with responsive regulation. Yet, there are signs that a third “ecologically responsive” intersection may emerge to shape business practice in light of the ecological crises we currently face. We see potential for this approach in recent proposals to reform corporate governance to encourage purposive, problem-focused corporations together with greater responsiveness and multiple business forms. To achieve this potential, though, requires a radical re-conceptualisation of regulation towards an “ecologically responsive” approach.