School of Social and Political Sciences - Research Publications
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ItemRecalibrating Minimum Force: Some Unintended Consequences of Tom Swift's 'Electronic Rifle'(Springer Nature, 2024-05-23)This chapter explores some significant impacts of ‘electro-shock’ weapons on the practices and accountability of police. It argues that the introduction of conducted energy weapons (CEWs or ‘Tasers’) has resulted in the recalibration of the traditional policing principle of minimum force. Using evidence from a range of jurisdictions, we explore the way CEWs replace low-level and intermediate force options, rather than the use of deadly force they were initially marketed to reduce. We suggest that the adoption of this type of weapon fractures police conceptions of the use of force continuum. This results in a shift away from ensuring ‘coercive’ force as both threat of use of force and the actual use of force are minimised in model police practice towards the mission to appear ‘non-lethal’, or at least less ‘injurious’. While CEWs carry less risk of serious physical injury when deployed as compared with firearms, the increasing rates and normalisation of threatened use of force and associated threats of severe pain and injury in policing practice comprise a form of ‘weapons creep’ and carry a concomitant risk to police–community relations. We argue the widespread adoption of CEWs in policing has reinforced long-held concerns about ‘weapons drift’ and has consequently impacted police legitimacy for some observers and further served to materially subvert interpretations of the principle of ‘minimum force’ as a useful measure of the reasonableness of police use of force.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableAged Care and the Convention Against Torture: ‘It Was Like Guantanamo Bay’(Palgrave Macmillan, 2024)There is a relative absence of criminological engagement with aged care, both as a site of confinement and control, and a site where human rights are often routinely breached. Similarly, the Australian government is unwilling to include residential aged care sites within the remit of the Optional Protocol to the Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. Instead, it relies on a narrow definition of ‘deprivation of liberty,’ applying the treaty only to what it terms ‘primary places of detention,’ thereby excluding aged care facilities. This chapter reflects upon this failure to include aged care sites under the ambit of the Convention while also calling upon criminologists to engage more attentively with such sites of care and the human rights breaches that they generate. Criminology delivers important insights into places of ‘care’ that share many characteristics with those purposed as punishment and detention. Nonetheless, a ‘criminology’ of human rights is misguided as long as it presumes that rights-based laws can always deliver on their promise. Accordingly, any research agenda within criminology must engage with the limits of human rights and, in particular, with how these limits are made manifest within carceral and confined sites.
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ItemThe IAEA’s Critical Role in Nuclear Security(Oxford University Press, 2023-05-11)The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the key multilateral global nuclear governance body, describes itself as the ‘global platform’ for nuclear security efforts, with a ‘central role’ in facilitating international cooperation in the field. After initial contestation among member states about whether the IAEA’s mandate encompassed it, nuclear security has now been universally accepted as a valuable mainstream IAEA activity. Although states still insist that nuclear security is primarily their responsibility, the Agency’s programme continues to evolve and grow and can barely meet demand for its services. It has been particularly effective in promulgating recommendations for enhancing nuclear security at the national level and in advising and assisting states in striving for higher standards. Since the end of the Nuclear Security Summit process in 2016, the IAEA has taken on the role of principal conference convenor, involving a ministerial meeting and increasingly creative technical presentations and side events. The Agency faces the usual dilemmas of international organisations in being constrained by what its member states will allow and by financial and technical limitations. This can result in modest advances after painstaking negotiations and lowest-common-denominator approaches. With a more expansive mandate, sharper prioritisation and evaluation of its activities, and guaranteed funding through the regular budget, the IAEA could make a significantly greater contribution to preventing nuclear terrorism.
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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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ItemNo Preview AvailableTreaty as a Pathway to Indigenous Controlled Policy: Making Space, Partnering, and Honouring New Relationships(Springer Nature, 2023)As several Australian jurisdictions embark on Australia’s first treaty processes there is growing recognition of the extent to which treaty will recast Indigenous-state relations. The negotiation of treaties means the recognition of other sovereign authorities—not authorities to be created (as these have existed for millennia) but authorities that will require space to be exercised alongside the state. Bureaucracies that have understood their role as primarily one of service delivery to First Nations will have to reorient themselves to become treaty partners with First Nations seeking to exercise greater control and autonomy. While we cannot yet predict the outcome of these negotiations, nor is it appropriate for us to attempt to articulate First Nations’ priorities, it is likely that, over time, treatied First Nations will seek to rewrite the policy relationship with government, pursuing autonomy and self-governance in the place of state authority and control. This chapter explores the possibilities and challenges of transforming public policy-making through treaty, arguing that it will take time to re-write the partnership manual and enable genuinely Indigenous-controlled policy to become the new political norm.
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ItemAlone and On the Move: Unaccompanied Children in UK Parliamentary Debates 2015-16.(Bristol University Press, 2023)
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ItemNo Preview AvailableUnsettling Australian Clinical Legal Education(Routledge, 2024-01-31)This chapter considers some of the dimensions of epistemic violence in Australian clinical legal education. Perhaps because clinical legal education and social change lawyering are viewed as indelibly progressive and ‘in the public interest’, clinical legal education has long escaped the attention of sustained decolonial and anti-racist critique. This chapter seeks to rectify this by providing four critiques of clinical legal education: its failure to consider settler colonialism and its effects; its failure to consider racism and its effects; intellectual nullius; and psychological nullius. Against each of these criticisms, we consider the potential for clinical legal education when Aboriginal sovereignty, advocacy and storytelling is centred. This chapter equally provides a case study specifically focusing upon our own experiences teaching clinical legal education in which we explain our pedagogical and philosophical approach, as well as strategies for unsettling Australian clinical legal education.
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ItemAsia-Pacific regional nuclear governance: Fragmented, patchy yet fixable?(Routledge, 2023)The chapter analyses the challenges and potential of nuclear governance in the Asia-Pacific region.
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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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