1,721,099 research outputs found
National security: Suggested priorities for the incoming government
No full textEmeritus Professor Paul Dibb, Professor William Maley and David Templeman take part in this panel discussion entitled \u27National security: Suggested priorities for the incoming government\u27 at The Australian National University on 6 October 2010. The event was moderated by Director of the National Security College Professor Michael L\u27Estrange.About the panellists:Emeritus Professor Paul Dibb AM, Chairman of the Advisory Board with the School of International,Political and Strategic Studies, ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.Professor William Maley AM, Foundation Director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy,ANU College of Asia and the Pacific.Mr David Templeman, Former Director General of Emergency Management Australia.
Duration: 1:2
William Maley. What is a refugee? Oxford University Press, New York, 2016, pp. 253, $34.08 (Paperback), ISBN 9780190652388
No full textRecently, with the activity of refugees and asylum-seekers in Europe, there has been a conceptional or terminological confusion, both in Europe and far beyond. While the lifeless body of Alan Kurdi, photographed beside a capsized boat, and the danger of the migration journey can be understood through news stories, in the 21st century, the term “asylum seeker” has become as common as “refuge”. The book titled, What is a refugee? written by William Maley, clearly explains in detail the concept of refugee and offers a guide to understanding migration
Australia and the Middle East
No full textRod Lyon and William Maley look at Australia\u27s interests in the Middle East from two very different perspectives: that of the strategic analyst, and that of the regional expert, enriched by a close knowledge of the countries and cultures of the Middle East.
Australia’s interests in the Middle East refl ect its broader interests in a favourable global order. The region will remain a critical global energy supplier for decades. And the global War on Terror is unlikely to be successful without transformation of regional politics. The war in Iraq is serving as the catalyst for a realignment of Middle East security, crystallising three distinct strategic trends that were already under way there: an eastward shift in the region’s centre of strategic gravity, a greater strategic importance for the sectarian fault-line between Sunni and Shia, and the increasing prevalence of unconventional forms of confl ict. Those trends suggest a new Middle East is on the rise: one where the old enmity between Arabs and Jews is becoming less important.
In that ‘realigned’ Middle East, Australian interests will centre more heavily upon a Gulf region facing a host of new strategic challenges. That realignment will be a key factor in global security in the coming decade, meaning that the Middle East will probably remain the region of the world where Australian troops are most likely to be deployed on warlike missions
A deadly new front opens up
No full textWith the assassination of one of its best provincial governors, Afghanistan could be on the brink of a fresh disaster, writes William Maley
LAST week, Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf struck a remarkable deal with religious extremists in the tribal areas of the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan, involving a truce in their stand-off with the army in exchange for their ending armed attacks in the country.
In Afghanistan, the reaction was less than enthusiastic, with the Governor of Paktia Province, Hakim Taniwal, warning that “if they are not being bothered, they will have more time to infiltrate here and do what they want”. On Sunday, only three days after these prescient remarks were published in the Washington Post, Taniwal was assassinated in a suicide bombing for which the Taliban promptly claimed responsibility.
The shock waves from Taniwal’s slaying are unlikely to settle down any time soon. Unlike some of his fellow governors, Taniwal was a man of substance. By training he was a sociologist, with a masters degree from the University of Munster in Germany. An Australian as well as an Afghan, he had returned to Afghanistan in 2002 after living in Dandenong, in Melbourne, for years. He had accomplished the near impossible by easing out an obnoxious militia leader and establishing an effective local administration in the face of serious resource shortages. When I last saw him, in 2003, he was obviously care-worn, but his commitment to aiding the reconstruction of his homeland was undiminished.
Since 2003, the situation in Iraq has been so grave that it has been all too easy to overlook the fragility of the situation in Afghanistan. Afghanistan was the obvious theatre in which to confront al-Qa’ida and its allies; obvious because world opinion strongly supported robust action and Afghan opinion yearned for an international intervention, too. Yet the momentum of transition was lost early - in March 2002, to be precise - when the expansion beyond Kabul of the UN-endorsed International Security Assistance Force was blocked by a Washington already mustering airlift assets for use against Saddam Hussein. This colossal blunder had a corrosive effect on the other elements of Afghanistan’s transition.
This is where the loss of Taniwal is so tragic. President Hamid Karzai, a thoroughly decent man with outstanding communications skills, has never been strong in the area of policy-making and he inherited from the 2001 Bonn conference a dysfunctional state structure in which ministries had been dealt out as prizes to various political leaders, who turned many of them into warring fiefdoms.
With the state not performing effectively and faced with international backing that was stronger at the rhetorical than the practical level, Karzai has increasingly resorted to a politics of bargaining and deal-making, seeking to secure local stability by pacifying potential spoilers. Thus, some of Taniwal’s fellow governors are at best pygmies, and several are profoundly unappetising, creating crises of bad local governance.
Add to this three other problems. The first is one of governmental legitimacy. Here, it is easy to misread the implications of Karzai’s comfortable victory in the October 2004 presidential election in which, with 55.4 per cent of the vote, he outdistanced his nearest rival by nearly 40 percentage points. Alas, in countries such as Afghanistan, electoral victory does not mean what it does in consolidated, institutionalised democracies such as Australia and the United states, where it confers legitimate authority until the next election is held.
In countries emerging from decades of disruption, an electoral victory confers a provisional mandate to attempt to rule, but a ruler who cannot meet popular expectations in the spheres of governance and security will likely see his authority disintegrate. There are alarming signs that this has begun to happen to Karzai.
The second problem is that of the ethnicisation of politics, which often occurs as weakening leaderships seek to shore up their support. The electoral system used in last year’s parliamentary elections worked directly against political parties, but with the result that those who wished to craft a bloc in the parliament to promote new legislation then resorted to ethnicity as a basis for mobilising support. This has left at least some ethnic groups feeling marginalised, an apprehension that formed part of the context for the riots that engulfed Kabul on 29 May.
Karzai is increasingly isolated as a result, and those whose fortunes have been rising, namely secular Afghan nationalists from the large Pushtun community, are the people who set Pakistani nerves jangling by reminding the Pakistan military of the “Pushtunistan” border dispute that poisoned relations between Afghanistan and Pakistan from the 1940s to the ’70s.
The third problem, and probably the most serious of all, has been Pakistan’s support for the Taliban’s renewed campaign to destabilise Afghanistan. President Musharraf has admitted that the Taliban have been crossing into Afghanistan from their bases in Pakistan but has denied any official involvement. This is belied, however, by the sophistication of the Taliban’s equipment and tactics, by Pakistan’s proven ability to turn the Taliban off like a tap (as it did under US pressure during the 2004 election) and by the sheer audacity of past Pakistani lying about its interference in Afghanistan.
Now, with the Taniwal assassination, we may be witnessing the opening of a new, deadly eastern front for the Karzai government to manage.
William Maley is director of the Asia-Pacific college of diplomacy at the Australian National University and author of Rescuing Afghanistan , published in APO’s Briefings series by UNSW Press. He recently visited Afghanistan and the subcontinent.
Photo: Arlene Gee/iStockphoto.co
Freedom a mirage for some detainees
No full textAmanda Vanstone’s new visa is a very small step forward, according to William Maley
THE ANNOUNCEMENT by the immigration minister, Amanda Vanstone, that the government will introduce new regulations to establish a Removal Pending Bridging Visa has been welcomed as a first step, albeit a small one, away from the rigid regime of mandatory, non-reviewable detention of asylum seekers who arrive without visas.
In practice, however, the step may prove to be very small indeed. When one examines the details of the proposal, it is clear that significant obstacles will still need to be overcome before many detainees can enjoy a taste of freedom.
One provision is of particular concern, namely the limitation of eligibility to those detainees who in the belief of the minister ‘have done everything possible to facilitate their removal from Australia’. This formulation is ostensibly straightforward, but it masks a host of troubling complexities which arise when a detainee’s nationality is contested. For in a number of cases, often on the most flimsy of grounds, applicants have been denied refugee status on the basis that they were not citizens of the country from which they claimed to have fled.
To see how this conundrum can arise, it is useful to examine a specific case, that of Applicant ‘M’. Mr M, a young man of about 19, arrived in Australia in early 2000, claiming to be a citizen of Afghanistan. He applied for a protection visa. The application was refused, and was then reviewed by the Refugee Review Tribunal, which affirmed the department’s decision. The tribunal accepted that Mr M was a member of the Hazara ethnic group (which has long been a victimised minority in Afghanistan), but that was as far as it would go: ‘On the basis of the applicant’s lack of familiarity with the part of Afghanistan from which he claims to have come, his lack of knowledge of recent events in Afghan history and his inability to nominate significant national days or to fix any date within the Afghan calendar, the tribunal finds that the applicant is not from Afghanistan and has not lived there all his life until he came to Australia’.
Superficially this might have seemed a plausible conclusion, but on closer scrutiny it was extremely shaky. Residents of remote districts in war-torn countries often have only the haziest knowledge of what is going on elsewhere, and may be discouraged from travelling by the threat of banditry on the roads. In the region of Afghanistan from which Mr M claimed to come, there were at least three calendars which people might use (the Arabic lunar calendar, the Hisab-e burj based on the signs of the zodiac, and the traditional Hazara animal calendar), and no reasons to think that what the tribunal called ‘the Afghan calendar’ was the prevalent one in Mr M’s district.
Most seriously of all, the tribunal drew adverse conclusions from the fact that when asked about the situation in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of Soviet troops, Mr M denied that he had been born at that time. Almost as if it were playing a trump card, the Tribunal set out evidence that the Soviet forces had withdrawn in 1989 when he was eight or nine years old.
It somehow escaped the Tribunal’s attention that it was in 1982, around the time of Mr M’s birth, that Soviet troops had withdrawn from the region from which Mr M claimed to come. These flaws in the tribunal’s reasoning did not, of course, establish that Mr M was an Afghan, but they severely weakened the case for suspecting that he was not.
What good would a Removal Pending Bridging Visa have done Mr M? If someone in his position stuck to his guns and maintained that he was an Afghan, his rejection of the tribunal’s shaky conclusions could be treated as evidence that he had not ‘done everything possible’ to facilitate his removal from Australia.
The lesson here is relatively clear: the decision as to whether or not to release long-term detainees should not be in the hands of the government, which could have an interest in blaming refugees for mistakes which may have led to their prolonged detention, but rather in the hands of an independent actor such as the Federal Magistrates Court.
And what of Mr M? Here the story as I heard it became even more interesting. Rejected by the tribunal, he sought judicial review in the Federal Court, but failed because he could not prove that the tribunal had made an ‘error of law’ in the technical sense. He requested that the then minister, Philip Ruddock, exercise his discretion to grant a humanitarian visa, but the minister would not shift an inch.
Finally, when all else failed, he turned to the new Embassy of Afghanistan, established only after Mr M had made his fruitless journey through the tribunal and the courts. After making its own inquiries, it discovered he really was an Afghan, and its conclusion to that effect forced the Australian government’s hand. Mr M is now a recognised refugee with a Temporary Protection Visa. But the delay caused by the mistakes over his identity not only cost Mr M years of his life, but also the opportunity ever to receive a permanent visa. It’s no fun being a refugee. •
William Maley is director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the Australian National University. This article first appeared in the Canberra Times.
Photo: Roberta Casaliggi • iStockphoto.co
Two different places
No full textDespite what the defence minister says, the most striking thing about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan is how different they are, writes William Maley
BRENDAN NELSON has been having a rather rough time as Defence Minister. His is genuinely a portfolio in which loose lips sink ships, at least metaphorically. Last Thursday was quite a day for him. Not only did he create headlines with the statement that “there is no such thing as victory in Iraq,” he also attracted the ire of some veterans of the World War II campaign on the Kokoda Track with the assertion that “today we face something which is no less a risk to our culture, our values, our freedoms and way of life than was presented to us in 1942.”
This was, to put it mildly, a startling claim, not only because it reflected a profound misunderstanding of the existential threats Australia faced in 1942, but also because the Iraq conflict is a war of America’s and Australia’s choice in a way the Pacific war in 1942 certainly was not.
Partially buried by these dramatic utterances was another statement from Nelson on 22 February, this time in a doorstop interview, which attracted less attention but in a way deserved more. “The most important thing we’ve got to understand,” he claimed, “is that the same people that are causing all of the problems in Afghanistan are the same people that are causing problems in Iraq. We’re fighting the same people in two different places.”
Does Nelson truly believe this?
The most striking features of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are not their points of similarity, but their differences. A government that is blind to these differences risks badly botching its response to each country’s genuine but distinctive problems.
In both countries, the “enemy” forces defy simple description. Iraq is now enmeshed in a nasty civil war, a label that even the neo-conservative former US diplomat John Bolton is now prepared to use. However, its roots lie in a logic which should surprise no informed analyst.
Saddam Hussein’s regime saw a Sunni Muslim elite in a position of domination over a population which is about 60 per cent Shi’ite Muslims. The overthrow of Saddam held the promise of a permanent minority status for the Sunnis as a whole, and retribution against those Sunnis who had been Ba’ath Party members. The ill-considered de-Ba’athification decrees of the US-run Provisional Authority simply confirmed the fears of militant Sunnis, and drove them into classic patterns of “spoiler” behaviour. This was predictable.
It is cheaper and easier to be a wrecker than a builder, and the obvious targets for Sunni wreckers were members of the Shi’ite community. Leaders of the Shia of Iraq knowing that their numerical weight positioned them to benefit from electoral processes showed great patience in the face of both the Sunni spoiler tactics, and the inability of the coalition forces or the Iraqi Government to offer them protection. But eventually, their patience ran out, and Shi’ite militias lifted their own levels of activity, with some support from circles in the Shi’ite state of Iran. However, the impact of Iran’s support should not be exaggerated. A US National Intelligence Estimate in January 2007 concluded that “Iraq’s neighbours influence, and are influenced by, events within Iraq, but the involvement of these outside actors is not likely to be a major driver of violence or the prospects for stability because of the self-sustaining character of Iraq’s internal sectarian dynamics.”
The confluence of the Sunnis’ spoiler behaviour, and the disgust of Shi’ites at the failure of the US and its local allies to protect Shi’ite interests, has produced a very complex nationalist underpinning for political violence: large numbers of both Sunnis and Shi’ites would like to see the Coalition leave. In a survey conducted last September by the Program on International Policy Attitudes, 71 per cent of respondents stated that they would like the Iraqi Government to ask the US-led forces to withdraw within a year. Some 78 per cent believed that the US military in Iraq was provoking more conflict than it was preventing, and 61 per cent approved of attacks on US-led forces. It is this reality the loss of confidence on the part of a large slice of the Iraqi population that makes the Coalition’s position so dire, much more than any threat from “terrorism.” Some Sunni terrorists with attachments to al-Qaeda have indeed found their way to Iraq, and engaged in spectacular acts of barbarity, but to treat Iraq as the “front line” in a “war on terror” is to misread Iraq’s complexities very badly.
It is rather Afghanistan that faces the main threat from globalised terrorism, and it is there that resources should be concentrated to halt al-Qaeda’s recrudescence. It is simply mind-boggling that the US blundered off into Iraq before ensuring that al-Qaeda had been substantially obliterated in its hideouts on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Yet in contrast to what one finds in Iraq, the bulk of the Afghan population remains notably supportive of an international presence, and civil war has been avoided even though the population is also segmented on complex lines. The enemy here, while some use the expression “neo-Taliban,” is better seen as al-Qaeda in alliance with the old Taliban leadership, aided by a number of paid helpers doing its work in Afghanistan’s southern provinces, and by networks of supporters in Pakistan. Its core leaders sit nearby in Pakistan, and Pakistan provides a safe haven for its operations. Here is perhaps the key distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq. The Iraq conflict is largely generated by an internal dynamic. Afghanistan’s troubles are largely driven by an external terrorist force and by the foreign state from whose territory it is able to operate.
There is a role for Australia to play in Afghanistan, and an enhancement of Australia’s contribution there will enjoy bipartisan support. It is also time to put pressure on Pakistan, which is acting far more destructively in Afghanistan than Iran is in Iraq. But building wider support for a good cause like the Afghanistan commitment is not helped by linking it in any way to the Iraq fiasco. The people of Afghanistan deserve better. •
William Maley is director of the Asia-Pacific College of Diplomacy at the ANU and author of Rescuing Afghanistan, published in APO’s Briefings series by UNSW Press. This article first appeared in the Canberra Times.
Photo: View off the rear ramp of a Chinook helicopter flying over eastern Afghanistan. Thomas Brouns/iStockphoto.co
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
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