Engagement

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Teachers and students in schools across Australia regularly benefit from the work that has been, and is being, conducted by Associate Professor Eleanor Hancock. Once a diplomat with the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Hancock is now a leading historian on the topic of Nazi Germany.

Having written three books, including Ernst Röhm: Hitler's SA Chief of Staff and Swastika over the Acropolis (with Associate Professor Craig Stockings), she has regularly been invited to address History Teachers Association ACT and History Teachers Association Australia, as well as several classes of history students.

“With the History Teachers Associations I tend to update them on the...

Data retention and journalists' sources

Academic research is never more engaging than when it is conducted hand-in-hand with those who most value its results. As if to prove this point, during his recent work, Professor Clinton Fernandes liaised directly with federal politicians to assist Parliament in enacting three major pieces of national security legislation.

One of those was the Telecommunications (Interception and Access) Amendment (Data Retention) Act.

“I liaised with Senator Nick Xenophon and contributed to several privacy protections,” Fernandes, who has written four books, 25 book chapters and over 15 journal articles, says.

“The most significant innovations were the creation of a category of ‘...

Ethics in the workplace

Ethicist Dr Ned Dobos asks the big questions.

“I'm involved in figuring out what is right and wrong, just and unjust, fair and unfair, and applying these principles to real-life contexts and scenarios,” he says.

Within Applied Ethics there are many specialist areas, such as criminal justice ethics, biomedical ethics and sports ethics. Dobos focuses on military and business ethics.

“One strand of military ethics is concerned with how soldiers ought to conduct themselves once hostilities are underway,” he says. “I'm more interested in what justifies recourse to war in the first place, and whether the very existence of the military establishment is justified.”

“...

Sharing knowledge for grass-roots community empowerment in Indonesia

Not long ago Dr Minako Sakai was a panellist at the World Economic Forum in Jakarta, discussing religion and development in Islamic economies. A few years later, on Indonesia’s Independence Day, she and several other dignitaries were invited to the Indonesian Presidential Palace. It struck her as powerful that the work of a female Japanese academic, fluent in Indonesian and living and working in Australia, was being openly respected in the Islamic nation.

“These types of experiences make me realise my work is bigger than I thought,” Sakai says. “This is good, because engagement is not a photo opportunity, it is a long-term relationship.”

“That is something I have learned...

Finding an audience in History

As a military historian specifically interested in the German Army during the Second World War, Dr David Stahel has a core audience of academics but a broader audience of people with a deep interest in, and knowledge of, anything connected with war.

“A production company that makes documentaries told me they never get as much feedback on any of the documentaries they make as they do for the military history ones,” Stahel says.

After touring Russia for the History channel’s Hitler’s Frozen Army in 2012 David has since appeared in numerous episodes of World War II: Battles Won and Lost (2017) and World War: Total War (forthcoming 2018). He has also conducted numerous radio...

Political information, war and peace

One cultural driver of terrorism is that people develop suspicion, or paranoia, about western foreign policy – or so the story goes. It’s a convenient, clean and easy-to-digest explanation of a complex subject that was common in western counter-terrorism policy after 9/11 and persists in current CVE policy, and it’s one that Dr Tim Aistrope refused to accept.

Aistrope’s work has looked into conspiracy and paranoia in relation to radicalisation, and particularly the role of social media as a place where political information is propagated and contested. That has led to studies into political warfare carried out online by state and non-state actors, which he refers to as ‘cyber-...

From Somali Piracy to the UN Security Council: Understanding the impact of law

As she was studying international maritime law, Dr Tamsin Phillipa Paige recognised a lack of research that took into account its sociological and socio-legal implications. After approaching a number of universities and supervisors, she travelled to East Africa to observe how laws were applied in counter piracy operations.

“I did a bunch of field work, interviewing key players in the enforcement field,” Paige says. “I also observed trial procedures for Somalis who’d been arrested and charged with piracy.”

Further into her research career Paige realised there was no legal definition for the term ‘threat to the peace’ (which allows the UN Security Council to trigger military...

A more tolerant society

Not long ago a senior officer from a foreign military body wrote to Dr Peter Balint to thank him for his work on dealing with insurgents. The officer’s eyes had been opened, he said, to the fact that dealing with the problem was not so much about fighting and killing the insurgents and was more about helping the communities that produced them. It was around fighting poverty rather than fighting people.

Balint studies ‘toleration’, or the way different ways of life can be taken seriously in order for everybody to live together successfully. It’s as relevant historically (Catholics vs Protestants) as it is currently (same-sex marriage).

His book, Respecting Toleration:...

Diversifying Anzac

It has been important for Australians, particularly during the centenary commemorations of Anzac events, to develop a more diverse interpretation of events during the First World War. Much of this understanding has come from the work of military historians.

Professor Peter Stanley, a battlefield researcher and author of 32 books, is a founder of and regular contributor to Honest History, a website offering a sustained and authoritative critique of ‘Anzackery’ – the exaggerated presentation of the Anzac legend.

Based on his substantive work on the history of Australia in the Great War, exemplified by his scholarly work, such as his chapters in The War at Home (2015) and his...

Making international human rights policy smarter

When Dr Morten Pedersen speaks, international policy makers listen. Having come into academia from the world of policy analysis, Pedersen has been a thought leader on the international community’s responses to ongoing issues in Myanmar for the past decade and a half.

In recent years, his focus has broadened to look at how global bodies promote a liberal, internationalist agenda. His research considers how the international community can best promote peace, democracy and human rights.

Pedersen consults frequently with governments and international organisations. His work is read by policy makers, diplomats and NGO staff, as well as academics.

“It can be difficult to...

The future of international law

During a recent international law conference in Wellington, Professor Shirley Scott found herself amongst many of the world’s greatest legal minds. There was the only Australian judge currently on the international Court of Justice, as well as a recently retired NZ judge. There were key people from the New Zealand Foreign Ministry and several top international lawyers from around the globe.

“We were looking at the future of international law as the distribution of world power shifts,” Scott says. “I was invited so that I could look at the big picture of geopolitics and link it to legal trends.”

A few weeks earlier she appeared before an Australian Senate Inquiry to help...

Deepening the public's understanding of Australian politics & reforming our political donations laws

Dr Lindy Edwards is a regular guest on the ABC television program The Drum and, in the recent past, has enjoyed a fortnightly slot on ABC Radio during which she discussed political ideology in Australian politics. She also makes YouTube videos on various related topics, some of which have boasted up to 30,000 views.

Edwards’ book, The Passion of Politics, and her ensuing media activity, has demonstrated there is an appetite to understand the deeper issues driving our politics, beyond the focus on short-term tactics and personalities that occupy so much of today’s political journalism.

“I also write op-eds for Fairfax newspapers, providing context around issues like the...

Leading in leadership

As the Director of the Public Leadership Research Group – Howard Library, Professor Tom Frame is based in Old Parliament House. The halls around him are thick with history, and of tales about the effects of good and bad leadership.

Fittingly, Frame’s work revolves around the dynamics of public leadership in terms of political processes and popular culture. How is it, for example, that national leaders are able to shape or reflect the consensus, then move the nation forward to reach its full potential, as so many disparate groups pull in different directions?

“Leadership has become more complicated, partly because of the nature of modern communications,” Frame says. “Anybody...

Addressing complex Issues in applied Military Ethics

Dr Deane-Peter Baker has been working in the area of military ethics for the last decade.

“Some of my early work was on ethical questions around private military and security companies,” Baker says. “More recently I've been focussing on special operations ethics as well as some work on the ethics of autonomous weapons.”

“There is evidence that training in military ethics does impact battlefield behaviour and potentially leads to fewer unnecessary deaths. So a big focus for me is spreading the word.”

Baker has run a massive open online course (MOOC), a seven-week course called ‘Military Ethics: An Introduction’ that included papers, a book written for the course and...

Governance of maritime operations

Currently consulting to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in South-East Asia, Professor Rob McLaughlin (also a Captain in the Royal Australian Navy Reserve) regularly advises to and designs workshops for maritime police, coast guard organisations, government advisors, government departments and policy makers on matters of maritime law enforcement and security.

His research areas covering the law, regulation and governance of maritime operations, the laws of armed conflict and threats and challenges to the rules-based order. McLaughlin’s main audience is practitioners who work in these fields and who apply regulation and law. A secondary audience is academics.

...

Genres and media of life writing

Dr Heather Neilson, one of the world’s foremost experts on the life and work of Gore Vidal, has turned her attention to Vidal’s biographer and friend, Jay Parini.

A writer and educator, Parini turns 70 in 2018. Neilson recently sat in on what was likely his final class at Middlebury College, where he has been a Professor of English and Creative Writing.

“Parini has produced many historical novels,” Neilson says. “But poetry he values more than anything else. He is also a burgeoning screenplay writer. This is where my current research is focused, although the bigger aim is to write a book on Parini's whole body of writing.”

Parini wrote the film The Last Station, a...

Books in the front line

Books have many roles to play during times of conflict. Dr Christina Spittel is interested in the way books are mobilised to sustain a world at war, and how they help to rebuild it afterwards. 

Currently she’s finishing a history of the Great War in Australian novels, spanning an entire century. With an international team of colleagues, she is studying how young people learn to commemorate war, not least through literature. Next up is a big project, funded by the Australian Research Council, on a socialist publishing venture to supply the Cold War world with English-language paperbacks from East Berlin. 

“I write across disciplines and my work has been picked up by...

Military history and genocide studies

Having taught on the Second World War for more than 20 years and Australia’s longest sustained university course on genocide (since 2001), Dr Debbie Lackerstein is a respected expert on war and genocide. Her research focus areas also include French history, especially Vichy France, collaboration and resistance. 

In order to influence the influencers, Lackerstein has delivered lectures to guides at the Australian War Memorial, who are responsible for passing on reliable historical information to tens of thousands of visitors each year. 

She has also run several lectures for the University of the Third Age, and collaborated with a production company that specialises in...

Understanding Chinese investment in the region

After giving a public lecture on the impacts of Chinese investment in 2016, Dr Pichamon Yeophantong was approached by several members of the audience, including policy makers, who remarked that her work could make a significant and positive difference to a lot of people in many countries. They encouraged her to continue along her current path of investigation. It was one of over 30 invited lectures she had delivered around the world in the past three years, but the audience’s reaction was not unique. 

Her research centres on Chinese foreign policy and China’s role in global environmental governance. Her work is currently focussed more specifically on...

Manning the ‘Unmanned’

Having filed a report to the British government as part of the Birmingham Policy Commissions on the legality, morality and political issues faced by military drone crews, Dr Lindsay Clark now has her sights set on Australian military policy. 

The use of armed drones such as Reapers and Predators has long raised questions. Clark’s work looks at policy development in an environment of increasing distance between adversaries. She also observes how this development affects our concept of military masculinity. 

“I’ve been speaking with the people who are setting up a Reaper-type capability in Australia,” she says. “They have been tasked with looking at the barriers to setting up...

Security implications of climate change

Across all levels of the Defence sector, Dr Gavin Mount has long provided guest seminars as well as regular delivery of scholarly and policy-relevant knowledge exchange to those within Defence. On a long-term basis he has been deeply engaged with his core audience. 

“My main form of external engagement has been with the ADF, as the most relevant ‘industry’ sector for my field,” Mount says. “For over a decade, I have been very actively engaged with the Defence sector.”  

This began with a seven-year, intensively delivered elective program for the Australian Command and Staff College, from 2003 to 2011. In 2010, Mount received a Teaching Award for this work, in recognition of...

How to govern a planet

The era of national governance in an increasingly globalised political arena has worked on certain levels, but for the environment the result has not been positive. Anthony Burke, a Professor of International Politics, has been concentrating his research focus on a solution to this problem. 

Burke has been developing a framework for what he calls ‘Global Ecological Governance’. It looks at the way international/environmental governance and law, and negotiations at a national level, deal with the looming ecological crisis of global warming. 

Burke’s ‘manifesto of planet politics’, originally intended to promote discussion amongst academics of international politics, is now...

War stories

After spending much of his research career looking into the way soldiers wrote about their experiences of war in military memoirs, Dr Neil Ramsey expanded his focus to a range of different genres of writing. He is concentrating on a specific period (1766 to 1832), around the Napoleonic Wars, to trace clues as to how a society and a culture comes to think about war. 

“I come from a literary studies background, so I'm interested in ideas about the impacts that different genres or forms of writing have,” he says. “How can we use those genres to think about intellectual change.”  

Ramsey’s work spans two academic audiences, literary studies and the cultural history of war....

Understanding book censorship

The life of Australian writer Dorothy Hewett was an extraordinary one. A Communist Party member during the mid 20th century and one of three writers to appear before the Petrov Royal Commission, Hewett was suspected of involvement in Russian espionage in Australia.  

Professor Nicole Moore, ARC Future Fellow and Professor of English at UNSW Canberra, is writing a biography of Hewett. Moore has authored several other books, including The Censor's Library: Uncovering the Lost History of Australia's Banned Books, shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award in Australian History, winner of the Walter McCrae Russell award from the Association for the Study...

Engaging with academics and policy makers on China

A special moment in Associate Professor Jian Zhang’s career came out of left field. As a researcher of Chinese domestic politics and Chinese foreign policy, he has long been accustomed to invitations to speak at academic events, at conferences, at university student events and to media. But when he was contacted by a high school student writing a piece about the South China Sea, he was particularly thrilled to share his knowledge.  

“It surprised me and gave me a new understanding of the significance of my work,” Zhang says. “The student had learnt about my research then contacted me to ask for my assistance. We had several interactions.” 

“For my research the typical...

Remembering Australia's ''First Wars'

Often called the ‘Frontier Wars’ or the ‘First Wars’, the battles and skirmishes that occurred between the indigenous inhabitants of the continent of Australia and the British settlers represented a massive shift in the nation’s culture, heritage and future. The events cemented the shift from a land owned by Aborigines to a land where the traditional owners were permanently dispossessed.

Much of the fighting was recorded in local newspapers, Connor says, and it was not always Aborigines vs British. Sometimes the fighting was between warring Aboriginal groups.

This vital chapter of Australia’s history is being studied by Connor, and sometimes with a twist. He recently...