Search results

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the views of Professor George Arnold Wood, a leading Australian scholar at the University of Sydney, concerning the involvement of the British Empire in the Great War of 1914-1918.

The author has examined all of Professor Wood’s extant commentaries on the Great War which are held in the archives of the University of Sydney as well as the biographical material on Professor Wood by leading Australian scholars. The methodology and approach is purely empirical.

The sources consulted revealed Professor Wood’s deeply held conviction about the importance of Christian values in the formation of political will and his belief that the vocation of politics is a most serious one demanding from statesmen the utmost integrity in striving to ensure justice and freedom, respect for the rights of others and the duty of the strong to protect the weak against unprincipled and ruthless states.

The paper highlights Professor Wood’s values as derived from the core statements of Jesus of Nazareth such as in the Sermon on the Mount. And as these contrasted greatly with the Machiavellian practice of the imperial German Chancellors from Bismarck onwards, and of the Kaiser Wilhelm II. It was necessary for the British Empire to oppose German war aims with all the force at its disposal. The paper illustrates the ideological basis from which Wood derived his values.

The purpose of this paper is to offer critical analysis of how public relations (PR) were used to justify the use of drones by the UK Government, through the promotion of a distinct strategic culture. The paper locates governmental PR discourse on drones in the UK since 2013 within the strategic culture associated with the global war on terror.

The project was based upon critical discourse analysis of the UK governmental PR on drones since 2013, examining press releases, opinion articles by ministers, media relations content, parliamentary statements, news content and other related materials.

The analysis led to five discursive themes of persuasive intent in relation to drones being identified, most of which were notably similar to the US governmental discourse on drone policy and deployment.

The project contributes a novel interdisciplinary synthesis of the communicative aspects of international relations as theorised in the field of strategic culture with the cultural aspects of the state-level PR in order to explain how PR was used to promote and diffuse a strategic culture in which drones are assumed to be the counter-terrorism measure of choice. The conclusion is that governmental PR discourse combines aspects of colonialism with focus on superior technology, remote control and precision of weapons, generating a military and communicative logic that overwhelms the voices of victims and impedes meaningful discussion on the reality of suffering caused by drone deployments.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse George Orwell's diaries through an information literacy lens. Orwell is well known for his dedication to freedom of speech and objective truth, and his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is often used as a lens through which to view the fake news phenomenon. This paper will examine Orwell's diaries in relation to UNESCO's Five Laws of Media and Information Literacy to examine how information literacy concepts can be traced in historical documents.

This paper will use a content analysis method to explore Orwell's relationship to information literacy. Two of Orwell's political diaries from the period 1940–42 were coded for key themes related to the ways in which Orwell discusses and evaluates information and news. These themes were then compared to UNESCO Five Laws of Media and Information Literacy. Textual analysis software NVivo 12 was used to perform keyword searches and word frequency queries in the digitised diaries.

The findings show that while Orwell's diaries and the Five Laws did not share terminology, they did share ideas on bias and access to information. They also extend the history of information literacy research and practice by illustrating how concerns about the need to evaluate information sources are represented within historical literature.

This paper combines historical research with textual analysis to bring a unique historical perspective to information literacy, demonstrating that “fake news” is not a recent phenomenon, and that the tools to fight it may also lie in historical research.

Against the backdrop of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) policy – an instrument with which the UN seeks to protect vulnerable civilians from gross violations of human rights – this study examines the application of R2P in the Libyan intervention and the various efforts to replicate similar claim to intervene in Syria. While proposing that the roles of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) is increasingly influential to the success of an intervention, this study asks the question: what are the general conditions for success of R2P application in Libya and Syria during the period 2011-2014?

In its examination of the policy and scholarly works that have informed, justified and evaluated the processes and outcomes of the principles of R2P policy, this paper used relevant search terms for conditions for success of humanitarian military intervention (COSI). Specific keywords such as R2P, BRICS and humanitarian intervention are scrutinised for relevance to the research question. Documents that failed to satisfy the criteria of research quality were excluded, whereas the key problems and findings identified in each studied document were tabulated into inclusion and exclusion.

Despite the role of BRICS in the Libyan and Syrian interventions, existing literature failed to explicitly make this connection, although much of the literature agreed on a number of general conditions for success. This paper problematise the relationship between success and BRICS role. One of the reasons for this is the emerging nature of the literature that is beginning to appreciate the plausibility that the BRICS influences the success of an intervention.

This piece synthesises studies that focus on COSI with preference for works that engaged this study’s case countries. Much rich data which even until now are always in need of close examination emerged during data collection, making it useful to craft a third part for BRICS-focused literature that has informed the R2P debate.

How ought religion and democratic politics relate to each other in a spirit of intellectual humility? This chapter suggests four potential understandings of the relationship: hindrance, resource, evaluation, and source. Each of these understandings seems to take for granted a form of Enlightenment rationality (whether in support or opposition), and the final section of the chapter develops a synthesis of Durkheim and Dewey to consider a different way through which religion and deliberative democracy can coexist, one more sensitive to the role of emotion, ritual, and contingency and thereby more open to the problem of epistemic arrogance and the necessity for intellectual humility.

The remarkable increase of sophistication of artificial intelligence in recent years has already led to its widespread use in martial applications, the potential of so-called “killer robots” ceasing to be a subject of fiction. The purpose of this paper is to re-examine the consequences of the availability of lethal autonomous robots (LARs) on global peace.

Virtually without exception, the aforementioned potential of LARs has generated fear, as evidenced by a mounting number of academic articles calling for the ban on their development and deployment. An analysis of the existing ethical objections to LARs is used as a vehicle for their critique and the advancement of an alternative.

The presented analysis shows the contemporary thought to be deficient in philosophical rigour, these deficiencies leading to a different view, one favourable to the development of LARs.

The emergent thesis is that LARs can in fact be a force for peace, leading to fewer and less deadly wars.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new approach to understanding the interrelationships between education and violent conflict, namely, one that focuses on the multifaceted, context‐specific impact of conflict on school communities and departs from the lived experiences of teachers and students in conflict‐affected places.

The paper is based on ethnographic, child‐centred research in elementary schools in Lebanon. It explores how the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel and subsequent internal sectarian strife in Lebanon have shaped the ways in which school communities confront issues of violence and identity.

By viewing the relationship between education and violent conflict as multifaceted and context‐dependent, this paper elicits how schools may become complicit in the continuing of violent conflict, rather than supporting its ending. It shows how teachers' pleas for peace are overruled by political conflict, partly as a result of children's engagement with politics. The paper argues for grounding educational interventions in children's lived realities so as to optimise their capacities for bridging differences and shaping a better future.

The lived experiences of students and teachers in conflict zones have rarely been exposed. On the basis of anthropological research, this paper offers original and critical insights into the interrelationships between education and violent conflict, based on the perspectives of elementary school students and their educators.

The C3 Framework is a recent example in a long history within the field of social studies education of efforts to engage teachers and students in inquiry-oriented teaching and learning. While there is some research regarding the efficacy of the inquiry design model (IDM) of the C3 Framework, few studies have sought to engage social studies teachers as coresearchers as they integrate the framework. This study addressed a persistent divide between the theory and practice of integrating inquiry in the social studies.

In this study, a classroom teacher and a university-based researcher conducted a hybrid action research study to understand the instructional shifts that occur as the C3 Framework is fully implemented into instruction.

Based on the findings, the authors present a theory of action to highlight key opportunities to shift instruction, while also acknowledging the factors that might mitigate those shifts. In particular, the authors focus on teacher decision-making and contextual factors that allow for and hinder the full integration of inquiry.

This study is unique in developing a hybrid action research/qualitative case study that provides insider knowledge related to improving social studies teaching and learning.