Charles Bean was Australia's greatest and most famous war correspondent. He is the man who told Australia about the horrors of Gallipoli and the Western Front. He is the man who created the Anzac legend. He is the man who was absolutely central to the creation of this country's most important cultural institution, the Australian War Memorial. Yet we know so little about the real man. Bean was not just a key figure in the telling of Australia's military history but also in the shaping of the emerging Australian identity in the years after Federation
About 1300 Australians died in the desert campaigns of World War I, while another 3500 died in North Africa and the Middle East during World War II. Thousands more carried the wounds of war for the rest of their lives. Countless families were left behind to mourn the dead and comfort the injured. A ripple effect of grief passed down the generations. This is the story of Australia's desert wars as never before told. Using letters, diaries, interviews and unpublished memoirs, Desert Boys provides an intensely personal and gripping insight into the thoughts, feelings and experiences of two generations of Australian soldiers. In many cases these were fathers and sons going to successive wars with all the tragedy, adventure and hardship that brought
AbstractSuperficially, citizenship appears relatively simple: a legal status denoting political membership. However, critical citizenship studies scholars suggest that citizenship is first and foremost a political practice. When non-citizens, such as irregularised migrants, constitute themselves as citizens through their actions, irrespective of legal status, these practices of citizenship have transformational potential because they are extra-legal. Yet, there is an ambivalence here: rights-claiming migrants tend to frame their key demands within the terms of the law often by calling for the regularisation of their status. This article addresses this ambivalence by adopting a 'deconstructive method' to investigate the legal dimensions of citizenship as sites of theoretical and political intervention. It is argued that practices of rights-claiming by irregularised migrants are important to grasp because they mobilise the paradoxes inherent to the fact that universal rights are enshrined in the constitutional texts of modern citizenship in order to generate new legal meanings and horizons of justice. This hypothesis is explored through a series of illustrative examples of rights-claiming taking place within and beyond the formal confines of legal orders. In so doing, the article sets out a novel conceptual framework for analysing how migrants' claims to justice strategically negotiate citizenship in its legal form.
This article examines the relevance of rhetorical analysis for the theory and practice of rights-claiming. Recent work in the field of human rights proposes that what is important about rights is not what they 'are' but what they 'do'. Utilising performative theory, they suggest that rights-claiming is best understood as a perlocutionary practice of persuasion. The question is, 'How might rights claims be most persuasive?' This article applies insights from the field of rhetoric to investigate how practices of rights-claiming by migrants in France contest French citizenship. It argues that rights claims are ethico-political negotiations of a political situation and that such practices are persuasive when they mobilise transcendent principles embedded within particular political communities. Rhetorical analysis explains how rights can be both inventive and efficacious. In so doing, this article extends the human rights literature by providing a refined rights-claiming analytic.
When Roscoe Pound, Dean of Harvard Law School, accepted an honorary degree from a leading German university in 1934, it was interpreted as a gesture of support for the Nazi Party. Was this a naïve misstep, or something more sinister? This Article addresses that question. It highlights previously unknown encounters between Pound and senior Nazi figures at the time, and an unusual relationship between Pound and a suspected Nazi agent that lasted throughout the Second World War, and beyond. These revelations necessarily bring into question Pound's personal ethics and his professional responsibilities as a lawyer.
In: Political geography: an interdisciplinary journal for all students of political studies with an interest in the geographical and spatial aspects, Band 115, S. 103205
Abstract The archives of migration are piecemeal and scattered. This is both an epistemological problem, and a matter of political concern in an international order that forces people to migrate, racializes them, and renders them subject to violence. In response, we explore the potential of counter-archiving migration. First, we explain why archives matter politically, and consider which traces of migration are stored and which are absent or lost. Second, we develop a methodology for counter-archiving migration. Third, we illustrate a process of counter-archiving, taking protests and violent evictions outside the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) offices as an analytical lens. We begin with an "along the grain" reading of official archives; we then turn to ethnography to trace the memories, practices, and material remnants of migrants' struggles. Our analysis makes the case for counter-archival work in and beyond the field of migration. We argue that this approach serves to disrupt the epistemic violence of classification systems and categories associated with border violence; to chart the contestations and transformations of the global order from below; and to articulate new horizons of justice.