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The China Labyrinth
James Madison famously remarked that a popular government without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a prologue to a farce or a tragedy. The present government of the People’s Republic of China has set out to disprove this rule. Rejecting talk of farce and tragedy, its rulers claim their authority is [...]
Political Reflections on Antarctica – Workshop Description
The 2012 Annual Symposium of The Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia (ASSA) Tuesday, 20 November 2012, Canberra Workshop Description Background: Social science perspectives on Antarctica are limited in scope and quantity. In the fields of political science, international relations, legal studies and public policy, there is ample literature on subjects such as governance [...]
Remembering the many Václav Havels
During my first encounter with him, in Prague in 1984, when everything seemed hopeless, I was struck by the man’s hedgehog resilience. Here was a rarity: an unusual figure, intense but witty, a clear-headed thinker and a wonderful writer, a courageous individual blessed with a razor-sharp sense of irony; a chain-smoking man of letters whose [...]
Václav Havel: a biographer’s account
Václav Havel has died aged 75. A poet and playwright, a political writer, dissident and a politician, Havel was the tenth and last President of Czechoslovakia, and the first President of the Czech Republic founded in 1993. The Conversation spoke with Sydney University Professor of Politics John Keane, author of Václav Havel: A Political Tragedy [...]
Tunisian hope and Greek despair: A week in the life of democracy
It has been a tumultuous week in the life and times of democracy in the Mediterranean. Seven days punctuated by joyous hope and its ugly opposite, sullen despair. The promising news came from Tunisia, hopeful homeland of the Arab uprisings against dictatorship, where a well-organised free and clean election served as a moment of breathtaking [...]
The Hidden Media Powers that Undermine Democracy
When recently ploughing through Tony Blair’s autobiography, I hit a rare rock of truth. On the last night of the second millennium, when the government’s extravaganza spectacles were faring badly, Blair recalls with special horror his discovery that a pack of top journalists invited to attend the midnight Millennium Dome celebrations had been left stranded [...]
Greed and Democracy
When making sense of the weird things happening in the northern hemisphere one trend should not escape our notice: a deepening crisis caused by bankers’ greed is beginning to rip the guts out of democracy. Here’s what the textbooks say: in the countries of continental Europe, Britain and the United States, democracy is a special [...]
Greece debt crisis threatens democracy
Athens is no longer considered by scholars as the birthplace of democracy but all of a sudden it has become the epicentre of a powerful political earthquake rocking the foundations of every democracy in the Atlantic region. Street fighting has turned whole sections of the city into burned-out battle zones. Some areas are controlled by [...]
Bin Laden, Assassination and Democracy
Osama bin Laden is dead – assassinated a fortnight ago by bullets sprayed from the guns of special armed forces of the United States. During the wild celebrations that followed, the word “assassination” was never once used by politicians. There were instead euphemisms galore. Bin Laden was said to have been “struck down” or “eliminated”. [...]
Refolution in the Arab world
Great revolutionary convulsions typically trigger long-lasting reflections on their causes and consequences. The European tradition of political thinking harbours many well-known examples, including Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Harold Laski’s Reflections on the Revolution of Our Times (1943) and Ralf Dahrendorf’s Reflections on the Revolution in Europe (1990). There are not [...]