Index
Global Studies Seminar Series
Beginning in July 2010, the Globalism Research Centre will run its Global Studies Seminar Series, a program of free public seminars exploring key thinking in the field of global studies. Our aim is to provide an intellectually challenging but accessible and collegial environment for discussion and debate around central themes in globalisation.
Defending the vulnerable: balancing the rights of individuals and states in international refugee regimes
Defending the vulnerable: balancing the rights of individuals and states in international refugee regimes (MP3 57min 12sec21.6 Mb)
21 July
4.45–6.00 pm
Research Lounge, RMIT Building 28, Level 5
The 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and its 1967 Protocol establish important criteria and guidelines for providing protection for individuals experiencing persecution. Yet since its inception, the Convention has been criticised on a number of levels. Recent criticism has focused particularly on the narrow scope of the Convention definition of who qualifies as a refugee, particularly in light of changing global circumstances that are driving more and more people to flee their country of origin for reasons other than individual persecution. In particular, generalised violence, chaos and disorder, violations of economic, social and cultural rights and growing threats to life and liberty posed by environmental and climate-induced disasters are factors prompting flight that are not covered by the definition of a refugee enshrined in the 1951 Convention. Moreover, the focus is on protection of basic liberty and security, with little attention given to subsistence and livelihood.
This paper explores proposals to alter the international definition of a refugee and for developing additional forms of protection for those who do not qualify as a refugee under the classical interpretation of the convention. It argues that, notwithstanding important developments in protection regimes at the international level, these mechanisms remain insufficient for ensuring that the basic rights of individuals fleeing their countries of origin are protected and upheld. Despite the predominantly humanitarian purpose of international refugee law, states are not always driven by humanitarian principles in their interpretation and application of the law. A critical problem in global migration politics remains how to protect and uphold the rights and needs of individuals alongside the rights of states. Drawing on insights from basic rights discourse, theories of hospitality and the concept of survival migration, the paper outlines alternatives that address current shortcomings in the international refugee and asylum seeker protection regime.
Respondent: Professor Paul James
Dr Erin K. Wilson is a Research Fellow in the Globalism Research Centre. Her key area of research is religion and its relationship with different aspects of politics, global justice and violence, and she is currently completing work on her book manuscript Religion, the West and International Relations: An Alternative Approach.
Revolutionary health: state capacity, social capital and the Cuban health paradox
11 August
4.30–6.00 pm
Research Lounge, RMIT Building 28, Level 5
This seminar explores the research findings recently published in the book Social Relations and the Cuban Health Miracle (Transaction, April 2010). Adopting a theoretical framework based on findings in recent ‘state capacity’ and ‘social capital’ literatures, the book explores the puzzle of Cuba’s key national health indicators, which are extremely positive for the country’s region and developing status, and given the arduous external circumstances it has faced in recent decades. The work was written and researched over a period of around five years, including nine months of fieldwork in Havana. Its central findings are that Cuba’s outcomes are partly attributable to an unusually high level of popular participation and cooperation in the implementation of health policy. This has been achieved with the help of a longstanding government that prioritises key health areas, and has enough political influence to compel the rest of the community to do the same. On the other hand, the degree of real popular participation in decision-making regarding health policy is minimal, and this carries consequences that sometimes compromise and even undermine certain aspects of health care quality.
Respondent to be announced.
Elizabeth Kath is a Research Fellow with the Global Cities Research Institute. Her past work has mostly been interdisciplinary, spanning the fields of political/social science, public health and development, while her more recent research interests relate to issues of reconciliation, particularly as they relate to health in various global contexts.
Opting out of citizenship? Sovereign logic and the autonomy of migration
Opting out of citizenship (MP3 1 hour 21 min 11 sec 29MB)
8 September
4.30–6.00 pm
Research Lounge, RMIT Building 28, Level 5
What does it mean to opt-out of citizenship? Reflecting on the inter-war refugee crisis, Hannah Arendt theorised statelessness or the lack of national citizenship as the loss of the right to have rights and the ultimate state of dehumanisation. More recently, Georgio Agamben has theorised the refugee as the figure of homo sacer, reduced to bare life (existence without political status) through the excesses of sovereign power. Agamben's work has been highly influential in studies which point to the extreme vulnerability of all kinds of irregular migrants whose right to have rights is suspended through a range of border policing technologies. Working against these approaches, an emergent discourse on ‘the autonomy of migration’ begins from a different assumption. From this perspective, migration is as much an expression of agency as it is the result of external pressures. Indeed the act of migration (and especially irregular migration) is understood as inherently subversive on account of its potential to undermine the sovereign logic that assesses the right to have rights in terms of citizens, aliens and different classes of migrant. 'Going underground' represents a case of opting out of citizenship—refusing to submit to the liberal rights-based framework that regulates mobility and political subjecthood.
This paper critically engages with these two competing perspectives. It argues that neither is capable of fully capturing the diversity and nuance of acts of (irregular) migration nor contemporary dynamics of citizenship. It also points out the political risks that pertain to each opposing view. It does so by reflecting upon activist strategies enacted by irregular migrants in Berlin and Brandenburg. These strategies suggest that we need to come to terms with a messy and often contradictory arsenal of tools that migrants employ to secure their political futures. Paradoxically, these strategies both contest and reinforce the sovereign logic against which they rail.
Respondent to be announced.
Anne McNevin is a Research Fellow in the Global Cities Research Institute. Her key areas of research include citizenship, migration, and globalization. She is co-Chief Investigator on an ARC Discovery Project, ‘Irregular Migrants and Political Belonging in Global Cities’, and she is currently working on a book Contesting Citizenship: Irregular Migrants and New Frontiers of the Political.
The new politics of climate change: building political momentum and community support for adequate action on climate change
Professor Robyn Eckersley and Dr Martin Mulligan
New politics of climate change (MP3 1 hour 32 min 18 sec 42MB)
13 October
4.30–6.00 pm
Research Lounge, RMIT Building 28, Level 5
In regard to responding to the enormous challenges of climate change, the public debate in Australia has been frustratingly narrow and yet polarising. The Rudd/Gillard governments have put nearly all their emphasis on the twice-defeated Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) and an increased roll-out renewable energy alternatives, while the Abbott-led opposition has given new oxygen to climate change scepticism and has talked very loosely about 'direct action' rather than taxation.
The extraordinary outcome of the recent federal election has changed the political climate significantly yet big challenges lie ahead for building an adequate political response to what Kevin Rudd properly called the ‘greatest moral challenge of our time’. Professor Robyn Eckersley and Dr Martin Mulligan will discuss ways of building political momentum and broader community support for a more fundamental shift in the way we look at this 'issue'.
Professor Robyn Eckersley is Head of Political Science at the University of Melbourne and author of the book The green state: rethinking democracy and sovereignty.
Dr Martin Mulligan is the Director of the Globalism Research Centre at RMIT University and was co-author of the book Ecological pioneers: a social history of Australian ecological thought and action.
Worlds in transition: evolving governance across a stressed planet
Worlds in transition (MP3 1 hour 26 min 8 sec 40MB)
10 November
5.30–7.00 pm
Research Lounge, RMIT Building 28, Level 5
In a recent book Professors Joseph Camilleri and Jim Falk set out to investigate how the capacity of humans to shape their future—and in particular through the processes which collectively have become known as public governance—are, could, and perhaps even should evolve during this period of extraordinary transition which humans and their planet are experiencing. Inevitably such a goal could be only partially realised.
In this seminar Jim Falk will describe some of the elements of this analysis, and conclusions drawn, with particular attention to ‘sectoral studies’ around issues associated with climate change and the intensifying global flows of information and pathogens.
Professor Jim Falk is the foundation Director of the Australian Centre for Science, Innovation and Society (ACSIS) and Convenor of the Climate Adaptation Science and Policy Initiative (CASPI) at the University of Melbourne. He is also Director of the Association of Pacific Rim Universities Pacific Cities: Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies (CMAS) project—a collaborative project across Australia, China, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and the USA. His most recent book, co-authored with Professor Joseph Camilleri and released earlier this year, is Worlds in transition: evolving governance across a stressed planet (Edward Elgar, London, 2010)..