He was the founding editor and is publisher of the transdisciplinary journal of the humanities and social sciences, Borderlands.[1]
His published work ranges across the fields of environmental politics, science and technology studies, security studies, war and peace, international ethics, the international relations of the Asia-Pacific and the Middle-East, and Australian politics and history.[2]
He is the author of four books: Uranium (Polity, 2017), Ethics and Global Security: A Cosmopolitan Approach (with Katrina Lee-Koo and Matt McDonald, Routledge 2014), Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against The Other (Routledge, 2007), and Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (Pluto Press Australia, 2001; 2nd. edn. Cambridge University Press, 2008). He is the co-editor of Ethical Security Studies: A New Research Agenda (with Jonna Nyman, Routledge 2016), Global Insecurity: Futures of Global Chaos and Governance (with Rita Parker, Palgrave, 2017), and Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific (with Matthew McDonald, Manchester University Press, 2007).
Key shorter works include "Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the end of IR" (Millennium, 2016), "Security Cosmopolitanism" (Critical Studies on Security, 2013), "Humanity After Biopolitics" (Angelaki, 2011), "Ontologies of War" (Theory & Event, 2006), and "Aporias of Security" (Alternatives, 2002).
Education and career
Anthony Burke received a B.A. (Communications) in 1991 and M.A. by thesis in 1994 from the University of Technology Sydney, where he also tutored and lectured. He studied journalism, creative writing, cultural theory and politics under teachers and intellectuals such as the literary theorist Stephen Muecke, sociologists Jean Martin and Caroline Graham, novelist Amanda Lohrey, semiologist Gunther Kress, media theorists Helen Wilson and McKenzie Wark and historians John Docker and Ann Curthoys. His fellow students included writers such as Claire Corbett, Lindsay Barrett, Fiona Allon, Bernard Cohen, Justine Ettler and Anthony Macris. During this time, until the mid-1990s, he also worked as a human rights activist with campaigns for East Timor, Bougainville, West Papua and Indonesia. In 1991-2 he was a researcher in telecommunications law and policy at the Communications Law Centre, UNSW.[2]
He was awarded a PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the Australian National University in 1999, and subsequently worked in the Australian Senate as a committee researcher on the environment, arts and communications. Whilst there he led a research team on the Senate's 2000 report, The Heat is On: Australia’s Greenhouse Future.[3]
He was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Queensland in 2001 and left to join the University of Adelaide in July that year. In 2005 he joined the University of New South Wales in Sydney, where he was promoted to Associate Professor in 2007, and in 2008 transferred to its college at the Australian Defence Force Academy in Canberra, Australia's capital.[4]
Writing and Approach
Burke has published four authored books, and a number of journal articles and essays, including an essay on biopolitics and the war on terror, "Life in the hall of smashed mirrors", which used a fictional form.[5][6]
His conceptual approach is a hybrid of poststructuralist themes (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Butler and Agamben), post-colonial theory (Said) and post-Kantian critical theory (from Frankfurt School figures such as Horkheimer, Habermas and Fromm, to harder to classify thinkers like Arendt, Levinas, Buber, Heller, Heidegger). Within the field of International Relations, his approach would be known as that of a "critical constructivist", and it does not fit easily into established theoretical "camps". More recently, his work on nuclear politics, security studies and environmental politics has drawn strongly on new materialist and post-humanist thinking.
Burke's first book, In Fear of Security: Australia's Invasion Anxiety, developed a theory of security as a 'political technology' with an historical account of how security has been defined, sought and mobilized throughout Australian history. It has a particular emphasis on Australia's policy towards Indonesia and the Asia-Pacific. Its second edition includes a chapter on Australia's repression and exclusion of asylum seekers, and its involvement in the US-led war on terror, and a new conclusion setting out a cosmopolitan future for Australia. While describing a more hopeful and progressive vision of Australian politics and foreign policy (in sympathy with broad notions of human security, or the Welsh School's emancipatory approach to critical security studies), its detailed empirical account of how security has functioned as a tool of the powerful in Australian history, at the same time as denying security and dignity to millions, challenges both conservative and progressive visions of security.[2][7]
His second book, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against the Other, combined political philosophy with a range of empirical studies: Israel/Palestine, the War on Terror, American exceptionalism, the Iraq and Vietnam wars, and the Australia-Indonesia relationship during the dictatorship of Soeharto. It develops his critical theory of security across three chapters, a further three chapters interrogate dominant ethical approaches to national security, especially just war theory, and the final three chapters question the constitutive and dysfunctional role of violence in world politics, finding its claims linked closely with modern ideas of strategy, progress and freedom. The book includes critical engagements with the writings of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, William E. Connolly, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Buber.[2][8]
More recently he has begun to publish works in the fields of critical terrorism studies, and strategic studies, including essays defining the field of critical terrorism studies,[9] on the philosophy of war,[10] terrorism and the use of force,[11] and nuclear strategic reason and disarmament.[12]
Burke has also begun to publish work engaging with Cosmopolitanism in international relations, philosophy and political theory,[13] which is pursued in a way that is both critical and transformative of more liberal notions of the cosmopolitan. There he develops a distinctive empirical-normative justification for it, a new relational ontology to ground its claims and practices, and rejects a teleological vision of change.[14]
In 2013 this direction moved into International Security Studies, with the publication of his theory of "Security Cosmopolitanism"[15] in the inaugural issue of Critical Studies on Security. Arguing that the realities of globalisation and the biosphere had made the classical model of the state (as a contained and sovereign "body-politic" that can immunise itself from external threats) both retrograde and dangerous, he proposed a new paradigm of security theory and practice that would radically transform both national and collective security practices and grapple with the way global insecurities emerge from with states and the structural practices and systems of modernity. This theory frames the 2014 book co-authored with Katrina Lee-Koo and Matt McDonald, Ethics and Global Security: A Cosmopolitan Approach.[16]
Controversy
In 2008, following the publication of an article in the new journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Burke was criticised by neo-conservative intellectuals in Australia.[9] This dispute quickly attracted national media attention.[17]
A Queensland university lecturer, Mervyn Bendle, writing in the magazine Quadrant, accused Burke and a number of other writers of supporting and apologizing for terrorism in their works. He also criticized Burke's teaching appointment to UNSW at the Australian Defence Force Academy as inappropriate. Bendle wrote that Burke had an "abstract and tendentious postmodernist perspective", and that "one gets an impression not only of the "radical pacifism" deplored by Ungerer, but of a deeper, almost pathological tendency revealed in Burke's antipathy for liberal democracies and mainstream Australians, and his relentless sympathy for terrorists, illegal immigrants, communists, and "the Other" in its multitudinous forms".[18] Bendle also repeated these views on ABC Radio National's Religion Report[19] and in The Australian.[20]
Burke responded by stating that he was neither a pacifist nor a supporter of terrorism, and stressed that his work "has been about trying to make liberal democracy better, better at living up to its own values and protecting the freedoms that are proclaimed so loudly about".[21] He emphasized that he had consistently "condemned terrorism as an immoral, illegitimate and politically counter-productive form of violence".[22] He responded to the claims in an interview on ABC Radio National[21] and his scholarship on terrorism was profiled in The Australian's Higher Education Supplement.[23]
Ethics and Global Security: A Cosmopolitan Approach (with Katrina Lee-Koo and Matt McDonald, Routledge, 2014).here
Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (Cambridge University Press, 2008 and Pluto Press Australia, 2001).here
Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against The Other (Routledge, 2007).here
Articles
"Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the end of IR", with Stefanie Fishel, Audra Mitchell, Simon Dalby and Daniel J. Levine, Millennium, Vol. 33 No. 3, 2016.
Burke, Anthony (September 2005). "Against the New Internationalism". Ethics & International Affairs. 19 (2): 73–89. doi:10.1111/j.1747-7093.2005.tb00501.x.
"Just War or Ethical Peace? Moral Discourses of Strategic Violence after 9/11", International Affairs, Vol. 80 No. 2, March 2004.
State terrorism refers to acts of terrorism which a state conducts against another state or against its own citizens.
Terrorism, in its broadest sense, is the use of intentional violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims. The term is used in this regard primarily to refer to intentional violence during peacetime or in the context of war against non-combatants. The terms "terrorist" and "terrorism" originated during the French Revolution of the late 18th century but became widely used internationally and gained worldwide attention in the 1970s during the Troubles in Northern Ireland, the Basque conflict, and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. The increased use of suicide attacks from the 1980s onwards was typified by the 2001 September 11 attacks in the United States.
Counterterrorism, also known as anti-terrorism, relates to the practices, military tactics, techniques, and strategies that governments, law enforcement, businesses, and intelligence agencies use to combat or eliminate terrorism.
There is no universal agreement on the legal definition of terrorism, although there exists a consensus academic definition created by scholars.
Cosmopolitanism is the idea that all human beings are members of a single community. Its adherents are known as cosmopolitan or cosmopolite. Cosmopolitanism is both prescriptive and aspirational, believing humans can and should be "world citizens" in a "universal community". The idea encompasses different dimensions and avenues of community, such as promoting universal moral standards, establishing global political structures, or developing a platform for mutual cultural expression and tolerance.
Robert Anthony Pape Jr. is an American political scientist who studies national and international security affairs, with a focus on air power, American and international political violence, social media propaganda, and terrorism. He is currently a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and founder and director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST).
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is a British investigative journalist, author and academic. He is editor of the crowdfunded investigative journalism platform INSURGE intelligence. He is a former environment blogger for The Guardian from March 2013 to July 2014. From 2014 to 2017, Ahmed was a weekly columnist for Middle East Eye, the London-based news portal founded by ex-Guardian writer David Hearst. He is 'System Shift' columnist at VICE covering issues around global systems crises and solutions. Ahmed is now Special Investigations Reporter at Byline Times.
Laura Elizabeth Sjoberg is an American feminist scholar of international relations and international security. Her work specializes in gendered interpretations of just war theory, feminist security studies, and women's violence in global politics.
Michael E. Cox is a British academic and international relations scholar. He is currently Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Director of LSE IDEAS. He also teaches for the TRIUM Global Executive MBA Program, an alliance of NYU Stern and the London School of Economics and HEC School of Management.
David Peter Wright-Neville is a former Australian academic who specialised in international relations and terrorism. He was Deputy Director of the Global Terrorism Research Centre and an Associate Professor of Politics in the School of Political and Social Inquiry at Monash University until his resignation in 2009. His contributions to discussions on terrorism appear in Australian and overseas media In 2008, he was selected to participate in the Australia 2020 Summit.
Daniele Archibugi is an Italian economic and political theorist. He works on the economics and policy of innovation and technological change, on the political theory of international relations and on political and technological globalisation.
Critical terrorism studies (CTS) applies a critical theory approach rooted in counter-hegemonic and politically progressive critical theory to the study of terrorism. With links to the Frankfurt School of critical theory and the Aberystwyth School of critical security studies, CTS seeks to understand terrorism as a social construction, or a label, that is applied to certain violent acts through a range of political, legal and academic processes. It also seeks to understand and critique dominant forms of counter-terrorism.
Kimberly Hutchings is Professor of Politics and International Relations at Queen Mary University of London.
Sir Adam Roberts is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the University of Oxford, a senior research fellow in Oxford University's Department of Politics and International Relations, and an emeritus fellow of Balliol College, Oxford.
Security studies, also known as international security studies, is an academic sub-field within the wider discipline of international relations that studies organized violence, military conflict, national security, and international security.
Maxwell "Max" Taylor is a Criminal and Legal psychologist. His early work specialised in the study of terrorism but he also became involved in the study of sex offenders, and in the development of capacity building activities for disadvantaged children in conflict zones, returning later to the study of terrorism.
Feminist ethics is an approach to ethics that builds on the belief that traditionally ethical theorizing has undervalued and/or underappreciated women's moral experience, which is largely male-dominated, and it therefore chooses to reimagine ethics through a holistic feminist approach to transform it.
Amitav Acharya is an Indian-born Canadian scholar and author, who is Distinguished Professor of International Relations at American University, Washington, D.C., where he holds the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance at the School of International Service, and serves as the chair of the ASEAN Studies Initiative. Acharya has expertise in and has made contributions to a wide range of topics in International Relations, including constructivism, ASEAN and Asian regionalism, and Global International Relations. He became the first non-Western President of the International Studies Association when he was elected to the post for 2014–15.
Anthony Dirk Moses is an Australian scholar who researches various aspects of genocide. In 2022 he became the Anne and Bernard Spitzer Professor of Political Science at the City College of New York, after having been the Frank Porter Graham Distinguished Professor of Global Human Rights History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is a leading scholar of genocide, especially in colonial contexts, as well as of the political development of the concept itself. He is known for coining the term racial century in reference to the period 1850–1950. He is editor-in-chief of the Journal of Genocide Research.
Steven C. Roach is an American professor of International Relations who writes on global ethics, the politics of international law, critical international theory, minority rights, and South Sudan's politics. He is Professor of International Relations and former Director of Graduate Programs at the School of Interdisciplinary Global Studies at the University of South Florida.
↑ Bellamy, Alex J.; Bleiker, Roland; Davies, Sara E.; Devetak, Richard (2007). Security and the War on Terror. Routledge. ISBN978-1-134-20542-4.[pageneeded]
↑ Introduction to Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against The Other (Routledge, 2007), and "Recovering Humanity from Man: Hannah Arendt’s Troubled Cosmopolitanism", International Politics, Vol. 45 No. 4, July 2008. http://www.palgrave-journals.com/ip/journal/v45/n4/index.html%5B%5D
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