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Ink and Land »
Documenting Factionalism around a Prospective Mine in Papua New Guinea
Authored by: Willem Church
Publication date: 2025
Ink and Land is an ethnographic account of political and legal struggles over landownership in Papua New Guinea, in which competing factions seek recognition as customary landowners of Wafi-Golpu, a major prospective copper-gold mine. Drawing on extensive archival research, oral histories, court documents and fifteen months of fieldwork, the book examines how different groups attempt to harness resource extraction for their benefit and how, in doing so, they reshape their social worlds through the medium of affidavits, court declarations and incorporation certificates. To analyse this process, the book advances the concept of antagonistic documentality—a form of conflict in which parties engage in conflicting world-building projects through and about documents and, in doing so, create an order of paper that outlasts the disputes themselves. Through this detailed case study, Ink and Land reveals how legal and bureaucratic battles over resource extraction in Papua New Guinea formalise factionalism, consolidate elite control over new sources of wealth, and redefine the nature of groups and landownership. By focusing on conflict over documents as a process of social transformation, the book offers fresh insights into the politics of land, law and resource extraction in the contemporary Pacific.
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East Asia Forum Quarterly: Volume 17, Number 2, 2025 »
Publication date: May 2025
Asia is home to some of the world’s most diverse political systems—from liberal democracies to authoritarian regimes and hybrid states. As global democracy faces renewed pressure, this edition of East Asia Forum Quarterly explores how political systems across Asia are evolving amid rising autocratisation. It examines why economic development alone cannot explain democratic outcomes in the region and how authoritarian success stories are reshaping debates about governance. With ideological contestation intensifying, Asia is not just adapting to global political trends—it is helping to define them.
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Made in China Journal: Volume 9, Issue 2, 2024 »
Edited by: Ivan Franceschini, Nicholas Loubere
Publication date: May 2025
Chinese journalism is dead—long live Chinese journalism! The dramatic transformations in China’s media landscape over the past decade have led many to declare the death of quality journalism in the country. The Party-State’s tightening grip on information, the dismantling of once vibrant investigative outlets, and the growing precarity of media professionals seem to confirm this narrative. And yet, as traditional spaces for critical reporting shrink, new modes of journalistic practice continue to emerge, often in dispersed and unexpected forms. From citizen-led investigations and social media exposés to transnational collaborations, Chinese journalism has not disappeared—it has adapted. This issue of the Made in China Journal explores the shifting terrain of journalistic production in and about China, tracing the resilience, reinvention, and risks that define the profession today.
War 4.0 »
Armed Conflict in an Age of Speed, Uncertainty and Transformation
Edited by: Deane-Peter Baker, Mark Hilborne
Publication date: April 2025
This volume explores the impact of technology and new domains on future warfare. It identifies several themes, and highlights the increasing complexity of the security environment and the uncertainty of future war. The sense of time and speed has been, and is being, compressed by developments in quantum technologies, the cyber domain, artificial intelligence, the increased capabilities of sensors and data collection, as well as new propulsion technologies such as hypersonic designs. Concepts regarding the shape and extent of the battlefield are challenged by the notion of hybrid war and sub-threshold tactics, as well as new domains in which competition is increasing, such as space. Further challenging the shape of the battlefield is the increased development of remote and autonomous warfare. Commercial developments will affect how military production is owned and managed, and how military forces are composed.
Thus, a confluence of new technologies exists, combining to create the potential of fundamental transformation at many levels. This wave of technological change has been called the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR), characterised by an exponential rather than a linear rate of change, generated by convergence and complementarity of emerging technology domains. These may not affect the fundamental Clausewitzian nature of war, but they will likely affect its character. From a military perspective, the key will be the impact on the speed of operations and on the shape of the operational domain—the factors of time and space. The combination of these shifts will increasingly affect the perception of states and the degree of certainty in approaching and engaging in conflict.
Strategic Imagination »
Essays in Honour of Brendan Sargeant
Edited by: Andrew Carr
Publication date: 2025
This book examines the concept of ‘strategic imagination’ developed by Brendan Sargeant during his distinguished career at the Australian Department of Defence and later as a scholar at the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre (SDSC), The Australian National University. His tragic passing has left this powerful idea awaiting a proper examination. This volume seeks to provide that scholarly account and carry both the concept and Brendan’s legacy forward.
The book is organised in three parts. First, former officials like Dennis Richardson join leading scholars, including Mark McKenna, Anthea Roberts and Ian Hall, to explore the unusual conjunction of strategy and imagination, demonstrating its crucial role in effective scholarship and policy.
Second, analysts from Australia and worldwide examine how strategic imagination improves strategic practice by revealing hidden possibilities, catalysing essential conversations and challenging core assumptions.
The final section offers personal reflections from Brendan’s colleagues at the SDSC, providing a fitting tribute to his life and contribution. The volume also includes selections of Brendan’s own writing on strategic imagination, ensuring his voice continues to inspire scholars and officials to explore this rich and powerful concept.
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Because COVID … »
Pandemic Responses, Rationales and Ruses
Edited by: Shirley Leitch, Sally Wheeler
Publication date: April 2025
The norms of everyday life were often cast aside during the pandemic years. States shut their borders, mothballed their economies, and locked down their cities. Individuals put family life, career goals, travel plans – even medical treatments – on hold. In Australia, a Government elected on a platform of neo-libertarian freedom and debt reduction, spent like Keynesians while curtailing even basic freedoms. Some citizens protested but most accepted curfews, mask mandates and the shuttering of schools and workplaces in exchange for the promise of safety.
Across every sphere of life, ‘Because Covid’ became an accepted shorthand, serving as both a response and rationale for previously unthinkable actions. Yet, it is always a mistake to take such things at face value.
Contributors to this book look beyond the rhetoric of Australia’s COVID-19 responses to consider where the pandemic has taken us as a nation. We examine economic policy, bioethics, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, global supply chains, public value science, violence against women, the experiences of Indigenous communities, news media practices, the arts sector, historical precedents, and more. What can we learn about managing future risks? What are the consequences, intended or not, of particular policy interventions? Are there new opportunities as normalisation kicks in? Our goal is to offer broad-ranging insights into the Australian experience at the very time the nation is beginning to learn how to live with COVID-19.
The Wild Australia Show »
The Story of an Aboriginal Performance Troupe and its Afterlives
Authored by: Paul Memmott, Maria Nugent, Michael Aird, Lindy Allen, Chantal Knowles, Jonathan Richards
Publication date: 2025
The Wild Australia Show was a troupe of 27 Aboriginal performers recruited from northern Queensland in the 1890s for a world tour that would culminate at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Those grand plans were ultimately dashed, and the troupe only performed in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne before disbanding. This book tells the story of the Wild Australia Show from its inception to its afterlives. It traces how the performers were recruited, the places they came from, the repertoire they created, rehearsed and performed, their experiences on tour and the politics of their representation in word and image. Drawing on an extensive archive of newspaper reports, government records, and court proceedings, richly complemented by photographs and other visual images, the authors seek to reconstruct the Wild Australia Show story from the perspectives of the performers themselves. The book contributes to a growing literature on the history of Aboriginal performers and performances under colonial conditions, and the ways in which public performance could be a means for cultural survival and resurgence.
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Globalising Chinese Actors and Internalising the Belt and Road »
Implications for Global and Domestic Governance
Edited by: Miwa Hirono
Publication date: 2025
The literature on the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) points out either its negative or positive impacts on global and domestic governance. However, such a dichotomy is too simplistic, not least because it tells us little about the complexity of change in the nature of the BRI as it is implemented. This book argues that the BRI manifests an intricate dynamic comprising two contradictory tendencies: Xi Jinping’s top-down and centralised approach to policy-making, with its focus on producing robust Chinese actors who can succeed in a competitive global economy; and a fragmented and decentralised reality made up of an expanding range of actors engaged in realising myriad BRI projects on the ground. The co-existence of these two contradictory tendencies implies that the BRI has a multidimensional impact on global and domestic governance in general, and on the role of Japan in countries where BRI projects take place. Japan matters because of its ‘in-between’ position between non-Western donors and the Development Assistance Committee of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a position that offers a unique dimension to a frequently dichotomous discussion of the BRI. Globally, China’s promotion of the BRI has strengthened an aspect of global governance, the ‘open economy’, while at the same time fostering the Chinese nuance of a ‘planned economy’. Domestically, a Chinese-style approach to state management and investment without political conditions may set back democratisation efforts in emerging countries, but the BRI has also given rise to a renewed sense of democracy in those countries. These multidimensional impacts enable China and Japan to find an on-the-ground complementarity in their approaches to development aid in relation to future cooperation.
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Military History Supremo »
Essays in Honour of David Horner AM FASSA
Edited by: Joan Beaumont, Garth Pratten
Publication date: 2025
Professor Emeritus David Horner AM FASSA is one of Australia’s greatest military historians and its fifth official historian of war and military operations. Few who undertake research in the field can do so without consulting his prodigious, authoritative and definitive publications. Serving for 25 years in the Australian Army before joining The Australian National University, Horner is the epitome of the soldier-scholar and has played a key role in establishing military history as an academic discipline in Australia.
This volume honours Horner’s long career of service to history and the nation. Authors pay tribute to Horner’s legacy by engaging with his scholarship, applying his conclusions to new case studies and contexts, reflecting and expanding on the subjects he addressed and the methodologies he employed, and pushing the boundaries of the discipline he was instrumental in founding. The breadth of Horner’s research is demonstrated by the subjects and themes they address, including strategic planning and policy, command, multinational operations, intelligence, and defence policy. Military History Supremo both underscores Horner’s contribution to Australia’s military and intelligence history and highlights the vibrancy and relevance of the field today.
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Dregs »
Love and Monsters in Small Town New Zealand
Authored by: Laura McLauchlan
Publication date: March 2025
Girls who join dog packs, boys who gain strength from trees, men who love bodies with nobody in them: Dregs is a collection of tenderly monstrous love stories, set in a shadowy small town of the same name. Based in South Canterbury, New Zealand, these lovingly disturbing fictions welcome the strange and other-worldly, while keeping an ethnographic eye trained on the classed, religious, gendered, racialised and species-based forces shaping this rural region of New Zealand's South Island.
While at times grotesque, these darkly loving, richly illustrated tales offer new avenues for ethnographic research and shed new light on the region, giving voice and form to unspoken aspects of this antipodean rural idyll. Shaped by a deep respect for the monstrous feminine, regardless of the gender of the bodies in which such forces appear, Dregs: Love and Monsters in Small Town New Zealand is a product of both an anthropological sensibility and a trust that naming and finding ways to live well with our monsters is a vital aspect of living well in our times.