Anthony D. Burke
Encyclopedia
Anthony Burke is an Australian political theorist and international relations scholar. He is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations in the University of New South Wales
.
He was the founding editor and is publisher of the transdisciplinary journal of the humanities and social sciences, Borderlands.
His published work ranges across the fields of security studies, war and peace, international ethics, the international relations of the Asia-Pacific and the Middle-East, and Australian politics and history. He is best known for contributions to the field of critical security studies and the study of war and peace, combining them with explorations of fundamental themes in political philosophy: freedom, security, sovereignty, terror, being, ethics, and truth.
He is the sole author of two books: 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, with Matthew McDonald, of Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific (Manchester University Press, 2007).
in 1991 and MA 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 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.
He was awarded a Ph.D 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.
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.
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".
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.
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 (dys)functional 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.
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, on the philosophy of war, terrorism and the use of force, and nuclear strategic reason and disarmament.
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". Bendle also repeated these views on ABC Radio National's Religion Report and in The Australian.
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". He emphasized that he had consistently "condemned terrorism as an immoral, illegitimate and politically counter-productive form of violence". He responded to the claims in an interview on ABC Radio National and his scholarship on terrorism was profiled in The Australian's Higher Education Supplement.
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
Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific, edited with Matt McDonald (Manchester University Press, 2007).here
Articles
"Nuclear Reason: At the Limits of Strategy", International Relations, Vol. 23 No. 4, December 2009.
“Postmodernism”, in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal eds. Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2008).
“Recovering Humanity from Man: Hannah Arendt’s Troubled Cosmopolitanism”, International Politics, Vol. 45 No. 4, July 2008.
“Life, In the Hall of Smashed Mirrors”, Borderlands, Vol. 7 No. 1, 2008, and Meanjin Quarterly, Vol. 67 No. 4, December 2008.
“The End of Terrorism Studies”, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Vol. 1 No. 1, 2008.
“Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence, and Reason”, Theory & Event, Vol. 10 No. 2, July 2007.
“Cause and Effect in the War on Terror”, in Alex J. Bellamy, Roland Bleiker, Sara E. Davies and Richard Devetak eds. Security and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2007).here
“Against The New Internationalism”, Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 19 No. 2, Summer 2005. (With a response by Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Against the New Utopianism”)here
“Iraq: Strategy’s Burnt Offering”, Global Change, Peace & Security, Vol. 17 No. 2, July 2005.
“Freedom’s Freedom: American Enlightenment and Permanent War”, Social Identities, Vol. 11, No. 4, July 2005.
“Just War or Ethical Peace? Moral Discourses of Strategic Violence after 9/11”, International Affairs, Vol. 80 No. 2, March 2004.
“Aporias of Security”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 27 No. 1, Jan-Mar 2002.
“Caught Between National and Human Security: Knowledge and Power in Post-Crisis Asia”, Pacifica Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, October 2001.
UNSW Biography: http://hass.unsw.adfa.edu.au/staff/profiles/burke.html
University of New South Wales
The University of New South Wales , is a research-focused university based in Kensington, a suburb in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia...
.
He was the founding editor and is publisher of the transdisciplinary journal of the humanities and social sciences, Borderlands.
His published work ranges across the fields of security studies, war and peace, international ethics, the international relations of the Asia-Pacific and the Middle-East, and Australian politics and history. He is best known for contributions to the field of critical security studies and the study of war and peace, combining them with explorations of fundamental themes in political philosophy: freedom, security, sovereignty, terror, being, ethics, and truth.
He is the sole author of two books: 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, with Matthew McDonald, of Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific (Manchester University Press, 2007).
Education and Career
Anthony Burke received a BA (Communications)Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in 1991 and MA 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 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.
He was awarded a Ph.D 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.
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.
Writing and Approach
Burke has published three 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.His conceptual approach is a hybrid of poststructuralist
Post-structuralism
Post-structuralism is a label formulated by American academics to denote the heterogeneous works of a series of French intellectuals who came to international prominence in the 1960s and '70s...
themes (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Butler and Agamben), post-colonial theory
Postcolonialism
Post-colonialism is a specifically post-modern intellectual discourse that consists of reactions to, and analysis of, the cultural legacy of colonialism...
(Said) and post-Kantian critical theory
Critical theory
Critical theory is an examination and critique of society and culture, drawing from knowledge across the social sciences and humanities. The term has two different meanings with different origins and histories: one originating in sociology and the other in literary criticism...
(from Frankfurt School
Frankfurt School
The Frankfurt School refers to a school of neo-Marxist interdisciplinary social theory, particularly associated with the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt am Main...
figures such as Horkheimer, Habermas and Fromm, to harder to classify thinkers like Arendt, Levinas, Buber, Heller, Heidegger). Within the field of International Relations
International relations
International relations is the study of relationships between countries, including the roles of states, inter-governmental organizations , international nongovernmental organizations , non-governmental organizations and multinational corporations...
, his approach would be known as that of a "critical constructivist"
Constructivism in international relations
In the discipline of international relations, constructivism is the claim that significant aspects of international relations are historically and socially contingent, rather than inevitable consequences of human nature or other essential characteristics of world politics.-Development:Nicholas Onuf...
, and it does not fit easily into established theoretical "camps".
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
Critical Security Studies
Critical Security Studies is an academic discipline within security studies which rejects mainstream approaches to security-Definition:Some use the term critical security studies to refer to all approaches that are critical of mainstream/orthodox realist approaches. Others see Critical Security...
), 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.
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 (dys)functional 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.
More recently he has begun to publish works in the fields of critical terrorism studies
Critical Terrorism Studies
Critical Terrorism Studies is a controversial new sub-discipline of Terrorism studies. It attempts to encourage criticism of the discipline of Terrorism studies itself and to widen debate by Terrorism studies researchers in part by applying insights from Critical Theory generally and the Frankfurt...
, and strategic studies
Strategic studies
Strategic studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to topics concerning the relationship between politics, geography and natural resources, economics, and military power, such as the role of intelligence, diplomacy and threats in the preparation and use of force...
, including essays defining the field of critical terrorism studies, on the philosophy of war, terrorism and the use of force, and nuclear strategic reason and disarmament.
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. This dispute quickly attracted national media attention.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". Bendle also repeated these views on ABC Radio National's Religion Report and in The Australian.
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". He emphasized that he had consistently "condemned terrorism as an immoral, illegitimate and politically counter-productive form of violence". He responded to the claims in an interview on ABC Radio National and his scholarship on terrorism was profiled in The Australian's Higher Education Supplement.
Selected works
BooksFear 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
Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific, edited with Matt McDonald (Manchester University Press, 2007).here
Articles
"Nuclear Reason: At the Limits of Strategy", International Relations, Vol. 23 No. 4, December 2009.
“Postmodernism”, in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal eds. Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford University Press, 2008).
“Recovering Humanity from Man: Hannah Arendt’s Troubled Cosmopolitanism”, International Politics, Vol. 45 No. 4, July 2008.
“Life, In the Hall of Smashed Mirrors”, Borderlands, Vol. 7 No. 1, 2008, and Meanjin Quarterly, Vol. 67 No. 4, December 2008.
“The End of Terrorism Studies”, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Vol. 1 No. 1, 2008.
“Ontologies of War: Violence, Existence, and Reason”, Theory & Event, Vol. 10 No. 2, July 2007.
“Cause and Effect in the War on Terror”, in Alex J. Bellamy, Roland Bleiker, Sara E. Davies and Richard Devetak eds. Security and the War on Terror (Routledge, 2007).here
“Against The New Internationalism”, Ethics & International Affairs, Vol. 19 No. 2, Summer 2005. (With a response by Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Against the New Utopianism”)here
“Iraq: Strategy’s Burnt Offering”, Global Change, Peace & Security, Vol. 17 No. 2, July 2005.
“Freedom’s Freedom: American Enlightenment and Permanent War”, Social Identities, Vol. 11, No. 4, July 2005.
“Just War or Ethical Peace? Moral Discourses of Strategic Violence after 9/11”, International Affairs, Vol. 80 No. 2, March 2004.
“Aporias of Security”, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 27 No. 1, Jan-Mar 2002.
“Caught Between National and Human Security: Knowledge and Power in Post-Crisis Asia”, Pacifica Review, Vol. 13, No. 3, October 2001.
External links
Blog: http://worldthoughtworldpolitics.wordpress.com/UNSW Biography: http://hass.unsw.adfa.edu.au/staff/profiles/burke.html