The practice of harm in modern warfare

This three-year doctoral study beginning in 2011 examines how domestic and international conceptualisations of the ‘harm principle’ affect decisions regarding the use of what might be called “atmo-weapons” in international conflict. Put simply, in addition to military-strategic imperatives, the manner in which weapons kill and injure matters. Extending the constructivist finding that arms control, humanitarian and disarmament norms both constrain and constitute national security interests, as well as the English School notion of an international society of states, I posit that the positive responsibilities and negative duties inherent in the practice of harm demand that weapons norm dynamics are sociologically determined both within and between states. The Middle East, having staged more than half of the world’s conflicts since 1945, as well as involving both intra- and extra-regional belligerents with differing political, cultural and religious identities, is examined as the primary site of investigation between the period 1945 to 2010.

Principal-investigator: N.A.J. Taylor [University of Queensland]. Funded by: Australian Federal Government and the University of Queensland. Total funding: $82,500.

Prospects for a WMD-free Middle East

This collaborative research project seeks to identify and examine the historical impediments to the formation of a nuclear weapon-free-zone in the Middle East since it was first seriously proposed in 1974, and later revised and expanded to include biological and chemical weapons in the 1980s. With formal negotiations due to begin in December 2012, it is argued that a detailed understanding of the norm dynamics particular to the region – across states, regional and international institutions, and civil society – is critical if the difficulties posed by mutual mistrust, suspicion and diverging interests – particularly between Egypt, Iran and Israel – are to be circumvented.

Co-investigators: Joseph A. Camilleri [La Trobe University], Michael Hamel-Green [Victoria University], Marianne Hanson [University of Queensland] and N.A.J. Taylor [University of Queensland]. Funding body: Institute for Human Security, La Trobe University. Total funding: $8,000.

Remnants of War

This collaboration in visual politics – with artistic photographer Louis Porter – examines and archives the legacy of explosive and toxic remnants of war (UXO) on the natural environment. Re-imagining UXO as having both bio-physical and atmospheric effects, rather than merely humanitarian ones, results in a stylist departure from more self-conscious, politically-motivated treatments that catalogue individual victims, not temporal harm. In some states, such as Egypt, the effected area comprises 28 million weapons, and covering around 25,000 km2. Whereas in other sites such as Laos there remain approximately 70 million unexploded bombs and mines despite the population there being only 4 million people, and the conflict being over for more than 40 years. In all sites, there remains an overriding puzzle on which the project seeks to provide aesthetic insight: to what extent, and in what ways, do the remnants of past wars preclude societies returning to an ordinary, “good life” post-conflict?

Co-investigators: Louis Porter [Monash University] and N.A.J. Taylor [University of Queensland]. Funding body: Monash University. Total funding: n/a.

Dishevelled Come Winter

The following is a working abstract for an incomplete manuscript of counterfactual history. The story concerns the world’s nuclear arsenal, an intoxicated Boris Yelstin, and a florist:

The florist is a sort of gatekeeper – of other people’s love, of regret, of gratitude, of hope, and of grief. But this is wartime. For a drunken decision by Boris Yeltsin has triggered a nuclear exchange. People now loathe the other, symbolism has given way to savagery, and soldiers enforce social order on the streets. Removed from these unforgiving games, one florist quietly tends to greying fields in the belief some flowers will survive the winter.

Author: N.A.J. Taylor. Funding as yet unsought.