Anthony Burke
Anthony Burke is professor of environmental politics and international relations at UNSW, Canberra, Australia, and convenor of its Environment and Governance Research Group. His research interests lie in green political theory, global security and environmental governance, and critical security studies. His most recent books include Uranium (Polity 2017) and Ethical Security Studies (Routledge 2016). He is working on a book manuscript with Stefanie Fishel entitled The Ecology Politic: Power, Law and Earth After the Holocene.
Address: International and Political Studies Program
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
The University of New South Wales
PO Box 7916 Canberra BC ACT Australia
Address: International and Political Studies Program
School of Humanities and Social Sciences
The University of New South Wales
PO Box 7916 Canberra BC ACT Australia
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (40)
Uploads
Books by Anthony Burke
In this book, Anthony Burke explores the geopolitical intrigue around uranium and the profound dilemmas of justice and security to which its development has given rise. The twenty-first century, he cautions, will be a time of reckoning and new reserves of political will must be found to manage the impact of this extraordinary mineral. Only by cooperating to achieve multilateral disarmament and greater international control over nuclear power can we ward off nuclear catastrophe and harness the potential of nuclear energy to help address, rather than create, some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Questions of morality and ethics have long been central to global security, from the death camps, world wars and H-bombs of the 20th century, to the humanitarian missions, tsunamis, terrorism and refugees of the 21st. This book goes beyond the Just War tradition to demonstrate how ethical commitments influence security theory, policy and international law, across a range of pressing global challenges. The book highlights how, from patrolling a territorial border to maintaining armed forces, security practices have important ethical implications, by excluding some from consideration, presenting others as potential threats and exposing them to harm, and licensing particular actions.
This innovative book extends the traditional agenda of war and peace to consider the ethics of force short of war such as sanctions, deterrence, terrorism, targeted killing, and torture, and the ethical implications of new security concerns such as identity, gender, humanitarianism, the responsibility to protect, and the global ecology. It advances a concrete ethics for an era of global threats, and makes a case for a cosmopolitan approach to the theory and practice of security that could inspire a more just, stable and inclusive global order.
--Professor Christine Sylvester, University of Lancaster, UK
In a lucid and compelling book Anthony Burke dissects the politics of security in several theories of state territory. He also addresses closely a series of recent state practices of security. In doing so, he opens the door to a post-security politics, a politics that goes beyond the construction of permanent, unspecified enemies.
--Professor William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University, USA
It is rare to find a work of political philosophy that so skilfully combines a detailed knowledge of the contemporary scenes of national and international violence with close attention to the ontological and ethical principles by which we might regard and evaluate them. This properly scathing treatment of the modern paradigm of 'security' opens the way to an urgently demanded interrogation of the terms on which the lauded freedom of the West might be pursued beyond its current blatant disregard for the life of the Other.
--Dr Fiona Jenkins, Australian National University, Australia
In a world plagued by war and terror, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence sounds a warning: not only are global patterns of insecurity, violence and conflict getting ever more destructive and out of hand, but the ways we understand and respond to them will only prolong the crisis. When security is grounded in exclusion and alienation, ethics licenses killing and war, and freedom is a mask for imperial violence, how should we act? Anthony Burke offers a groundbreaking analysis of the historical roots of sovereignty and security, his critique of just war theory, and important new essays on strategy, the concept of freedom and US exceptionalism. He pursues critical engagements with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Emmanuel Levinas, Carl Von Clausewitz, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Walzer, Michel Foucault and William Connolly. Combining a diversity of critical thought with analyses of the War on Terror, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Vietnam War, the Indonesian crisis, globalization and the new drive for empire, Burke refuses easy answers, or to abandon hope.
In this volume, working from a diverse range of perspectives—poststructuralism, liberalism, feminism, just war, securitization, and critical theory—leading scholars in the field of security studies consider the potential for ethical visions of security, and lay the ground for a new field: "ethical security studies".
These ethical ‘visions’ of security engage directly with the meaning and value of security and security practice, and consider four key questions:
• Who, or what, should be secured?
• What are the fundamental grounds and commitments of different security ethics?
• Who or what are the most legitimate agents, providers or speakers of security?
• What do ethical security practices look like? What ethical principles, arguments, or procedures, will generate and guide ethical security practices?
Informed by a rich understanding of the intellectual and historical experience of security, the contributors advance innovative methodological, analytical, political and ethical arguments that represent the cutting edge of the field. This book opens a new phase of collaboration and growth that promises to have great benefits for the more humane, effective and ethical practice of security politics.
"Challenges us to look beyond the available scholarship on Asia-Pacific regional security. Its claims about what constitute core security issues in the region, what is missing from existing analyses, and how to move forward are sure to provoke healthy disagreement and debate among Asian security experts about the 'state of their art'."
--Amitav Acharya, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore."
Papers by Anthony Burke
Charter, the sovereign state has formed the fulcrum of political order
and law. Yet in the Anthropocene, this humanist political containment fails
to grapple with humanity’s dangerous enmeshment with the ecological systems
of planet Earth. This article addresses one aspect of this dilemma by
focusing on the international law and governance of biodiversity, which
presents a “blue screen” biosphere: a material simulation that enables a
double disappearance of biodiversity from the text of international law
and from the actuality of the world. Through a critique of the figure of
the “natural resource,” the article finds that the founding texts of international
environmental law entrench a twofold humanism-as-statism that
simultaneously supports the geopower of the state to facilitate the capitalist
appropriation of the nonhuman and imports the modern metaphysics
of the human domination of nature into international customary law. Such
legal-political ontologies block a path to a more hopeful system of global
ecological law and governance based on the “rights of nature” that might
be able to honor the intrinsic value of the biosphere as a rich, agentic, and
communicative whole, fundamental to the Earth’s survival.
This article lays out the key ontological and ethical frameworks for security cosmopolitanism. These challenge the dominant ontological foundations of national security (and international society) anchored in the social contract between citizen and state. Security cosmopolitanism argues that states cannot contain and immunize the national social body from external threats; rather, insecurity arises in a borderless way from the very histories, choices, powers, and systems of modernity. This generates both a new analytical model for global security and a different – relational, networked, and future-oriented – ethic of responsibility."
In this book, Anthony Burke explores the geopolitical intrigue around uranium and the profound dilemmas of justice and security to which its development has given rise. The twenty-first century, he cautions, will be a time of reckoning and new reserves of political will must be found to manage the impact of this extraordinary mineral. Only by cooperating to achieve multilateral disarmament and greater international control over nuclear power can we ward off nuclear catastrophe and harness the potential of nuclear energy to help address, rather than create, some of the world’s most pressing problems.
Questions of morality and ethics have long been central to global security, from the death camps, world wars and H-bombs of the 20th century, to the humanitarian missions, tsunamis, terrorism and refugees of the 21st. This book goes beyond the Just War tradition to demonstrate how ethical commitments influence security theory, policy and international law, across a range of pressing global challenges. The book highlights how, from patrolling a territorial border to maintaining armed forces, security practices have important ethical implications, by excluding some from consideration, presenting others as potential threats and exposing them to harm, and licensing particular actions.
This innovative book extends the traditional agenda of war and peace to consider the ethics of force short of war such as sanctions, deterrence, terrorism, targeted killing, and torture, and the ethical implications of new security concerns such as identity, gender, humanitarianism, the responsibility to protect, and the global ecology. It advances a concrete ethics for an era of global threats, and makes a case for a cosmopolitan approach to the theory and practice of security that could inspire a more just, stable and inclusive global order.
--Professor Christine Sylvester, University of Lancaster, UK
In a lucid and compelling book Anthony Burke dissects the politics of security in several theories of state territory. He also addresses closely a series of recent state practices of security. In doing so, he opens the door to a post-security politics, a politics that goes beyond the construction of permanent, unspecified enemies.
--Professor William E. Connolly, Johns Hopkins University, USA
It is rare to find a work of political philosophy that so skilfully combines a detailed knowledge of the contemporary scenes of national and international violence with close attention to the ontological and ethical principles by which we might regard and evaluate them. This properly scathing treatment of the modern paradigm of 'security' opens the way to an urgently demanded interrogation of the terms on which the lauded freedom of the West might be pursued beyond its current blatant disregard for the life of the Other.
--Dr Fiona Jenkins, Australian National University, Australia
In a world plagued by war and terror, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence sounds a warning: not only are global patterns of insecurity, violence and conflict getting ever more destructive and out of hand, but the ways we understand and respond to them will only prolong the crisis. When security is grounded in exclusion and alienation, ethics licenses killing and war, and freedom is a mask for imperial violence, how should we act? Anthony Burke offers a groundbreaking analysis of the historical roots of sovereignty and security, his critique of just war theory, and important new essays on strategy, the concept of freedom and US exceptionalism. He pursues critical engagements with thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Hardt and Negri, Emmanuel Levinas, Carl Von Clausewitz, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Michael Walzer, Michel Foucault and William Connolly. Combining a diversity of critical thought with analyses of the War on Terror, Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Vietnam War, the Indonesian crisis, globalization and the new drive for empire, Burke refuses easy answers, or to abandon hope.
In this volume, working from a diverse range of perspectives—poststructuralism, liberalism, feminism, just war, securitization, and critical theory—leading scholars in the field of security studies consider the potential for ethical visions of security, and lay the ground for a new field: "ethical security studies".
These ethical ‘visions’ of security engage directly with the meaning and value of security and security practice, and consider four key questions:
• Who, or what, should be secured?
• What are the fundamental grounds and commitments of different security ethics?
• Who or what are the most legitimate agents, providers or speakers of security?
• What do ethical security practices look like? What ethical principles, arguments, or procedures, will generate and guide ethical security practices?
Informed by a rich understanding of the intellectual and historical experience of security, the contributors advance innovative methodological, analytical, political and ethical arguments that represent the cutting edge of the field. This book opens a new phase of collaboration and growth that promises to have great benefits for the more humane, effective and ethical practice of security politics.
"Challenges us to look beyond the available scholarship on Asia-Pacific regional security. Its claims about what constitute core security issues in the region, what is missing from existing analyses, and how to move forward are sure to provoke healthy disagreement and debate among Asian security experts about the 'state of their art'."
--Amitav Acharya, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore."
Charter, the sovereign state has formed the fulcrum of political order
and law. Yet in the Anthropocene, this humanist political containment fails
to grapple with humanity’s dangerous enmeshment with the ecological systems
of planet Earth. This article addresses one aspect of this dilemma by
focusing on the international law and governance of biodiversity, which
presents a “blue screen” biosphere: a material simulation that enables a
double disappearance of biodiversity from the text of international law
and from the actuality of the world. Through a critique of the figure of
the “natural resource,” the article finds that the founding texts of international
environmental law entrench a twofold humanism-as-statism that
simultaneously supports the geopower of the state to facilitate the capitalist
appropriation of the nonhuman and imports the modern metaphysics
of the human domination of nature into international customary law. Such
legal-political ontologies block a path to a more hopeful system of global
ecological law and governance based on the “rights of nature” that might
be able to honor the intrinsic value of the biosphere as a rich, agentic, and
communicative whole, fundamental to the Earth’s survival.
This article lays out the key ontological and ethical frameworks for security cosmopolitanism. These challenge the dominant ontological foundations of national security (and international society) anchored in the social contract between citizen and state. Security cosmopolitanism argues that states cannot contain and immunize the national social body from external threats; rather, insecurity arises in a borderless way from the very histories, choices, powers, and systems of modernity. This generates both a new analytical model for global security and a different – relational, networked, and future-oriented – ethic of responsibility."