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Gavin Mount

The University of New South Wales, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, UNSW Canberra, Faculty Member

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Carmen Sánchez Manzanares

Universidad de Murcia

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University of Virginia

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Imam Khomeini International University(IKIU)

Robert O Ritchie

University of California, Berkeley

Socrates Stratis

University of Cyprus

Southern Methodist University

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University of Basel

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Papers by Gavin Mount

Spamouflage - A Hidden Weapon in Influence Operations

by Gavin Mount and Yuxuan Lai

Australian Outlook, 2024

Spamouflage, a form of disinformation spread through fake social media accounts, poses a growing ... more Spamouflage, a form of disinformation spread through fake social media accounts, poses a growing threat to democratic processes by manipulating public opinion and amplifying polarisation. Governments must take proactive steps to curb the impact of these campaigns and protect the integrity of elections.

Nations and nationalism

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jun 21, 2018

The race to robustness: exploiting fragile models for urban camouflage and the imperative for machine learning security

arXiv (Cornell University), Jun 26, 2023

Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) represents the ability to disrupt Machine Learning (ML) algori... more Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) represents the ability to disrupt Machine Learning (ML) algorithms through a range of methods that broadly exploit the architecture of deep learning optimisation. This paper presents Distributed Adversarial Regions (DAR), a novel method that implements distributed instantiations of computer vision-based AML attack methods that may be used to disguise objects from image recognition in both white and black box settings. We consider the context of object detection models used in urban environments, and benchmark the MobileNetV2, NasNetMobile and DenseNet169 models against a subset of relevant images from the ImageNet dataset. We evaluate optimal parameters (size, number and perturbation method), and compare to state-of-the-art AML techniques that perturb the entire image. We find that DARs can cause a reduction in confidence of 40.4% on average, but with the benefit of not requiring the entire image, or the focal object, to be perturbed. The DAR method is a deliberately simple approach where the intention is to highlight how an adversary with very little skill could attack models that may already be productionised, and to emphasise the fragility of foundational object detection models. We present this as a contribution to the field of ML security as well as AML. This paper contributes a novel adversarial method, an original comparison between DARs and other AML methods, and frames it in a new context-that of urban camouflage and the necessity for ML security and model robustness.

Hybrid Peace/War

We are all hybrids. Our polities, societies, and economies are the result of a long process of hy... more

Nationalism and war

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2001

The Problem of Peoples: Global Politics, Ethnicity and the Struggle for Legitimacy

Extreme Offence? The Conroy-Campbell Exchange

Social Science Research Network, 2014

In February 2014, Sovereign Borders Commander Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell took extreme off... more In February 2014, Sovereign Borders Commander Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell took extreme offence when Opposition Defence Minister Senator Stephen Conroy accused him of participating in a 'political cover up'. Should military personnel be surprised or offended by such allegations? There are a number of fundamental principles guiding civil military relations at work here. The first is the old Clausewitzian adage that 'war' is the continuation of policy by other means. Second is the liberal separation of powers between military and civil affairs. A third element is the balance between military requirements of operational security and the imperative of building political legitimacy. Each of these principles place responsibility and accountability firmly in the hands of the government and parliamentary oversight. We may be disappointed in the boorish remarks of a Senator to a serving military commander, but not surprised that a parliamentary inquiry might make accusations of a 'political' cover up. More significant are the political decisions that have immersed military personnel directly into an overt political exchange in the first place. If an apology is owed, it should come from the electorate that has voted for the policies of the major parties and failed to galvanise support for any viable alternatives.

Nations and Nationalism

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jun 29, 2012

Introduction While nations and nationalism have become the dominant mode of ascribing political c... more Introduction While nations and nationalism have become the dominant mode of ascribing political culture in world politics, understanding the meaning and political importance of these terms has been a notoriously challenging task. One survey of concepts in International Relations (IR) said of the term ‘ national interest ’ that it was ‘the most vague and therefore easily used and abused’; of nationalism, that ‘there is a lack of consensus about what it is and why it has maintained such a firm hold over so much of the world's population’; and that ‘Nations and states seem identical but they are not’ (Griffiths and O'Callaghan 2002: 202–13). The discussion that follows will survey debates on nation and nationalism around four broad questions. The first concerns debates around terminology and their contemporary relevance for the study of IR. The second relates to questions of nation formation and the origins of nationalism, particularly in terms of how it came to shape modern states and international society . The third explores how the ideas of nations and nationalism have been important in IR theory and practice. The fourth section briefly considers the rise of new nationalism in contemporary world politics. As a discipline , IR has made a surprisingly modest contribution to this scholarship (see Carr 1945; Hinsley 1973; Mayall 1990; Breuilly 2013). Nationalism is often not addressed explicitly, but it has a significant tacit presence in all of the major schools of thought in the discipline. Consequently, mainstream IR theories have compounded some of the analytical problems associated with understanding nationalism. For example, classical realists have tended to conflate nation and state into the concept of ‘national interest’, while liberal and Marxist theorists have been internally conflicted over the merits of nationalism versus its potential to undermine ideals of internationalism. The study of nationalism should be a central consideration for any analysis of the major issues in contemporary global politics because taking questions of national interest, values and identity seriously is one way of invoking the idea that culture and ‘people’ matter.

Digital Ethnography Redux: Interpreting Drone Cultures and Microtargeting in an era of Digital Transformation

This paper affirms and demonstrates the application of digital ethnography methodologies to two d... more This paper affirms and demonstrates the application of digital ethnography methodologies to two digitally transformative phenomena that are fundamentally enmeshed in the public sphere: personal drones and microtargeting. We review recent methodological studies on digital ethnography that can be delineated into three forms: research that is online or remote by necessity because of physical distance between researcher and participants; research that uses natively digital tools to study phenomena (Rogers 2013; Fish 2019) and research focused on digital cultures (Markham 2020). Our application of digital ethnography is further informed by qualitative ethnographic research undertaken by Pink, Horst, Postill and Hjorth (Pink, et al., 2016); and Manovich's work on the application of digital ethnography to examine automation and big data (Manovich & Arielli, 2022). Beesley (forthcoming) utilises longitudinal visual ethnography as a lens to understand consumer drone cultures and disentangle the multiple narratives surrounding these disruptive technologies. Mount (2020), utilised digital ethnography to review two decades of microtargeting activities, employed by Strategic Communication Laboratories and Cambridge Analytica, to influence electoral behaviour. This methodological research will be combined with our conceptual swarm hermeneutics framework (Mount & Beesley, 2022) to develop scenario based simulations that will further evaluate interpretive schemas and behaviours.

Digital Ethnography Redux: Interpreting Drone Cultures and Microtargeting in an era of Digital Transformation

by Gavin Mount and David Beesley

4th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2022)

This paper affirms and demonstrates the application of digital ethnography methodologies to two d... more This paper affirms and demonstrates the application of digital ethnography methodologies to two digitally transformative phenomena that are fundamentally enmeshed in the public sphere: personal drones and microtargeting. We review recent methodological studies on digital ethnography that can be delineated into three forms: research that is online or remote by necessity because of physical distance between researcher and participants; research that uses natively digital tools to study phenomena (Rogers 2013; Fish 2019) and research focused on digital cultures (Markham 2020). Our application of digital ethnography is further informed by qualitative ethnographic research undertaken by Horst, Pink, Postill and Hjorth (Horst, et al., 2016); and Manovich’s work on the application of digital ethnography to examine automation and big data (Manovich & Arielli, 2022). Beesley (forthcoming) utilises longitudinal visual ethnography as a lens to understand consumer drone cultures and disentangle...

Hybrid Peace/War

It is intuitive to view peace and war as inherently opposite categories. Peace is routinely defin... more It is intuitive to view peace and war as inherently opposite categories. Peace is routinely defined as the freedom from organised collective violence, or as the ‘absence of war’. Conversely, war is generally conceived either in Clausewitzian terms as organised violence to achieve political ends or as a moral or legal condition defining the permissible limits of organised violence.2 And yet, one of the founding tenets of contemporary peace and conflict studies has been to reject this binary ‘negative’ concept of peace as merely the ‘absence of war’ by asserting a positive concept of peace that refers to consensual values and the ‘integration of human society’.3 The enduring aspiration of how to achieve peace can be summed up with the phrase ‘peace through peaceful means’. While the field has remained normatively grounded on sustaining a prohibition on the resort to violence—peace through peaceful means—it has also grappled with

Nations and nationalism

An Introduction to International Relations

Hybrid Peace/War

Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development, Editors: Wallis J, Kent L, Forsyth M, Dinnen S, Bose S. ANU Press, Canberra., 2018

This chapter applies a ‘hybrid sensibility’ as a heuristic tool to consider how the peace/war bin... more This chapter applies a ‘hybrid sensibility’ as a heuristic tool to consider how the peace/war binary might be reinscribed. It begins with a review of canonical texts that inform peace and war studies and asks two questions: ‘how has war been understood in peace theory?’ and ‘how has peace been understood in war studies?’ It then considers contemporary peace and conflict empirical research to show how a focus on hybridity helps to understand how the major trend of conflict recurrence is related to the interstitial period between the ending of war and the negotiations of peace.

A World of Tribes?

Many of the most disturbing images of the last decade of the twentieth century have depicted horr... more Many of the most disturbing images of the last decade of the twentieth century have depicted horrific episodes of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and protracted ethnic or communal conflicts. In fact, post-Cold War world politics seems to have been ‘engulfed in convulsive fits of ethnic insecurity, violence and genocide’ (Lake and Rothchild, 1996, p. 41). These events have generated extensive intellectual debate among policy makers, academics and other commentators. In particular these debates have revealed two sets of assumptions about the underlying causes of ethnic antagonisms. Some argue that these conflicts represent a revival of premodern or ‘tribal’ identities, whilst others argue that they are part of a late-modern ‘fragmentary’ reaction against homogenising tendencies of globalisation...

In To cite this work: Mount, Gavin. “A World of Tribes?” in G. Fry and J. O’Hagan (eds) Contending Images of World Politics, Palgrave MacMillan, 2000

Conventional International Relations Theory and the Problem of Peoples

iv

Postmodern IR and Ethnic conflict

Remembering Rwanda: A bibliographic Review

The 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide will prompt scholarship recalling the 1994 tragedy a... more The 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide will prompt scholarship recalling the 1994 tragedy and its aftermath to understand what has been learned about genocide prevention and conflict transformation. This paper reviews seminal works across two decades of scholarship to examine how post-conflict analysis has sought to understand an event that many still describe as 'incomprehensible'. In the first five years, the Rwandan genocide emerged as a grand signifier of the 'failure to prevent' while scholarship consolidated the empirical evidence of the events. Research leading up to the tenth anniversary produced a deeper level of understanding of agency and aetiology of the genocide. In the third phase, the genocide was increasingly situated in a deeper historical and regional context and scholarship shifted its focus to the normative theme of transitional justice. Contemporary research has produced a more critical literature challenging the Rwandan 'success story' and exploring the complex politics of reconciliation and memory. This retrospective of Rwandan genocide scholarship reveals a progressive pattern of scholarly change. Similar patterns might be observable across the field of post-conflict analysis which could help guide current and future research strategies.

Indigenous obligations, liberal enclosures and communitarian recognition: Some critical and cosmopolitan responses

Hedley Bull's Neomedievalism

Stephen Conroy was targeting politics in play, not Angus Campbell - Canberra Times - 27 Feb 2014

Spamouflage - A Hidden Weapon in Influence Operations

by Gavin Mount and Yuxuan Lai

Australian Outlook, 2024

Spamouflage, a form of disinformation spread through fake social media accounts, poses a growing ... more Spamouflage, a form of disinformation spread through fake social media accounts, poses a growing threat to democratic processes by manipulating public opinion and amplifying polarisation. Governments must take proactive steps to curb the impact of these campaigns and protect the integrity of elections.

Nations and nationalism

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jun 21, 2018

The race to robustness: exploiting fragile models for urban camouflage and the imperative for machine learning security

arXiv (Cornell University), Jun 26, 2023

Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) represents the ability to disrupt Machine Learning (ML) algori... more Adversarial Machine Learning (AML) represents the ability to disrupt Machine Learning (ML) algorithms through a range of methods that broadly exploit the architecture of deep learning optimisation. This paper presents Distributed Adversarial Regions (DAR), a novel method that implements distributed instantiations of computer vision-based AML attack methods that may be used to disguise objects from image recognition in both white and black box settings. We consider the context of object detection models used in urban environments, and benchmark the MobileNetV2, NasNetMobile and DenseNet169 models against a subset of relevant images from the ImageNet dataset. We evaluate optimal parameters (size, number and perturbation method), and compare to state-of-the-art AML techniques that perturb the entire image. We find that DARs can cause a reduction in confidence of 40.4% on average, but with the benefit of not requiring the entire image, or the focal object, to be perturbed. The DAR method is a deliberately simple approach where the intention is to highlight how an adversary with very little skill could attack models that may already be productionised, and to emphasise the fragility of foundational object detection models. We present this as a contribution to the field of ML security as well as AML. This paper contributes a novel adversarial method, an original comparison between DARs and other AML methods, and frames it in a new context-that of urban camouflage and the necessity for ML security and model robustness.

Hybrid Peace/War

We are all hybrids. Our polities, societies, and economies are the result of a long process of hy... more

Nationalism and war

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2001

The Problem of Peoples: Global Politics, Ethnicity and the Struggle for Legitimacy

Extreme Offence? The Conroy-Campbell Exchange

Social Science Research Network, 2014

In February 2014, Sovereign Borders Commander Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell took extreme off... more In February 2014, Sovereign Borders Commander Lieutenant-General Angus Campbell took extreme offence when Opposition Defence Minister Senator Stephen Conroy accused him of participating in a 'political cover up'. Should military personnel be surprised or offended by such allegations? There are a number of fundamental principles guiding civil military relations at work here. The first is the old Clausewitzian adage that 'war' is the continuation of policy by other means. Second is the liberal separation of powers between military and civil affairs. A third element is the balance between military requirements of operational security and the imperative of building political legitimacy. Each of these principles place responsibility and accountability firmly in the hands of the government and parliamentary oversight. We may be disappointed in the boorish remarks of a Senator to a serving military commander, but not surprised that a parliamentary inquiry might make accusations of a 'political' cover up. More significant are the political decisions that have immersed military personnel directly into an overt political exchange in the first place. If an apology is owed, it should come from the electorate that has voted for the policies of the major parties and failed to galvanise support for any viable alternatives.

Nations and Nationalism

Cambridge University Press eBooks, Jun 29, 2012

Introduction While nations and nationalism have become the dominant mode of ascribing political c... more Introduction While nations and nationalism have become the dominant mode of ascribing political culture in world politics, understanding the meaning and political importance of these terms has been a notoriously challenging task. One survey of concepts in International Relations (IR) said of the term ‘ national interest ’ that it was ‘the most vague and therefore easily used and abused’; of nationalism, that ‘there is a lack of consensus about what it is and why it has maintained such a firm hold over so much of the world's population’; and that ‘Nations and states seem identical but they are not’ (Griffiths and O'Callaghan 2002: 202–13). The discussion that follows will survey debates on nation and nationalism around four broad questions. The first concerns debates around terminology and their contemporary relevance for the study of IR. The second relates to questions of nation formation and the origins of nationalism, particularly in terms of how it came to shape modern states and international society . The third explores how the ideas of nations and nationalism have been important in IR theory and practice. The fourth section briefly considers the rise of new nationalism in contemporary world politics. As a discipline , IR has made a surprisingly modest contribution to this scholarship (see Carr 1945; Hinsley 1973; Mayall 1990; Breuilly 2013). Nationalism is often not addressed explicitly, but it has a significant tacit presence in all of the major schools of thought in the discipline. Consequently, mainstream IR theories have compounded some of the analytical problems associated with understanding nationalism. For example, classical realists have tended to conflate nation and state into the concept of ‘national interest’, while liberal and Marxist theorists have been internally conflicted over the merits of nationalism versus its potential to undermine ideals of internationalism. The study of nationalism should be a central consideration for any analysis of the major issues in contemporary global politics because taking questions of national interest, values and identity seriously is one way of invoking the idea that culture and ‘people’ matter.

Digital Ethnography Redux: Interpreting Drone Cultures and Microtargeting in an era of Digital Transformation

This paper affirms and demonstrates the application of digital ethnography methodologies to two d... more This paper affirms and demonstrates the application of digital ethnography methodologies to two digitally transformative phenomena that are fundamentally enmeshed in the public sphere: personal drones and microtargeting. We review recent methodological studies on digital ethnography that can be delineated into three forms: research that is online or remote by necessity because of physical distance between researcher and participants; research that uses natively digital tools to study phenomena (Rogers 2013; Fish 2019) and research focused on digital cultures (Markham 2020). Our application of digital ethnography is further informed by qualitative ethnographic research undertaken by Pink, Horst, Postill and Hjorth (Pink, et al., 2016); and Manovich's work on the application of digital ethnography to examine automation and big data (Manovich & Arielli, 2022). Beesley (forthcoming) utilises longitudinal visual ethnography as a lens to understand consumer drone cultures and disentangle the multiple narratives surrounding these disruptive technologies. Mount (2020), utilised digital ethnography to review two decades of microtargeting activities, employed by Strategic Communication Laboratories and Cambridge Analytica, to influence electoral behaviour. This methodological research will be combined with our conceptual swarm hermeneutics framework (Mount & Beesley, 2022) to develop scenario based simulations that will further evaluate interpretive schemas and behaviours.

Digital Ethnography Redux: Interpreting Drone Cultures and Microtargeting in an era of Digital Transformation

by Gavin Mount and David Beesley

4th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2022)

This paper affirms and demonstrates the application of digital ethnography methodologies to two d... more This paper affirms and demonstrates the application of digital ethnography methodologies to two digitally transformative phenomena that are fundamentally enmeshed in the public sphere: personal drones and microtargeting. We review recent methodological studies on digital ethnography that can be delineated into three forms: research that is online or remote by necessity because of physical distance between researcher and participants; research that uses natively digital tools to study phenomena (Rogers 2013; Fish 2019) and research focused on digital cultures (Markham 2020). Our application of digital ethnography is further informed by qualitative ethnographic research undertaken by Horst, Pink, Postill and Hjorth (Horst, et al., 2016); and Manovich’s work on the application of digital ethnography to examine automation and big data (Manovich & Arielli, 2022). Beesley (forthcoming) utilises longitudinal visual ethnography as a lens to understand consumer drone cultures and disentangle...

Hybrid Peace/War

It is intuitive to view peace and war as inherently opposite categories. Peace is routinely defin... more It is intuitive to view peace and war as inherently opposite categories. Peace is routinely defined as the freedom from organised collective violence, or as the ‘absence of war’. Conversely, war is generally conceived either in Clausewitzian terms as organised violence to achieve political ends or as a moral or legal condition defining the permissible limits of organised violence.2 And yet, one of the founding tenets of contemporary peace and conflict studies has been to reject this binary ‘negative’ concept of peace as merely the ‘absence of war’ by asserting a positive concept of peace that refers to consensual values and the ‘integration of human society’.3 The enduring aspiration of how to achieve peace can be summed up with the phrase ‘peace through peaceful means’. While the field has remained normatively grounded on sustaining a prohibition on the resort to violence—peace through peaceful means—it has also grappled with

Nations and nationalism

An Introduction to International Relations

Hybrid Peace/War

Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development, Editors: Wallis J, Kent L, Forsyth M, Dinnen S, Bose S. ANU Press, Canberra., 2018

This chapter applies a ‘hybrid sensibility’ as a heuristic tool to consider how the peace/war bin... more This chapter applies a ‘hybrid sensibility’ as a heuristic tool to consider how the peace/war binary might be reinscribed. It begins with a review of canonical texts that inform peace and war studies and asks two questions: ‘how has war been understood in peace theory?’ and ‘how has peace been understood in war studies?’ It then considers contemporary peace and conflict empirical research to show how a focus on hybridity helps to understand how the major trend of conflict recurrence is related to the interstitial period between the ending of war and the negotiations of peace.

A World of Tribes?

Many of the most disturbing images of the last decade of the twentieth century have depicted horr... more Many of the most disturbing images of the last decade of the twentieth century have depicted horrific episodes of ‘ethnic cleansing’ and protracted ethnic or communal conflicts. In fact, post-Cold War world politics seems to have been ‘engulfed in convulsive fits of ethnic insecurity, violence and genocide’ (Lake and Rothchild, 1996, p. 41). These events have generated extensive intellectual debate among policy makers, academics and other commentators. In particular these debates have revealed two sets of assumptions about the underlying causes of ethnic antagonisms. Some argue that these conflicts represent a revival of premodern or ‘tribal’ identities, whilst others argue that they are part of a late-modern ‘fragmentary’ reaction against homogenising tendencies of globalisation...

In To cite this work: Mount, Gavin. “A World of Tribes?” in G. Fry and J. O’Hagan (eds) Contending Images of World Politics, Palgrave MacMillan, 2000

Conventional International Relations Theory and the Problem of Peoples

iv

Postmodern IR and Ethnic conflict

Remembering Rwanda: A bibliographic Review

The 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide will prompt scholarship recalling the 1994 tragedy a... more The 20th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide will prompt scholarship recalling the 1994 tragedy and its aftermath to understand what has been learned about genocide prevention and conflict transformation. This paper reviews seminal works across two decades of scholarship to examine how post-conflict analysis has sought to understand an event that many still describe as 'incomprehensible'. In the first five years, the Rwandan genocide emerged as a grand signifier of the 'failure to prevent' while scholarship consolidated the empirical evidence of the events. Research leading up to the tenth anniversary produced a deeper level of understanding of agency and aetiology of the genocide. In the third phase, the genocide was increasingly situated in a deeper historical and regional context and scholarship shifted its focus to the normative theme of transitional justice. Contemporary research has produced a more critical literature challenging the Rwandan 'success story' and exploring the complex politics of reconciliation and memory. This retrospective of Rwandan genocide scholarship reveals a progressive pattern of scholarly change. Similar patterns might be observable across the field of post-conflict analysis which could help guide current and future research strategies.

Indigenous obligations, liberal enclosures and communitarian recognition: Some critical and cosmopolitan responses

Hedley Bull's Neomedievalism

Stephen Conroy was targeting politics in play, not Angus Campbell - Canberra Times - 27 Feb 2014

Aligning Online engagement with assessment: Some Experiences

Pedagogy of online engagement and demonstration of how to use VoiceThread enhance student learnin... more

Safe and Sound: human ethics and international studies fieldwork

Replicating Classroom Intimacy and Engagement Online

Developing a Literature Review for a Doctoral Thesis

A literature review is ‘integral to the success of academic research’ and an indispensable compo... more A literature review is ‘integral to the success of academic research’ and an indispensable component of a doctoral thesis. Brief versions are particularly important for the Confirmation phase of your candidature. Often this work will form a significant component of the introduction or early chapters of your thesis.

Mount - Nations and Nationalism.pdf

The Responsibility to Prevent: Diplomatic Applications of NGO Early Warning and Crisis Prevention Resources

Appeals from the international community to develop capacity for civilian based conflict preventi... more Appeals from the international community to develop capacity for civilian based conflict prevention and early warning systems have been steadily growing over recent years. For example, recognition of the effectiveness of civil society and research communities that can develop more reliable conflict prevention mechanisms is often mentioned as an important component of the Responsibility to Protect agenda. Scholars that have been working in this area for decades also argue that while the research for this systematic early warning has been evolving for twenty five years, its execution and translation into practice is relatively young. More reliable early warning mechanisms have the potential to influence political will of the international community to respond earlier to crisis.

This paper will survey the diplomatic arguments that are making these appeals, survey the current scholarly research on early warning mechanisms and evaluate the claim that these resources are most effectively developed and managed by civil society. The paper will then look in more detail at the Sentinel Project as a particularly interesting example of a civilian early warning mechanism that uses mobile technologies such as 'crowdsourcing' to gather, manage, visualise and disseminate information to dynamically engage in genocide prevention strategies by identifying situations as concern, countering websites and identifying safe areas. The concluding remarks will then speculate on whether emerging early warning mechanisms such as the Sentinel Project are likely to be regarded as effective and legitimate resources for states and the international community.

Ethnic Vulnerability and Environmental Hazards

What is the empirical relationship between environmental hazards and the vulnerability of ethnic ... more What is the empirical relationship between environmental hazards and the vulnerability of ethnic minorities and how might it be understood as a normative problem in international politics? Drawing upon empirical research on ethnopolitical conflict and geospatial crisis mapping of ecological hazards, this paper furthers the proposition that ethnic minorities are disproportionately vulnerable to the impacts of environmental hazards. It will demonstrate that there are empirical grounds to regard the relationship as a major challenge for international relations and that these dynamics have been under-examined in the field. The research complements and reinforces emerging conceptual and policy analysis on a broader trend in the politics of vulnerable peoples towards building resilient communities as a strategy for sustainable solutions. A preliminary review of existing diplomatic and security initiatives suggests that the problem, viewed as a mutual or shared threat, is leading to diplomatic cooperation rather than competition and appears to be functioning as a "diplomatic glue" even in regions of geopolitical tension. Overarching geostrategic dynamics and underlying ethnopolitical tensions are, however, likely to pose challenges for addressing this issue. dramatically demonstrated that we are all vulnerable to disasters, both natural and manmade... We need to examine how those crisis situations could be turned into opportunities.

Replicating Classroom Intimacy and Engagement Online

This paper demonstrates how an audio only approach to online learning can effectively increase en... more This paper demonstrates how an audio only approach to online learning can effectively increase engagement and replicate classroom intimacy. Defining ‘engagement’ as being a relationship between students and course materials, with educators, and among each other; we affirm that innovative teaching practices can sometimes be best achieved by renovating core pedagogic practices to new and dynamic learning environments. As part of a trial of adopting new software (Camtasia and Collaborate Ultra), we developed audio-only tools to deliver course material podcasts, virtual seminars and feedback podcasts. This audio-only strategy sought to facilitate more intimate and meaningful forms of online engagement. Student participation logs revealed consistently high levels of engagement (over 1500 hits per week) and several peaks where podcasts were downloaded in bulk. Qualitative data was gathered through written testimonials and several recorded feedback session structured around five pedagogica...

Resilient Hermeneutics: Using simulations in decision-centric and information rich environments

by David Beesley and Gavin Mount

Future of Warfare Conference, 5-7 Oct. Amsterdam, 2022

In an environment in which artificial intelligence and autonomous systems are increasingly the fo... more In an environment in which artificial intelligence and autonomous systems are increasingly the foundation of decision-centric approaches to modern warfare, interpretation of these data-rich hyper speed realms will be a common dilemma for command, control, and analysis. Numerous military reports have recognised that future warfare will be increasingly defined by a "large mass of autonomous systems" (Australian Army, 2021) and that the key strategic challenges and advantages will depend upon a shift towards decision-centric capabilities (Clark et. al., 2020). In this complex, remote and hybrid security context, hermeneutics, or the theory and methodology of interpretation, will be the critical challenge. We propose to build scenario-based simulations around four hermeneutic modalities. Informed by real world examples, our approach extrapolates hypothetical scenarios to develop immersive decision-making simulations. These scenarios require participants to navigate four sophisticated and nuanced hermeneutic modalities: (1) The hermeneutics of trust explores how decision-making integrity and robust systems may be disrupted or hijacked by adversaries. (2) Critical hermeneutics situates digital objects/processes within a broader sociopolitical and cultural context acknowledging the contentious interfacing of human communities with machine learning activities. (3) Cryptic hermeneutics is a disposition that actively seeks to reveal and unmask systemic bias or nefarious elements within digital ecosystems. (4) The hermeneutics of suspicion allows for sophisticated forms of deciphering and revealing multiple sources of knowledge and layers of meaning. Advanced simulations would explore the weaponisation of countermeasures. These simulations will deliver research and training that will enhance the resilience and decision-centric capacity of command, control, and intelligence practitioners.

Digital Ethnography Redux: Interpreting Drone Cultures and Microtargeting in an era of Digital Transformation

by Gavin Mount and David Beesley

4th International Conference on Advanced Research Methods and Analytics (CARMA 2022), 2022

This paper affirms and demonstrates the application of digital ethnography methodologies to two d... more This paper affirms and demonstrates the application of digital ethnography methodologies to two digitally transformative phenomena that are fundamentally enmeshed in the public sphere: personal drones and microtargeting. We review recent methodological studies on digital ethnography that can be delineated into three forms: research that is online or remote by necessity because of physical distance between researcher and participants; research that uses natively digital tools to study phenomena (Rogers 2013; Fish 2019) and research focused on digital cultures (Markham 2020). Our application of digital ethnography is further informed by qualitative ethnographic research undertaken by Pink, Horst, Postill and Hjorth (Pink, et al., 2016); and Manovich's work on the application of digital ethnography to examine automation and big data (Manovich & Arielli, 2022). Beesley (forthcoming) utilises longitudinal visual ethnography as a lens to understand consumer drone cultures and disentangle the multiple narratives surrounding these disruptive technologies. Mount (2020), utilised digital ethnography to review two decades of microtargeting activities, employed by Strategic Communication Laboratories and Cambridge Analytica, to influence electoral behaviour. This methodological research will be combined with our conceptual swarm hermeneutics framework (Mount & Beesley, 2022) to develop scenario based simulations that will further evaluate interpretive schemas and behaviours.

Simulating World Politics

12th Annual American Political Science Association (APSA) Teaching and Learning Conference: Innovations and Expectations for Teaching in the Digital Era, Washington D.C., 12 - 18 January 2015, 2015

Simulations and role-play have been persistently used as pedagogic tools in International Relatio... more Simulations and role-play have been persistently used as pedagogic tools in International Relations (IR) with varying degrees of success. These approaches offer an opportunity for students to develop a ''feel" for concepts and practices in global politics. For educators, these methods can elucidate the complex nature of decision-making and problem solving dynamics and test theories in simulated scenarios. Both for students and teachers, simulations and role play approaches can require a disproportionate investment in time and may consume the curriculum in ways that do not effectively satisfy all university learning objectives. Simulations of world politics have also had a chequered intellectual history. It is fair to say that the discipline failed to deliver on the lofty promises of early simulation theorists. The discipline has, however, recently considered a cautious return to complex systems and computational simulation as both a teaching and research tool. Critical simulation research has also identified a number of potential problems. The use of simulations in training can create problems of ‘transfer’. Serious gaming tools can generate potential problems relating to unrealistic ‘god-like’ capabilities or the over-reliance on enemy-centric war analogies. Encoded assumptions in simulations can also rely upon fixed “theme-place” and “fictitious identity” assumptions that can produce unhelpful stereotyping. This paper will review current thinking about the pedagogic and research and the utility of simulations in IR and propose that a more critical metaphysical and mediological approach be adopted for integrating simulation studies into tertiary education and research. The proposed approach critically evaluates simulations "of", "in" and "out of" world politics. Methods of discourse analysis and mediology will be employed to decode interests, values and identities that are embedded in computational models used for training, gaming and intelligence analytics. Simulations can be simultaneously experienced and analysed as a subject of critical inquiry. The paper concludes with some reflections on how this pedagogy is informed by current my research in early warning systems and defence simulation research.