Issue #18: Reconstituting Politics: Out Now…!

Arena Quarterly

2 Jul 2024

In this issue of Arena, we call people to arms against arms, with a push back against the push to war, an expose on AI drones in Gaza, and the military in our schools.

Counting Down from One Hundred

Arena Quarterly no.18

Russell Rollason

Jun 2024

Killer drones are being linked to AI in Gaza and Ukraine, fusing surveillance and death. Will a growing resistance set new rules for war?

Australia Should Not Be There

Arena Quarterly no.18

Alison Broinowski

Jun 2024

The Albanese government’s refusal to assert an independent position on Gaza is the culmination of decades of mythologising of our ‘interests’. We are now at an impasse from which the only exit is independent defence.

Great Powers Adrift in the Blue Pacific

Arena Quarterly no.17

Nic Maclellan

Mar 2024

Successive Australian governments have been forced to manoeuvre between the Indo-Pacific strategies of Western allies and the desire of many island neighbours to maintain a foreign policy of ‘friends to all, enemies to none’.

Gaza and the Politics of Grief: Witnessing the devastation of Gaza, outrage is not the only feeling

Arena Online

Mark Furlong

14 Jun 2024

Why focus on grief right now? Grief offers a practical reference point—maybe even a frame—which helps many of us articulate the depression and roiling helplessness we are experiencing about the events in Palestine.

The One Unforgivable Thing: On Policing Male Violence

Arena Online

Nicola Brayan

14 Jun 2024

Our justice system cannot truly compensate victims of gendered violence, and it is built in such a way that those victims are subjected to even more cruelty if they are brave enough to seek justice.

In Fiji, Vunisavisavi on the Edge: How top-down adaptation to sea-level rise went over the top

Arena Quarterly no.17

Amanda Bertana

Mar 2024

The world is riddled with disastrous adaptation projects—cracked water tanks in drought-prone areas, monstrous seawalls that have shifted sediment downstream, elite capture of resources.

‘Radical’: A film to provoke thinking

Arena Online

Peter Curtis

14 Jun 2024

For those of us who work in education systems, we can only empathise with Sergio who suffers an ‘existential crisis’ from having to teach the curriculum. The effect is soul destroying for both him, and his students.

Unsettling Scorsese’s Killers

Arena Quarterly no.17

Alice Bellette

Mar 2024

Is this a filmmaker casting his gaze back across a body of work or recognising the extent to which his creative artefacts have been confined by his subjective positioning?

Endgame for Beginners: The US push to retain empire is part of an older plan

Arena Quarterly no.17

Alison Broinowski

Mar 2024

The Bush doctrine of unipolarity, military domination, pre-emptive (aggressive) war and regime change still rules.

From the Archive

Green Pathways to a People’s Future

Arena Quarterly no. 1

Adam Bandt

‘Fire’ may be an appropriate way to think and talk about the climate-change emergency, not just because we are literally dealing with a burning world but also because it does not bring with it the concerns associated with ‘rule by emergency’.

From the Archive

The Tip of the Democracy-Sinking Iceberg

Timothy Erik Ström

There is a curious and seldom-told backstory and parallel story to the high-profile Cambridge Analytica scandal, one that makes the notorious firm seem like the tip of the democracy-sinking iceberg.

Preferred Genocide

Arena Online

David Blumenstein

6 Jun 2024

A political cartoon about preferential genocide.

From the river to the sea, the world is becoming the Gaza laboratory

Arena Online

Guy Rundle

17 May 2024

During the Vietnam war you couldn't say 'fuck' on a theatre stage, but you could make the political proposition that an army our own soldiers were fighting should prevail. Now pro-Palestine marchers pass bus stops in which government-run anti-HIV ads feature men talking about how they fuck, chanting a geopolitical opinion that the government may well ban. What has occurred?

The Hollow Myths of a ‘Maverick’ Empire

Arena Online

Gavin Lewis

17 May 2024

Ironically Star Wars was produced towards the end of a historical period of idealised counter-cultural iconography. Its heroes were rebels. In Top Gun: Maverick the earlier film’s dynamics are appropriated in support of the American empire.

Big History for World Revolution?: Karatani’s and Graeber and Wengrow’s very different new perspectives

Arena Quarterly no.17

Charles Barbour

Mar 2024

If, for almost all of our history, humans have creatively and continuously improvised new ways of living in common and wilfully abandoned experiments that failed, why has that process stagnated so completely in the modern world?

Save Humanity! In 30,000 AD! With Crypto!

Simon Cooper

3 May 2024

What is ‘good’ or of ‘value’ is a complex question, one radically narrowed by the utilitarian, quantitative approach, which assumes that what is good is what can be measured.

The Mask of Curfew in Alice Springs

Arena Online

Lora Chapman

3 May 2024

The recent execution and looming possibility of a reinstated youth curfew are unlikely to quell well-established divisions between the town’s Aboriginal and settler-Australian populations.