Greeting the Stranger: Examining the (un)familiar in Australia’s detention history

Despite the contemporary explosiveness of asylum seekers and their treatment in Australia, the complex vicissitudes of its history have been glossed over. Focusing specifically on the evolution of detention legislation, this thesis places Australia’s treatment of ‘boat people’ within the framework of the 1980s migration debates, preoccupations with illegal immigration and the development of Australia’s ‘proud humanitarian record.’ It criticises historians’ exemplification of the 1992 mandatory detention legislation as a ‘watershed’ moment, and shows that this legislation only solidified a policy with a deeper and more complex history

From Uneven Ground: The Undermining of the Alliance Between Commercial Farmers and the State in Zimbabwe 1990 – 1996

This paper explores the deterioration of the strategic alliance between commercial farmers and the state in Zimbabwe after 1990. Expiry of the Lancaster House constitution, the implementation of a structural adjustment program and the formal emergence of a black 'empowerment' lobby combined with severe drought had significantly altered the nature of Zimbabwe's land debate by the mid 1990s. The deadlock in land redistribution during this period is often vaguely attributed to a combination of state apathy and white farmer resistance, but interest group dynamics were far more complex both internally and externally. This comprehensive analysis of the relative policies, positions and internal reconfigurations of key stakeholders explains the polarisation of the land debate, the collapse of the alliance and the slowdown in land transfers.

Therapeutic Jurisprudence and Homosexual Expungement Law: Lessons from Australia and New Zealand/Aotearoa

Until recently, a historical conviction for a homosexual offence remained on an individual’s criminal record until expungement legislation was enacted to facilitate such convictions to be spent. An analysis of parliamentary debates in New Zealand/Aotearoa and across Australia highlights the aim and opinions of lawmakers in their desire to bring about a therapeutic remedy to address the ‘criminal stain’ of a conviction for a historical homosexual offence. Along with the aim to remedy the effect of a conviction, parliaments used the law reform debate as a broader therapeutic project of inclusiveness for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer (LGBTIQ) communities. The success of expungement is evidenced by the passing of legislation, with most applications to expunge granted. These positive outcomes are countered by a low number of applications to expunge, a refusal by all governments to provide reparations and the use of expungement legislation to garner favour with all members of LGBTIQ communities—a move open to an accusation of government virtue signalling

Complex Politics: A Quantitative Semantic and Topological Analysis of UK House of Commons Debates

This study is a first, exploratory attempt to use quantitative semantics techniques and topological analysis to analyze systemic patterns arising in a complex political system. In particular, we use a rich data set covering all speeches and debates in the UK House of Commons between 1975 and 2014. By the use of dynamic topic modeling (DTM) and topological data analysis (TDA) we show that both members and parties feature specific roles within the system, consistent over time, and extract global patterns indicating levels of political cohesion. Our results provide a wide array of novel hypotheses about the complex dynamics of political systems, with valuable policy applications

A Leap in the Dark: How Benjamin Disraeli’s 1867 Reform Bill Remade the Tory Party

Publications on Benjamin Disraeli tend to focus on popular topics like his clashes with William Gladstone, career as an author, or supposed opportunistic character. Biographers like Robert Blake have produced retellings of Disraeli’s life encompassing several volumes, and there are a multitude of writings on the lasting legacy he left on the Conservative Party and the United Kingdom as a whole. These publications also include Monypenny and Buckle’s seminal Life of Disraeli Vol.III 1846-1855 upon which a large portion of modern Disraeli scholarship is based. Some volumes like Young Disraeli: 1804-1846 by Jane Ridley focus on Disraeli’s life before he became Prime Minister. The discussion within these publications often attribute Disraeli’s political actions as being opportunistic rather than a living, developing ideology that grew with him through his career. Essentially he is often characterized as a man who had no particular ideology and just adapted pieces of existing political thought to capitalize on popular consensus. However, by examining the 1867 Reform Act, this paper seeks to disprove the notion that Disraeli was simply a political opportunist instead of a political mastermind who engineered a new winning identity for the Conservative Party. This paper aims to utilize Disraeli’s own speeches, letters, and musings to delve into the ideas that formed his political ideology, One Nation Conservatism. It will use the words and thoughts of its founding father to define what One Nationism is and what served as its genesis. Newspapers and contemporary accounts will also reveal the United Kingdom’s reactions to Disraeli’s policies and how it became so entwined with Tory dogma. Disraeli’s motives and pre-established line of thinking can be used to demonstrate he had already formulated the basis of One-Nation Conservatism and was acting accordingly

Emotion in Politics in Times of War: A Corpus Pragmatics Study

[EN] Emotions remain a fertile field of research. Thanks to newly available technology, investigating people's preferences, emotions and feelings is relevant for different purposes and perspectives. Consequently, the exploration of emotion has stimulated specialised software development. This paper presents a snapshot of currently available computational tools for analysing emotions. We also explore and compare their contributions and use them complementarily to characterise a corpus. The study presented here combines several emotion analysis tools to examine and characterise a corpus of political debates. Specifically, 34 British House of Commons debates on the war in Ukraine have been examined to identify the lexicon associated with the emotions articulated by parliamentarians in a situation of maximum political conflict, such as war, and to provide a global overview of the most common terms used, to express emotion and feeling. Using corpus pragmatics, a comprehensive overview of the corpus is obtained, as it allows the analysis of considerable amounts of data, studied from a pragmatics perspective, for the characterisation of emotion in terms of meaning and use.Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-Universitat Politecnica de Valencia agreement with Springer Nature. No research grants were obtained from funding agencies or research support (including salaries, equipment, supplies, reimbursement for attending symposia, and other expenses) by organizations that may gain or lose financially through publication of this manuscript.Mestre-Mestre, EM. (2023). Emotion in Politics in Times of War: A Corpus Pragmatics Study. Corpus pragmatics (Online). 7(4):323-344. https://doi.org/10.1007/s41701-023-00147-w3233447