AUKUS

Arena Quarterly no. 14 features an extensive special section on AUKUS. Clinton Fernandes and Alison Broinowski reveal in their respective articles the true commitment that AUKUS binds us to in the projection of US power against China. They debunk comforting notions that AUKUS protects vital sea lanes and builds, without social cost, local defence industries, showing us the financial and ideological commitments Australia is making to the US war machine. Binoy Kampmark details the responses and consequences for our South-East Asian neighbours, especially of nuclearisation and the possibility of a regional arms race, while Guy Rundle asks big questions about the reforming of world power blocs and their likely racialist qualities. As with Fernandes, he asks why an independent Australian defence is not possible in an emergent multi-polar world. In a different register, Simon Cooper questions Western progressives’ willingness to militarise human rights and their adoption of certain ‘boutique’ nations as reflections of their own blinkered values. Marilyn Lake and David Lee offer very welcome historical perspectives, respectively on Australia’s foundational anti-Chinese policies and discourses, and how these may be playing out still, and on Labor’s movement since Curtin through Hawke and now Albanese away from relative defence independence and the party’s grassroots nuclear-free commitment.

We also publish two exceptional articles that can only open metropolitan eyes to the causes and effects of social and policing policy in Central Australia. They make the death of Kumanjayi Walker and recent ‘riots’ (uprisings?) among Aboriginal youth in Alice Springs explicable. Nick Cheesman presents the struggle in Myanmar in terms of the re-emergence of ‘the people’ as a revolutionary category. Meanwhile Richard King ponders the effects of contemporary body technologies on social relations and individual identity, Ali Alizadeh skewers the meaning of new horror movies as the horror of precarity and the proletarianisation that may befall us all, and Julie Stephens wonders about the ambiguities and vulnerabilities around sex and consent in her review of two books critical of ‘liberal’ consent culture.