David Martin Jones

• PhD
• Professor at King's College London

9/11 and its aftermath was to have a dramatic impact on the visual arts and the artistic response to the War on Terror. This study surveys the evolution of these responses from the dramatic events of 11 September 2001 to the longer term reactions generated by the two-decade long encounter with the so-called War on Terrorism, primarily via the Imper...

Popular music was the most immediate way in which the cultural response to 9/11 manifested itself. Initially music offered a way of mourning and coping with grief. As the United States moved toward the invasion of Iraq, pop music also began to reflect the divisions in society between patriot-artists who supported the invasion, most notably in count...

This article examines recent interest in hedging as a feature of international politics in the Asia Pacific. Focusing on the small states of Southeast Asia, we argue that dominant understandings of hedging are misguided for two reasons. Despite significant advances in the literature, hedging has remained a vague concept rendering it a residual cate...

Economic redistribution, and social equality required an interconnected, regional and global trading order. After 1989, it was easy to believe that a liberal democratic model, supported by US-sponsored international rules, would spread across the globe. However, over two decades, unmoveable progressive values proved internally and externally unsust...

The economic decline of the West weakened economically by the euro zone crisis and politically by Brexit, is unlikely to be arrested. Yet the redistribution of global wealth has not advanced social justice, a Rawlsian ‘law of peoples’ or global emancipation, as the progressive mind anticipated. History far from ended in 1989 and geopolitics reasser...

After the fall of the Berlin Wall the West set off to re-make the world. Its abstract norms and progressive values set the global agenda. The consequences proved disastrous, and not only for the West. In these circumstances of revisionism abroad and populism at home, is it possible to recuperate a more circumscribed international vision that recogn...

The end of the Cold War announced a new world order. Liberal democracy prevailed, ideological conflict abated, and world politics set off for the promised land of a secular, cosmopolitan, market-friendly end of history. Or so it seemed. Thirty years later, this unipolar worldview— premised on shared values, open markets, open borders and abstract s...

Scepticism concerning the direction of progress and the policies required to achieve it, exposed new liberalism’s incoherent character. The Home Office’s decision to ignore an intransigent minority censoring works it found offensive created a precedent. The death threats issued against Salman Rushdie represented the opening shots in a cultural war...

Failure to confront the ideological challenge that Islamism presented at home and abroad exposed the incoherence at the core of new liberalism’s inclusive, but diversity aware, secular agenda. After the millennium confusion over the theory and practice of external war and countering terrorism at home posed an intractable dilemma for the progressive...

The way the Cold War ended and the triumph of market capitalism constituted the global, economic preconditions and the liberal democratic premises for abstract speculation about how the evolving world order ought to be governed. Release from the ideological straightjacket of the Cold War stimulated interest in social justice, emancipation, human se...

The creative destruction that the financial crisis unleashed created a political and economic climate increasingly inimical to liberal, secular, progressive, or socially just outcomes. Western governments ruling according to a rationalist technique fatally underestimated the role that non-negotiable cultural understandings continued to play at the...

At the millennium a progressive consensus influenced and constrained western democratic behaviour. The new consensus transcended conventional party politics. Its more prominent exponents considered developed states without enemies. It was no longer implausible to embed a realistic utopia, where global citizens, cherishing minority rights, would ena...

This chapter examines the economic, technological and financial changes that facilitated liberal globalization. To understand, The technological advances of the 1980’s that facilitated globalization rendered rigid, closed, bureaucratic regimes redundant. The economic process established the structural preconditions that enabled the idea that histor...

The introduction outlines the question this work addresses. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact between 1989-92, it was ubiquitously held in the western media, business, government and academe that history was ‘being driven in a coherent direction’ towards a secular, liberal democratic, secular and borderless end. A quarter of...

If the politics of prudent diffidence and the restoration of political balance, civil association, and limited constitutional rule, proves incapable of recovering political conduct under contingent conditions, what alternative dispositions might mould the contours of our post historical future? This chapter concludes the book by examining how histo...

The scientific and business performance models applied to the university sector from the 1980s changed the academy in ways that facilitated the domination of a progressive orthodoxy and conformity with its values at the end of history. Rational management and the infantilization of students undermined academic freedom and repressed heterodox viewpo...

Citizenship and democratization in Southeast Asia Edited by Ward Berenschot, H.G.C. Schulte Nordholt and Laurens Bakker Leiden: Brill, 2017. Pp. 320. Figures, Tables, Index. - David Martin Jones

Almost two decades after the events of 9/11, this Handbook offers a comprehensive insight into the evolution and development of terrorism and insurgency since then. Gathering contributions from a broad range of perspectives, it both identifies new technological developments in terrorism and insurgency, and addresses the distinct state responses to...

This chapter assesses the effectiveness of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) process in establishing a regional economic community. It suggests that intra- and extra-ASEAN economic practice reveals that its practice of nonbinding consensus inhibits deeper integration either within ASEAN or the wider East Asian region. Thus, whilst...

A generation of scholars has depicted the premiership of Labor Party leader Gough Whitlam as a watershed in Australian foreign policy. According to the prevailing consensus, Whitlam carved out a more independent and progressive role in international affairs without significantly endangering relations with Western-aligned states in East and Southeas...

This article analyses the way in which the group calling itself the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (Islamic State) manages cultural heritage sites under its control. By drawing on three different cases—Palmyra; Sufi, Shi'a and Sunni heritage sites; and Mosul—it examines the way in which the logic of Islamic State's iconoclasm might also be conside...

After 2006, counterinsurgency rose to prominence as the dominant paradigm in American and British thinking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for the presumed wars of the future. Counterinsurgency—or COIN—achieved such currency in the strategic community that it became more than a military doctrine, its nominal status. Instead, it became a...

From the foundation of a security service in 1949 under Cold War auspices of MI5 to the expansion of the concept of security after 2001 and promulgation of over 50 new counter-terror laws, the practice of national security has troubled the Australian political conscience. The maintenance of national security and evolution of an Australian Intellige...

Since 2001 expenditure on the security services has increased exponentially in Western democracies and particularly amongst the Five Eyes community of the UK, the US, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. This has occurred in conjunction with the expansion of counter-terror laws. Yet somewhat problematically the phenomenon of Islamist inspired violenc...

The Austrian philosopher, Eric Voegelin, argued that the ideological fanaticism of the Nazis was a spiritual perversion. More precisely, so far, as the political religions of the twentieth century, Fascism, Stalinism, Maoism and Islamism, are concerned, the meaning or substance of religious phenomena moved from a spiritual concern with transcending...

In 1997, the thirtieth anniversary of the Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN), the organization enunciated a vision of where it would be in 2020. An integral part of that ASEAN Vision 2020 required the creation of an ASEAN Economic Community (AEC), a single market and production base affording a free flow of goods, services, investments...

Twenty-first-century political crises stretching from Europe to the Middle East and the Asia-Pacific have undermined the worldview that governed post-Cold War western thinking about a liberal end of history. This worldview assumed that shared norms and transnational institutions would transform the state based-order. In this context, the use of for...

Since the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) expanded its institutional outreach to span the broader Asia Pacific and new policy areas, a dominant orthodoxy has placed the organization at the center of the region's international order. More recently, uncertainty in the context of China's rise sheds doubt on ASEAN's apparent centrality t...

In the wake of the 9/11 attacks the American film industry took a while to react to the Islamist threat at home and abroad. From 2005, however, Hollywood responded to the threat to the homeland and the War on Terror “over there” in Iraq and Afghanistan in a variety of ways. This article examines the nature of that response and whether it evinces, a...

This chapter discusses the historical assumptions informing current counterinsurgency (COIN) thinking—which were largely influenced by British experiences during the period of decolonization—addressing the issue of whether the British armed forces promoted coherent knowledge of counterinsurgency. A number of commentators have recently claimed that...

This chapter provides readers with an overview and discussion of the manner in which the Internet and social media has facilitated movements, ranging from Aryan Nations and the various European Defence Leagues, to the Global Jihadist Movement and anarchist groups. As the phenomenon of netwar and online recruitment evolved after 9/11, extremist move...

Recent events in world politics, from the implosion of Syria and the Ukraine to China’s growing assertiveness in the East and South China Seas, have exposed the limitations of the dominant idealist and normativist paradigms in the study of international relations. In a world that is more Metternich than Rawls, it is necessary once again to examine...

Over the last half-decade, counter-insurgency (COIN) rose to prominence as the dominant paradigm in American and British thinking about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and indeed for the presumed wars of the future. ‘COIN’ achieved such currency in the strategic community that it became more than a military doctrine, which is its nominal status....

Since the bombing attacks launched on the transport systems in Madrid in 2003 and London in 2005, and the discovery of similar plots between 2005 and 2013 in Toronto, New York, Sydney, Melbourne, London, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, and Boston, Western governments increasingly recognize that home-grown Islamist radicalization represents a profound threat...

Eric Voegelin, the Austrian philosopher who fled the Third Reich in the wake of the Anschluss in 1938, argued that the ideological fanaticism of the Nazis was not only a moral and political mistake, but also a spiritual perversion. More precisely, so far as the political religions of the twentieth century, Fascism, Stalinism, Maoism and Islamism ar...

The September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, apart from announcing a jihadist threat to the modern Western state, constituted the precursor event that subsequently revealed a pattern of interconnected sources of instability. In particular, the Bali nightclub bombings of October 2002, which killed 202 people in Indonesia, demonstrated the ex...

On July 7, 2005, a series of coordinated bombings severely disrupted the London transport system, claiming 56 lives. As Londoners recovered from the terrorist attacks, two facts emerged with increasing clarity. Firstly, the protean and previously unheard of “Secret Organization Group of Al-Qaeda of Jihad Organization in Europe” that claimed respons...

The medium, Marshall McLuhan observed, is the message. By this McLuhan understood the media as “new languages with new and unique powers of expression.”1 Ironically, Al-Qaeda and its home-grown offshoots in the UK and elsewhere appear to have appreciated McLuhan’s insight in a way that Western governments and their media have not.

After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon in 2001, the Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication devised a new classification. The category, September 11 Terrorist Attacks 2001-Fiction, responded to a distinct genre of political novels that include among others: Jay McInerney’s The Good Life (2006), Don DeLillo’s Falling Man...

Confusion and incoherence in the theory and practice of war currently haunts the Western liberal conscience: Who or what precisely is the enemy? How should war be prosecuted and legally addressed? And what might the answers to these questions entail for our future political and social organization? These are critical questions that arise from the l...

After 9/11 and the identification of the asymmetric threat emanating from failed states or states of concern like Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, Western military thinking underwent a “cultural revolution.”1 It assumed the form of a distinctive doctrine, namely, counterinsurgency — the attempt to confound organized armed challenges to established a...

1. History Restarted 2. The Unbearable Lightness of Being British 3. The Commentariat and Discourse Failure 4. Counter insurgency (COIN): The Military Revolution that Failed 5. Non-western terror and counter-insurgency: the case of Jemaah Islamiah 6. Beyond Belief: Islamist Strategic Thinking and International Relations Theory 7. Political Fiction...

demonstrates that early modern thinking concerning war and statecraft of a realist or reason of state provenance was acutely aware of the moral and political consequences of the use of force. Thinkers following Machiavelli sought to address questions of the use of force on a practical case-by-case basis, and contemporary leaders of western democrac...

Observers have begun to scrutinize the prominence of counter-insurgency (COIN) in the military, security and political discourse of the major Western powers, questioning whether COIN's precepts account for its claimed successes and whether they offer valid policy prescriptions. The key research questions this study seeks to examine, however, are of...

In recent years a number of commentators have posited that the British reputation for conducting small wars has suffered in the wake of setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. The argument here contests whether such a tradition can be truly said to have ever existed. A close examination of this supposed tradition reveals it to be a myth. In fact, rarely...

'Congratulations to the authors for a clearly argued and comprehensive treatment of China's post-Cold War rise and what it means for existing and future dynamics of the Asia-Pacific region. Effectively employing realist theory in a fair-minded treatment of regional developments, the volume shows how and why power realities are more important than n...

It has become orthodoxy in terrorism studies that the survival or durability of the organization or network is central to the terrorist mission. From this perspective, its ideology or political religion is subordinated to the core purpose of the group, which is understood to be survival for its own sake. Through a case study that examines the evolu...

The notion of “counterinsurgency” (COIN) has for some years been the central concept driving military operations in Afghanistan, and before that, in Iraq. It constitutes the dominant idea influencing much current military planning of the major Western powers. This study questions the assumptions and relevance of the thinking behind counterinsurgenc...

A powerful orthodoxy exists in the academic literature devoted to the history of Australia's post-1945 international relations. It maintains that suspicion and condescension permeated the attitude of the Menzies government (1949–66) towards Asia. Accordingly, Menzies’ regional policies not only prevented Australia from engaging meaningfully with it...

The prevailing orthodoxy in the academic literature devoted to the history of Australia's post-1945 international relations posits that a mixture of suspicion and condescension permeated the attitude of the governments headed by Robert Menzies (1949–1966) toward the Asia-Pacific region. Menzies's regional policies, according to this view, not only...

Milton's status as a political thinker has endured something of a checkered career. Recent scholarship has attended both to the complexity of Milton's character and the classical ideals permeating his political thought. This essay seeks to clarify further Milton's defence of the commonwealth, by situating his polemical writings of 1649 to 1653 in t...

In Of Reformation (1641) Milton lamented that, ‘there is no art that hath bin more canker’d in her principles, more soyl’d and slubber’d with aphorising pedantry than the art of policie’.1 Milton further contended that it was the ‘masterpiece of the modern politician’ to mould ‘the people’ with precepts. Milton evidently questioned this development...

This Special Issue of Parergon examines the manner in which understandings of reason of state and natural law informed the conception and practice of governance of the early modern state. A series of related essays considers aspects of these evolving understandings from the perspective of the political, economic, moral, and external conduct of the...

In the prevailing understanding of political and economic development, the emergence of a self-confident urban middle class promotes liberalization and democratization. However, in Pacific Asia the middle class has not pressed for a wider civil society or communicatory democracy. Rather, a technocratic elite has proactively adopted constitutional i...

"For the first time in its history Australia is in an interesting place at an interesting time" argues Dr. David Martin Jones of the School of Political Science and International Studies, University of Queensland. Dr Jones notes that the current "ideology driving US foreign policy comes into conflict with developing Chinese reality", which is "proj...