5.7 KiB
| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony D. Burke | 1/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_D._Burke | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:55:07.127099+00:00 | kb-cron |
Anthony Burke (born 1966) is an Australian political theorist and international relations scholar. He is Professor of Environmental Politics and International Relations at the University of New South Wales. He is co-principal at the Planet Politics Institute. His published work ranges across the fields of political theory and philosophy, environmental politics, science and technology studies, security studies, war and peace, international ethics, international law, and Australian politics and history. He has spent the last decade working on problems of planetary politics, governance and security, especially climate change, and written for Nature and The Washington Post on the crisis at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and the environmental consequences of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. He is the author of six books: The Ecology Politic: Power, Law & Earth in the Anthropocene (with Stefanie Fishel, MIT Press, 2025), Institutionalising Multispecies Justice (with Danielle Celermajer et. al., Cambridge University Press, 2024), Uranium (Polity, 2017), Ethics and Global Security: A Cosmopolitan Approach (with Katrina Lee-Koo and Matt McDonald, Routledge 2014), Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against The Other (Routledge, 2007), and Fear of Security: Australia’s Invasion Anxiety (first edn. Pluto Press Australia, 2001; 2nd. edn. Cambridge University Press, 2008). He is the co-editor of Ethical Security Studies: A New Research Agenda (with Jonna Nyman, Routledge 2016), Global Insecurity: Futures of Global Chaos and Governance (with Rita Parker, Palgrave, 2017), and Critical Security in the Asia-Pacific (with Matthew McDonald, Manchester University Press, 2007). Shorter works include "Interspecies Cosmopolitanism" (Review of International Studies, 2023), "Planet Politics: A Manifesto from the end of IR" (Millennium, 2016), "Security Cosmopolitanism" (Critical Studies on Security, 2013), "Humanity After Biopolitics" (Angelaki, 2011), "Ontologies of War" (Theory & Event, 2006), and "Aporias of Security" (Alternatives, 2002).
== Education and career == Anthony Burke received a B.A. (Communications) in 1991 and M.A. by thesis in 1994 from the University of Technology Sydney. He studied journalism, creative writing, cultural theory and politics under teachers and intellectuals such as the literary theorist Stephen Muecke, sociologists Jean Martin and Caroline Graham, poet Dorthy Porter and novelist Amanda Lohrey, semiologist Gunther Kress, media theorists Helen Wilson and McKenzie Wark and historians John Docker and Ann Curthoys. His fellow students included writers such as Claire Corbett, Lindsay Barrett, Fiona Allon, Bernard Cohen, and Anthony Macris. During this time, until the mid-1990s, he also worked as a human rights activist with the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement and campaigns for East Timor, Bougainville, West Papua and Indonesia. In 1991-2 he was a researcher in telecommunications law and policy at the Communications Law Centre, UNSW. He was awarded a PhD in Political Science and International Relations from the Australian National University in 1999, and subsequently worked in the Australian Senate as a committee researcher on the environment, arts and communications. Whilst there he led a research team on the Senate's 2000 report, The Heat is On: Australia’s Greenhouse Future and was a key author of its report on the Jabiluka uranium mine project, Undermining Process. He was appointed to a lectureship at the University of Queensland in 2001 and left to join the University of Adelaide in July that year. In 2005 he joined the University of New South Wales in Sydney, and since 2008 has worked at its campus in Canberra. He has held visiting fellowships at the Australian National University, the University of Birmingham, and the New School for Social Research in New York City.
== Writing and Approach == Burke has published six authored books, and a number of journal articles and essays, including an essay on biopolitics and the war on terror, "Life in the hall of smashed mirrors", which used a fictional form. After a period in the early 2000s working on Australian engagement with the politics and culture of the Asia-Pacific, in the wake of 9/11 he published a series of studies on the ethics of war and the political theory of security and the state. Thus began a lifelong interest in the promises and pathologies of the modern "body-politic" or "social contract" that forms the normative and legal underpinnings of the modern nation-state. His first two books, Fear of Security and Beyond Security Ethics & Violence, were initially concerned with the body-politic's problematic and racist systems of identity, exclusion, repression, and democracy. These concerns extended into a critique of its ecological consequences in The Ecology Politic. Burke could be understood as a broadly critical theorist working across decolonial, post-Marxist, ecological, ecofeminist, and post-humanist problematics. His philosophy works across continental and analytical traditions, and has been consistently relational, decolonising, deconstructive, and emancipatory in intent. It combines a grounded and interdisciplinary critique of contemporary political ontology, governance practices, and democracy alongside efforts to rethink the bases and purposes of politics. The work first challenged the Body-Politic's legal-structural relations with violence, war, insecurity, and colonisation, and in his book with Stefanie Fishel, The Ecology Politic, moves to a positive vision of a transnational ecological polity attentive to a rapidly changing planetary situation.