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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Anthony D. Burke | 2/3 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_D._Burke | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T15:55:07.127099+00:00 | kb-cron |
=== Contemporary work: planetary politics === This simultaneously cosmopolitan and planetary awareness has underpinned a decade of work on nuclear politics and colonialism, "Planet Politics," and Earth system governance. Following his 2009 International Relations article on "Nuclear reason", he edited a 2016 special issue of Critical Studies on Security on nuclear politics, contributing the article "Nuclear Time". He published the 2017 book, Uranium, in Polity Press "resources" series - a text that ranged across the impacts of mining and nuclear testing on Indigenous people, the past and future of nuclear energy, the history of nuclear weapons and science, and the international security implications of nuclear strategy, arms control, and disarmament. His work in environmental political theory and earth system governance includes a series of new treaty proposals on coal, forests and an "architecture for a net zero world"; political theories of "thing-systems power", biospheric ethics, and a material ecological democracy; and a jointly authored manifesto, "Planet Politics", calling on the institutions and study of world politics to engage with and repair an endangered Earth. The books The Ecology Politic and Institutionalising Multispecies Justice are the initial culmination of this research program.
=== Planetary cosmopolitanism === At the turn of the decade Burke begun to publish work engaging with Cosmopolitanism in philosophy, international relations, and political theory, which is pursued in a way that is both critical and transformative of more liberal notions of the cosmopolitan. His theory of "Security Cosmopolitanism" was published and debated in the inaugural 2013 issue of Critical Studies on Security, with a follow-up debate in 2015. Arguing that the realities of globalisation and the biosphere had made the classical model of the state both retrograde and dangerous, he proposed a new ethos that would radically transform both national and collective security practices, and grapple with how global insecurities emerge from within states and the very practices and systems of modernity. States can no longer immunise themselves, behind hardened borders, against threats from without. This theory framed the book, Ethics and Global Security: A Cosmopolitan Approach. Burke has also published philosophical studies on the grounds, ethics, and ontology of cosmopolitanism. In a 2012 Angelaki essay, "Humanity After Biopolitics", Burke developed a distinctive empirical-normative justification for cosmopolitanism, a relational ontology to ground its claims and practices, and rejected a teleological vision of change. In 2013 he published another essay, "The Good State", which pushes beyond anthropocentrism to anchor its account in the vulnerability of humanity both to the political dangers it poses to itself and to the cosmic arrangement of chance that enables complex life on Earth. In 2023 he published a third essay, "Interspecies Cosmopolitanism", which pushes beyond the weak anthropocentrism of his earlier work in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, which exposed the agentic power of the virus to assemble with human and planetary flows into a landscape of devastation. The essay challenged the anthropocentric humanism of the cosmopolitan tradition and grounded a planetary cosmopolitan outlook in the materiality of a changing Earth and its life.
=== Early work: ontologies of strategy and security === Burke's first book, In Fear of Security: Australia's Invasion Anxiety, joined a theory of security as a "political technology" to an historical account of how security has been defined, sought, and mobilized as a system of power throughout Australian history. It has a particular emphasis on Australia's policy towards Indonesia and the Asia-Pacific. Its second edition includes a chapter on Australia's repression of asylum seekers and its involvement in the US-led war on terror, and a new conclusion setting out a more cosmopolitan future for Australia. While describing a more hopeful and progressive vision of Australian politics and foreign policy (in sympathy with broad notions of human security, or the Welsh School's emancipatory approach to critical security studies), its detailed empirical account of how security has functioned as a tool of the powerful in Australian history, at the same time as denying security and dignity to millions, challenges both conservative and progressive visions of security. His second book, Beyond Security, Ethics and Violence: War Against the Other, combined political philosophy with a range of empirical studies: Israel/Palestine, the War on Terror, American exceptionalism, the Iraq and Vietnam wars, and the Australia-Indonesia relationship during the dictatorship of Soeharto. It develops his political theory of security and the state across three chapters, a further three chapters challenge dominant ethical approaches to national security, especially just war theory, and the final three chapters question the constitutive and dysfunctional role of violence in world politics, finding its claims linked closely with modern ideas of strategy, progress, and freedom.
== Controversy == In 2008, following the publication of an article in the new journal, Critical Studies on Terrorism, Burke was criticised by neo-conservative intellectuals in Australia. This dispute quickly attracted national media attention. A Queensland university lecturer, Mervyn Bendle, writing in the far right magazine Quadrant, accused Burke and a number of other writers of supporting and apologizing for terrorism in their works. Bendle wrote that Burke had an "abstract and tendentious postmodernist perspective", and that "one gets an impression not only of the "radical pacifism" deplored by Ungerer, but of a deeper, almost pathological tendency revealed in Burke's antipathy for liberal democracies and mainstream Australians, and his relentless sympathy for terrorists, illegal immigrants, communists, and "the Other" in its multitudinous forms". Bendle also repeated these views on ABC Radio National's Religion Report and in The Australian. Burke responded by stating that he was neither a pacifist nor a supporter of terrorism, and stressed that his work "has been about trying to make liberal democracy better, better at living up to its own values and protecting the freedoms that are proclaimed so loudly about". He emphasized that he had consistently "condemned terrorism as an immoral, illegitimate and politically counter-productive form of violence". He responded to the claims in an interview on ABC Radio National and his scholarship on terrorism was profiled in The Australian's Higher Education Supplement.
== Selected works ==