ABSTRACT The Bob Hawke Collection is held by the University of South Australia (UniSA) Library. This collection, comprising the personal papers of former Prime Minister, the honourable Robert James Lee (Bob) Hawke AC GCL, is housed in the Bob Hawke Prime Ministerial Library (BHPML) in Adelaide. Throughout his public career spanning the 1950s to his death in 2019, Hawke demonstrated interest in matters pertaining to the Pacific Islands. He was first influential while working with the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) as an advocate where he led a wage arbitration case with local officers in the Territory of Papua and New Guinea. As ACTU president, Hawke led national and international action against atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons at Moruroa. As prime minister, Hawke promoted regional cooperation, support for development, and further anti-nuclear measures. The BHPML is a publicly accessible repository, offering Pacific academics and historians unique research opportunities.

ABSTRACT Malcolm Fraser’s view of the Commonwealth of Nations and involvement in its affairs exemplifies his approach to international relations, combining idealism and pragmatism. His liberalism was strongly anti-racist. Evident before he became prime minister, this approach developed further at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings in 1977, 1979 and 1981, and in the short-lived Commonwealth Heads of Government Regional Meetings. Fraser subsequently served as co-chair of the Eminent Persons’ Group on South Africa in 1985–1986, also becoming a candidate for Secretary-General in 1988–1989. Fraser’s approach to the Commonwealth provides insights into how the grouping might best function today.

ABSTRACT As Israel and much of the world reeled following the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin (1922–1995) by an extremist Jew who opposed progress towards a peace agreement with the Palestinians through the Oslo Accords, Egyptian newspapers published items to explain and contextualize the media event. This article relies on the cartoons printed in Egypt’s main outlets in the immediate aftermath of the assassination, seeking to draw out the primary narratives propagated therein for consumers, both in Egypt and across the Arab world. Overall, the caricatures reveal a failure on the part of the Egyptian press to truly encompass the complexities of the devolution of the Israeli parliamentary system into violence, or to adequately represent Rabin as a leader and as an individual. Still, the underlying messages were largely sympathetic, often creating a connection and therefore identification between the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat a decade and a half earlier.

ABSTRACT The term ‘poetic’ is often a synonym for beautiful, compelling, euphonious, memorable, stirring, and so on. That leads to an assumption that poetics may reveal only what is beautiful, compelling, euphonious, memorable, stirring, or what have you about discourse – studying poems and/or *unpoems for aesthetic and other evidence of their charisma. A corollary would be that poetics cannot offer insights into uncharismatic discourse. This article asks whether the label poetic might be as much a problem as it is a commendation, having regard to discursive contexts in which a sense of heightened aesthetics may prove highly prejudicial. It brings that question to the task of closely reading the 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart, along with two prime ministers’ speeches in response to the Statement. It shows how a widespread imposition of the poetic ideal onto the Statement’s highly crafted rhetoric served to caricature and even traduce the Statement and its intentions. Australia’s 2017 Uluru Statement from the Heart and two prime ministers’ speeches in response to the Statement are well-known examples of public discourse. Closely reading them in combination demonstrates how a public utterance and its reception may be governed by a discourse-limiting idealism about the ‘poetic’.

ABSTRACT Legitimacy is a foundational concept in political science typically measured through surveys assessing citizen perceptions of political institutions. However, the validity of existing measures is often assumed rather than tested, especially in hybrid regimes where institutional capture blurs distinctions between office and office-holder. Drawing on original semi-structured interviews with Serbian citizens, we find that conflation - the inability to separate office and office-holder - was high for questions on input side institutions such as trust in the president, the prime minister and the parliament, lower for output side institutions, such as the police, court and the tax authority, and most varied between respondents for general system questions. Our analysis suggests two main reasons for this pattern: first, citizens’ evaluations of elected institutions rely more heavily on mediated information sources (e.g. TV, internet, print media), whereas views of bureaucratic institutions are often grounded in direct personal experience; second, respondents showed a weaker understanding of democratic principles than of expectations around public service delivery. These findings highlight potential item bias both between respondents within a hybrid regime and in cross-regime comparisons, calling into question the comparability and validity of standard legitimacy measures in European hybrid regimes.

ABSTRACT The Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference held in Lagos in 1966 marked the first gathering outside London. It was called in response to Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence and became a testing ground for African leaders. This article contends that the Lagos meeting served as a key manifestation of African agency in the new world order. By providing a granular reading of the importance of Lagos as a site of contestation, the article reveals how the conference presented opportunities for African states to exercise African agency and challenge the longstanding authority of Britain as the key decision-making body in the Commonwealth.

ABSTRACT The first Comprehensive Spending Review in 1997–98, led by Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, was an important innovation of the first Blair government that allowed greater budget certainty for departments. The Comprehensive Spending Review occurred in parallel to a separate Strategic Defence Review within the Ministry of Defence, that reset British defence policy in a post-Cold War world where there were few, if any, existential threats to the United Kingdom. This article assesses the power relationships between the Treasury and government departments in general, the interactions between the two reviews, not least the Treasury’s wish to subordinate the Strategic Defence Review to the Comprehensive Spending Review, and the impact this had over defence policy decisions. The article argues that the Comprehensive Spending Review process increased Treasury powers not only over how much money was spent within departments but also how it was spent, whilst the Prime Minister and his office were largely kept at arms-length. Although the Ministry of Defence did have greater autonomy at the start of the process than other departments, in the end it had to subordinate itself to the Treasury in order to complete both the Comprehensive Spending Review and the Strategic Defence Review.

ABSTRACT This article uncovers a convention on foreign judgments, negotiated between Britain and Italy in 1887. The Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, saw it as ‘the most practical first step towards the attainment of complete uniformity’: proof that the civil and common law worlds could agree on common private international law rules. It was Britain’s first such agreement with a civil law country, half a century before much narrower agreements with France and Belgium. It remained unratified amid Italian political instability and perceived German influence (similar concerns scuppered negotiations in the 1930s). The convention was the high-water mark of British attempts to take a leading role in pan-European codification. By the 1890s, under Dicey’s influence, Britain had abandoned its grand ambitions for a truly global regime. The common law was left to its own devices for another generation, with Britain standing aloof from the codification projects it had once sought to lead.

ABSTRACT This article examines Italy’s role in the 2025 EU-US trade and tariff crisis, focusing on how Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni positioned Italy between the United States and the European Union. It argues that, despite her ideological proximity to Donald Trump and her long-standing Eurosceptic background, Meloni consistently supported the EU’s collective negotiating framework because she viewed it as the most effective instrument for defending Italian interests under conditions of external pressure. The article conceptualises this approach as strategic Europeanism: a pragmatic and interest-driven reliance on the European Union when national objectives cannot be achieved through unilateral action. Drawing on public statements, policy documents, and press reporting, the article reconstructs the evolution of the trade dispute and analyses Italy’s diplomatic strategy throughout the negotiations. The analysis shows that Meloni sought to reinforce the EU’s negotiating position, while highlighting how the intertwining of trade and security issues, together with persistent divisions among member states, constrained Europe’s room for manoeuvre. The findings contribute to debates on Euroscepticism, European integration, and the political foundations of collective action in the European Union, drawing attention to the distinction between instrumental and normative support for European integration.

With welfare states considered contested sites for the construction of unequal social relations, this article explores official welfare imaginaries – discursive practices and narratives which construct the nature of the “good society” and the role of government policies in achieving this – as strategies of depoliticisation, aimed at reproducing authoritarian governance. Through an analysis of Singapore National Day rally speeches by then Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, the article focuses on appeals to maintaining Singapore’s established cultural, societal, and economic relations. Three inter-connected depoliticising logics to National Day speeches are highlighted: technocracy (an appeal to government through rational expertise); survivalism (an appeal to stable leadership in the face of global challenges); and anti-welfarism (an appeal to the necessity of eligibility-based and productivity-geared welfare). Central to maintaining oligarchic modes of authoritarian political governance, welfare imaginaries disseminated through officialised political narratives pre-emptively diffuse alternative discourses and practices which could trouble established hierarchies. The mobilisation of these imaginaries insulates the political economy from deeper critique or the possibility of popular mobilisation against an economy skewed towards enriching an oligarchic state-capitalist elite. Welfare imaginaries help to legitimate accumulation based in disciplined labour and one-party rule albeit within a welfare state facilitating asset-building for some.

This opening address by Prime Minister Ahmed Osman introduces the conference on financing economic development. It underlines the theoretical and practical importance of the topic for developing countries and for the wider international community. The speech invites participants to examine different approaches to planning and development financing through a comparative and critical perspective, with the aim of producing conclusions useful to economists, planners, policymakers, and financial decision-makers.

ABSTRACT The liberal international order has been in crisis for years. It was thought the order could nevertheless endure as it had a shared vision of the good life and legitimate patterns of power. However, US President Donald Trump challenges these foundations. The article combines the use of narrative performativity with the concept of the good life and the power, principles, and practice framework, showing how the Trump Administration has avoided undertaking expected performative actions that would normally be invoked to reinforce a positive narrative. In a slightly different take on Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney’s metaphor—it is the United States that has “taken down the sign.” The question now is, can the liberal international order continue under new management, and if so, how and with what challenges, and what kind of multi-order world might be the outcome?

Front cover caption, volume 42 issue 3 GEERTZ'S BALINESE COCKFIGHT Man with a cock in a basket, Bali, c. 1920–1935. This photograph, taken some two decades before Clifford Geertz arrived in Tihingan in April 1958, documents the cultural practice that would later become the subject of one of anthropology's most celebrated essays. Geertz's Deep play: Notes on the Balinese cockfight (1972) transformed the cockfight from a local pastime into an icon of interpretive anthropology, a text through which generations of scholars have read Balinese culture. The image captures something close to what Geertz himself sought to convey: the quiet intimacy between a Balinese man and his bird, the careful tending, the moment of stillness that precedes public spectacle. The cock in its woven basket is not yet in the ring; it is at home, where the relationship that makes the fight meaningful is formed. Yet the very practice that drew Geertz's interpretive attention also draws Henk Schulte Nordholt's historical scrutiny. By comparing Geertz's published account of the famous police raid with the fieldnotes preserved in the Geertz papers, Nordholt reveals that the dramatic transformation Geertz described, from ignored outsider to embraced insider, appears nowhere in the contemporaneous record. The fieldnotes show no 10‐day period of social rejection, no euphoric morning‐after embrace, no hastily arranged tea table. What they show instead is fieldwork proceeding methodically, the day after the raid given over to careful notes on a temple ceremony. The photograph thus marks the gap between the anthropologist as observer of events and the anthropologist as author of narratives. Nordholt's question is whether literary ambition came to overshadow historical accuracy in Geertz's account, and whether the discipline's enthusiasm for thick description has at times allowed the construction of compelling stories to take precedence over the patient work of getting the record right. Back cover caption, volume 42 issue 3 Protest wall, Tel Aviv In this issue, Ori Mautner examines why Israel's anti‐government protest movement, unprecedented in scale, has failed to unseat the very government even its supporters often describe as inept and corrupt. Drawing on 14 months of fieldwork in Ramle among working‐class Mizrahim who ambivalently vote Likud, the article centres advice from those the opposition needs most to convince –and most consistently alienates. The cover image, photographed by the author on a Tel Aviv street, shows a wall layered with protest stickers and posters. The poster at right reads Mahriv Yisrael, ‘Destroyer of Israel’, over a stencilled portrait of the prime minister. The round black stickers repeat Movil le‐milhemet ahim, ‘Leading to a war among brothers’. The yellow rectangles read Memshelet ha‐bizah, ‘Government of plunder’, under a row of cabinet ministers’ faces. Read as a single artefact, the wall shows what working‐class Mizrahim in Ramle see when they look at the protest movement: a register of total moral repudiation, accumulating on the streets of cities they rarely visit, spoken in registers that leave no room for the ambivalence many of them feel. Mautner's interlocutors support much of the indictment. Yosef, a market vendor and key interlocutor, regularly criticizes Netanyahu and the ‘rot’ he sees in Likud. What he refuses is the posture. ‘The left’, he says, ‘never misses an opportunity to poke us in the eye’. The stickers do the work the article describes: they perform righteousness rather than persuade. They claim the public street, condense politics into anathema and leave nothing to argue with. The image documents the visual economy of a movement that – as Mautner's ethnography reports – fortifies the government it set out to unseat.

How do citizens respond to political violence during election campaigns? Previous research suggests such events can increase support for the victim's party through a “rally ‘round the flag” effect, where the public unites against perceived threats, or an “empathy effect,” where individuals sympathize with the victim. Yet it remains unclear whether these effects vary across contexts. This study examines regional variation in public opinion following the 2022 assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, which occurred two days before the national election. Using over 640,000 daily responses from a Voting Advice Application (VAA), we estimate changes in support for Abe's Liberal Democratic Party (LDP). Applying the generalized synthetic control method (GSCM), we find no significant change in public opinion in the area surrounding the assassination site. By contrast, in Abe's home region, support for the LDP temporarily increased and support for rights restrictions declined, suggesting that psychological proximity to the victim briefly influenced public opinion. However, surveys conducted 8 to 9 months later reveal no persistent regional effects, suggesting that neither physical nor psychological proximity to the victim produced lasting changes in political attitudes.

ABSTRACT This paper explores how the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), since coming to power in 2014 under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has redefined the ‘symbolic repertoires’ of India’s official nationalism using the visual iconography of postage stamps issued by the Department of Posts. Stamps are excellent primary data for analysis since they are the official product of a state and its agencies. The 2014 election marked a paradigm shift in Indian politics, alongside a radical transformation in the sights, sounds, and vocabularies of everyday life, particularly in relation to the discourse on national identity and nation-building. A content analysis of postage stamps issued from 2014 to 2020 reveals a statist push towards consolidating visual iconography centred on India’s civilisational past, with recurring themes of Hindu national identity and a neoliberal discourse on development.

Cancer is a leading cause of death in both the USA and India. During Prime Minister Narendra Modi's State Visit to Washington, DC in June 2023, the two governments announced several cooperation commitments. One such commitment was the establishment of the US-India Cancer Dialogue, initiating a structured bilateral effort to address shared cancer challenges. The aim of this article is to outline the preparatory steps and proceedings of the inaugural joint meeting of the US-India Cancer dialogue that took place in New Delhi in August 2024. This manuscript reports the outcomes of a structured bilateral consensus development process designed to identify priority areas for collaboration between the USA and India. Following the announcement, a high-level virtual consultation convened government, scientific, and clinical leaders to identify shared priority areas. A US-based meeting hosted by the American Society of Clinical Oncology (ASCO) refined technical workstreams, including prevention, early detection, therapeutics, clinical trials, and implementation science. Continued coordination among the US National Cancer Institute, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and India's Department of Biotechnology formalized the bilateral agenda RESULTS: Over 2 days, the in-person Dialogue identified priority areas for bilateral collaboration, including expansion of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination and cervical cancer screening, advancement of artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled early detection technologies, improved access to immunotherapies and chimeric antigen receptor T cell (CAR-T) therapies, strengthened genomics and data-sharing infrastructure, expanded clinical trial capacity, and enhanced survivorship and palliative care. This collaboration establishes a durable framework to accelerate innovation, expand equitable access, and reduce preventable cancer deaths across both nations.

Last month's parliamentary elections ended Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's 16-year rule, giving Hungary something more consequential than a change of government: a chance to show the world how to rebuild science after political control. With a two-thirds parliamentary majority, the new leadership has the mandate and the constitutional power to rebuild Hungary's scientific enterprise around merit, and resistance against future interference. If Hungary gets this right, it will offer a model that matters far beyond its borders.

Biosafety at the French Academy of Sciences

Abstract This article offers an overview of the statuary dedicated to Cavour erected in Italy during the first 50 years after unification (1861–1915), focusing on the most significant cases. Promoted by moderate circles close to the former prime minister, the construction of public monuments to the so-called ‘‘weaver of unification’’ responded to the requirements of patriotic education. Pursuing a policy of unveiling monuments throughout central and northern Italy, liberal elites sought to strengthen the population’s sense of national identity, while simultaneously promoting the memory and myth of Cavour as a founder of the unified state, champion of liberty and master diplomat. This was no easy task, given Cavour’s limited popularity, and it involved citizens’ committees, mayors, and accomplished artists in an effort to establish an effective and enduring iconographic model.

ABSTRACT In 1984, following the government’s attack on the Sikh Golden Temple, Prime Minister India Gandhi was assassinated by her Sikh bodyguards. Her assassination triggered nationwide anti-Sikh riots involving systematic violence, mass killings, torture, and persecution. These traumatic events continue to affect the Sikh community, impacting not only survivors but also their descendants. Recently, the Historical Intergenerational Trauma Transmission model (HITT) proposed a framework describing the individual, familial, societal, and historical facets of intergenerational trauma transmission. The current study sought to examine the validity of the HITT-Q model in this population. We examined intergenerational trauma transmission mechanisms and their impact on symptoms of anxiety, depression, post-traumatic stress (PTSD) and complex post-traumatic stress (C-PTSD), as well as on resilience, in the form of perceived coping abilities, in a sample of children of survivors of the Sikh massacre. Results showed that family and offspring vulnerability factors, historical moral injury, and insidious trauma predicted mental health symptoms; whereas family and offspring resilience factors predicted perceived coping ability. Thus, the results of the current study support the validity of the HITT model, and, more importantly, they provide robust support for the hypothesis that the 1984 events continue to impact the mental health of the Sikh diaspora today and call for intergenerational trauma-informed mental health interventions that not only consider individual and family processes, but also incorporate societal and historical aspects.