Session 10: Justice and Morality
Chair: Fiona Sprott

Justice and the Savage Metamorphosis of Law
Kirsten Pavlovic
Centre for Peace and Justice, Southern Cross University, Lismore, NSW, Australia

In the early phase of the “war on terror” two Australian citizens, David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib were among those captured in Afghanistan and Pakistan and detained as enemy combatants in Guantanamo Bay. While Habib was released without explanation three years later, Hicks remains imprisoned after more than five years without trial.
Rather than seeking the release of its citizens from Guantanamo Bay, as other Western governments have done, the Australian Government has sought assurance from the US authorities that the trial of David Hicks will proceed without unnecessary delay. The treatment of Hicks and Habib, including the Australian Government’s reluctance to intervene on their behalf, has provoked outrage and considerable public debate in Australia. Most protest has been voiced as a call for the reinstatement of rule of law in what is perceived as its flagrant abuse or lacunae. However, even if construed as a departure from long settled approaches to law and governance, the detention of Hicks and Habib also presents the paradigmatic logic underpinning what may be interpreted as a savage metamorphosis of sovereignty and the rule of law. Following Giorgio Agamben, this is to say that insofar as the structure of sovereignty is profoundly implicated in the rule of law, no less than in the decisions made by executive arms of government or monarchs or dictators, life is vulnerable to a violent and paradoxical inclusion - as an exclusion.
Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben this paper explores the link between violence and the law in the detention of Hicks and Habib. As a marker of law’s relationship to life this link is also where the possibility of alternative approaches to justice may begin to be reconceptualised.

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A Community in Constant Transition - Propagating a Yield of Conflict and Violence?
Yaso Nadarajah
Globalism Institute (RMIT Research Centre), RMIT University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

Large-scale urban transformation in Malaysia is the most visible sign of a rapid development geared towards the new national development strategy Wawasan 2020 (vision 2020). From independence through to the 1969 racial riots tragedy, the New Economic Policy (NEP) of the 1970s to its current considerations, Malaysia’s concentration on ‘development’ has been its political underpinning strategy. However, whilst contemporary Malaysia has achieved economic growth; rapid modernization and development are slowly unraveling fractured tensions, pulling at the cultural fabric of community life, testing the state and traditional institutions of social classes and capital. The process by which Malaysia makes this transition and link between the ‘everyday-defined’ cultural reality and a ‘state–defined’ notion of national identity is a crucial one, particularly in the sustainability of the modern nation state in the global arena.
This paper is an attempt to understand contemporary Malaysia through a case study of research engagement with a squatter settlement in a period of large-scale urban transformation in Malaysia. Situated at the intersection of what was once the main road linking metropolitan Kuala Lumpur to one its main ports Klang, this community is currently being relocated into dense new low-cost housing flats in the same vicinity. The introduction of a ‘zero squatter settlements by the end of 2005’ directive from the Government was possibly prompted by a week of violent ethnic clashes in the area in early 2001.
This case study is part of a larger longitudinal local/global community sustainability research project, utilising a common methodology, and attempting to come to grips with the complexities of contemporary community life. This study is particularly interested in questions of identity, meaning, interchange and the foundations of violence in the transformations of a nation-state. How does identity develop, or come to coalesce or disintegrate around particular cultural political situations or forms, particularly within the increasing fragmentation of the ethnic communities on the one hand; and the contestations between the discourses and practices of the politics of ethnicism, participatory democracy and developmentalism on the other. This paper suggests that the resulting contradictions make this sort of engaged research more difficult to carry out, but they also generate insight that otherwise would be impossible to achieve, and could provide a deeper basis for analytical understanding and theoretical innovation in understanding the context for violence in contemporary life.

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Abu Ghraib and the Prisoners Blind Fear of Electrocution: A Projection of Warped Principles
Nathan Roger
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Wales, Swansea

This paper makes a detailed examination of the iconic image of prisoner abuse which has emerged from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.  The image shows a hooded prisoner, who is holding his arms outstretched – with wires in each hand – in fear of being electrocuted.  This papers author explores the issue that contrary to many previous commentaries on what makes images newsworthy, here it is not the violence.  Rather, this image has managed to maintain its news-value and has obtained the status ‘iconic’ because of the elusiveness of the images symbolic side.  The image holds explicit references to both the Ku Klux Klan and also Christ’s Crucifixion.  The author argues that both these themes are themselves ‘iconic’ and there presence within this image is an unconscious act – a projection / transference of the abusers internal conflicts onto this prisoner.  The paper concludes by showing how this abuse image has now become a powerful weapon against American Foreign Policy and also an effective poster-image for the anti-war lobby who have parodied it on a number of occasions for the purpose of their campaign against the War in Iraq. 
So, to sum up briefly, on the iconic image of Abu Ghraib abuses’ journey from explicit war trophy through its time on illicit Internet niche war-porn catalogues and its re-appropriation as an anti-war symbol.  Today, it exists, parodied within the high glamour of Italian Vogue.  When once images of abuse within war were tabooed – today, such images have successfully crossed over into the mainstream.  This is our current position; we are all complicit through our awareness of these war abuses and indeed the symbolic side of this iconic image from Abu Ghraib. 

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