Settler Colonial Strategic Culture: Australia, AUKUS, and the Anglosphere

Abstract

Australia's history as a settler colony within the British Empire fundamentally shapes its sense of security within the Indo‐Pacific region. Australia has consistently looked outside of its region for security and sought partners on the explicit basis of political, cultural, and ethnic similarity. What role does Australia's history play in shaping its foreign policy? We argue that these choices in foreign policy are inextricable from Australia's history as a settler colony on the farthest reaches of the British Empire. The AUKUS Agreement (AUKUS) is an example of how Australia operates to preserve racial hegemony in the face of non‐white threat — real or perceived. This research utilises critical discourse analysis to interrogate elite‐level discourse around AUKUS to ascertain the dominant narratives that inform its creation, the issues it seeks to address in Australian security policy, how it is structured by historical narratives of security, and how it functions to structure those narratives going forward. This article seeks to participate in the growing push to decolonise International Relations by illuminating the way Australia is ontologically and epistemologically invested in the preservation of racial hegemony.

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy January to June 2023

“…Tools for thinking through some of these issues can be found in a recently published special issue of Australian Journal of Politics and History edited by Alexander Davis and James Blackwell on "Decolonising Australia's International Relations?" Contributions to the special issue include discussions of pedagogical practice and curriculums in IR scholarship in Australia, 90 the coloniality of the conduct of Australia's foreign policy, 91 its grounding it its settler colonial history, 92 and endeavours for Indigenous inclusion. 93 Davis and Blackwell underline the difficulty of doing IR and foreign policy otherwise in a context where the colonial history and present are rarely confronted, meaningful efforts to decolonise the Australian state have not taken place, and where IR and foreign policy circles do "not sufficiently engage with Indigenous issues, or speak to the concerns of Indigenous peoples".…”