The future shape of Thailand is up for grabs, and if democracy survives, it won't resemble the 'Washminster' system that the West is used to, writes John Keane.
[caption id="attachment_7792" align="alignnone" width="700"] Anti-government protesters march in Bangkok on January 17, 2014....
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When visiting Tokyo last week for the launch of the Japanese edition of The Life and Death of Democracy, it was pure coincidence, or sweet and sour serendipity, that the government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe steamrolled through parliament a controversial...
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Vibrant democracies need sharp-angled and unceremonious characters like Lou Reed who can rail against imperiousness and conformity, writes John Keane.
[caption id="attachment_9170" align="alignnone" width="741"] PHOTO: Lou Reed embodied detached cool and passionate anger. (Tracey Nearmy: AAP)[/caption]
It's said often that democracy requires...
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The following words on the subject of secrets and politics were spoken at a recent Sydney public symposium, organised by my colleague Benedetta Brevini, Beyond Wikileaks (8th October 2013).
There are three sensitive secrets I’d like to reveal about the topical subject of...
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By Giovanni Navarria, University of Sydney and John Keane
While Australians face the possibility of the first-ever Senate by-election, as well as stormy sittings of a new parliament wrangling over the pro and cons of scrapping a carbon tax, 16,000 kilometres away,...
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It’s difficult from afar to grasp the depressing scale and depth of European disintegration, so let me try from close range to convey something of what’s going on by using a simple method: extracting snippets of randomly-chosen local political news...
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Perhaps the only bright democratic light in this dark crisis surrounding Syria is the unexpected growth of a cross-border, large-scale and ultimately global denunciation of the follies and horror of war, writes John Keane.
Does democracy have anything to do with...
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‘No bourgeois, no democracy’ is the racy formulation penned half a century ago by the American historian Barrington Moore Jr. It’s a well-known political maxim, one that’s often used in support of the view that to be middle class is...
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In the midst of a two-party dominated and heavily-scripted federal election campaign, I spoke with the widely-respected and independently-minded Senator Scott Ludlam (Greens, Western Australia) about his life-long interest in urban thinking and city life as a laboratory of new...
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The most telling tale in Charles Moore’s winsome biography of Margaret Thatcher spotlights the moment of her greatest political triumph: the military defeat of Argentina in mid-June 1982, after a 74-day war that cost nearly a thousand lives on windswept...
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