This chapter summarizes the maximum sentences available to domestic courts around the world for the perpetration of acts of terrorism. In more than one-quarter of all States this includes the death penalty. The chapter then describes the prosecution of terrorism suspects in selected domestic courts across the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific, and Europe. It considers the reasonableness of the charges laid, the fairness of the trials, and the legitimacy of the sentences imposed upon conviction. Some of those prosecuted for terrorism offences are children or women. The overwhelming majority, though, are men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five years.

This chapter highlights issues around sexuality and migration. It examines more closely one particular type of migration, with a comparative analysis of migrations from southern Italy, China, and western India to the Americas, Africa, and South Asia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the women who were left behind by this migration. Traditional research on historical migrations has provided male-centred perspectives regarding motives, settlement, identity, and citizenship. Recent studies have sought to alter these perspectives by shifting women”s narratives from the margins to the centre in the context of agency, sexuality, and masculinity. Thus this chapter problematizes the sexual economy not only of the “women left behind” in the migration process but also that of their spouses and partners. It reveals how gender shapes migration and how migration defines gender relations. It alludes to attitudes and perceptions about gender and sexuality in a diverse geopolitical context, how the intersectionality of sex and emotions frames mobility behaviour and challenges sexual norms. It thus shifts the nexus between gender, sexuality, and migration to the centre of historical analysis rather than situating it at the margins.

When planning for this volume commenced in 1997, few signs were present of the turbulence that was to engulf Australian policies in the last years of the twentieth century. Prime Minister John Howard’s desire that Australians should feel ’comfortable’ seemed to have been realised in the foreign policy arena. To reinforce this sense of comfort, the new government, which assumed office in March 1996, sought to reinforce relations with ’great and powerful friends’, particularly the United States. The relationship with traditional friends in Europe was also given a boost: the government characterised its new policy direction with the catch-phrase ’Asia first, but not Asia only’.

Australians visiting Europe often complain about how little they see or hear of their own country in the European media. On the face of it, there is much to justify these reactions. It is exasperating to turn the pages of British newspapers and read the trivia they contain when one knows of the much more reportable, entertaining or significant stories they could print about other parts of the world. But is the situation much better when viewed in reverse? Are not the Australian media as guilty of parochialism when it comes to coverage of the outside world? The sad but very basic fact of the matter is that all politics are local politics. All of us who specialise in international affairs have been frustrated by the leverage of local issues on the attention of politicians, journalists, other academics and public opinion. We, when all is said and done, focus on issues such as whether certain countries will continue to exist, or whether the world will be at peace or war in months or years ahead. Sadly, these topics compete poorly with less vital topics such as the love lives of the Royal family or tales of petty corruption, both in Britain and in Australia.

There were significant changes in the quality and direction of Australia’s relations with Southeast Asia between 1990 and 1995. These changes were symbolised by the new directions set out in Foreign Minister Gareth Evans’s statement on Australia’s Regional Security of December 19891 and at the end of the period by the signing of the Australia–Indonesia Security Agreement in December 1995. The signing of this agreement signalled a historic change in Australia’s relations with Indonesia and Southeast Asia, surprising observers in both countries. Yet the seeds of that agreement lie in the groundwork of the new approach to regional security set out by Evans in 1989, and in its antecedents in earlier ’moves to Asia’ of the 1970s and 1980s.

The Australian economy performed surprisingly strongly throughout most of the five-year period under consideration. The performance was surprising, that is, given the troubles – concentrated in the years 1997–99 – that afflicted most East Asian economies, which together account for more than half of Australia’s exports. By the end of the five-year period, however, the triumphalism that had accompanied Australian official reaction to the Asian economic crisis began to look premature. In 1999–2000, the government had to apply the brakes (in the form of higher interest rates) to the economy largely because of external constraints: a worsening current account deficit and a depreciating currency. The economy was showing all-too-familiar signs of the stop–go pattern that had choked off growth in earlier periods. Fears were mounting that the economic growth that had occurred throughout the period – the country’s longest boom since the 1960s – was drawing to an end.

During the early 1990s Australians reviewed their relationship to Asia not only in economic and strategic terms, but also in a broad cultural context. In a sense, Australian identity had always been defined in relation to Asia. The European settlers were aware of their remoteness from the old world and their proximity to people who seemed different to them in exotic and sometimes threatening ways. The ideal of ’White Australia’ had announced a determination to develop an Australian society independently of the new national societies being formed elsewhere in the region. The so-called ’multicultural’ Australia, promoted in the 1970s and 1980s, made claims to be inclusive of non-Western cultures – yet the underpinning ideology was derived from elements of Western liberalism. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, some Australians began to think of their country in different terms again, asking whether it might be possible to consider Australia as in some sense ’Asian’. By 1996, a consensus appeared to emerge to the effect that, although Australians ought to engage vigorously with Asian societies, Australia itself could not convincingly be described as an ’Asian’ country.

The defence policies of many countries in the world are in disarray. With the end of the Cold War, the United States and its NATO allies, as well as Russia and former members of the Warsaw Pact, are having great difficulties justifying their large defence forces. As a result, defence budgets are being slashed and force structures are being reoriented away from nuclear conflict and major conventional war. In Asia, however, strong economic growth is sustaining the largest increase in defence spending of any area of the world. This is taking place even though most countries in Asia face no palpable threat. Furthermore, few countries in the region have set out in the public domain reasoned arguments for their defence-force acquisitions. As a close ally of the United States and as an important regional power, how does Australia’s defence policy fit into these two divergent trends? Has Australia’s defence policy changed radically since the end of the Cold War? What about Australia’s economic and political engagement with Asia? Has it led to less anxiety in official circles about potential military threats from the north and has this resulted in any changes to the force structure?

At the end of 1995, the global economic environment appeared far more favourable to Australia than at the beginning of the decade. The worst fears of the early 1990s had failed to materialise. The Uruguay Round of negotiations in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) had been concluded and GATT’s successor, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), established. With a successful outcome to the GATT negotiations, the threat of the global-trading system fragmenting into rival regional trading blocs largely receded. The establishment of the Single Internal Market in 1992 and the conversion of the European Community into the European Union with the Maastricht Treaty of the following year came and went with no evidence of adverse impact on its trading partners: ’Fortress Europe’ did not eventuate. Even agriculture, very much the orphan child of the world community’s postwar moves towards liberalised trade, was brought under WTO auspices; the requirement that barriers protecting agriculture be converted into tariffs by the end of the century promises to bring greater transparency in agricultural trade and, with it, the possibility of more effective pressure for liberalisation.

The extent to which Australian foreign policy was reoriented between 1991 and 1995 is evident from an examination of the last edition of Australia in World Affairs. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union still loomed large in world affairs; the alliance with the United States correspondingly remained central to Australian foreign policy. Efforts by the Hawke Government to engage more closely with Asia in these years had frequently been rebuffed, so that Fedor Mediansky was able to write at the end of the decade not of closer engagement with the region, but of ’Australia’s diminished regional standing’. Australia’s ’shift towards Asia’ gathered momentum in the first half of the 1990s. Some important foundations for this trend were laid in the later 1980s, especially in immigration patterns, trade and tourism. The desirability of this shift was articulated in a range of official reports and statements, including the Fitzgerald Report on immigration, the Garnaut Report on Australia’s relations with Northeast Asia, and the Foreign Minister’s statement Australia’s Regional Security, all produced before the collapse of the Soviet Union and the definitive ending of the Cold War.

Key developments that began to affect international politics in the immediate aftermath of the Cold War – globalisation, humanitarian intervention at odds with previously unquestioned prerogatives of state sovereignty, and the development of multilateral institutions to manage emerging security and economic challenges – gained further momentum in the late 1990s. Paradoxically, the Australian–US relationship was both reaffirmed and tested in some very traditional ways over this period. The Howard government was elected in March 1996 with a pledge to ’reinvigorate’ that relationship, which it felt had been neglected by its Labor predecessors.

Beginning with the floating of the Thai baht on 2 July 1997, a regional crisis unfolded that saw the magic disappear from the economies of East Asia. What appeared initially to be merely the sharp devaluation of a single currency turned into an economic free-fall that rippled across neighbouring economies and eventually the entire region. By early September 1997, the Malaysian ringgit had fallen to its lowest level against the US dollar since 1971; in the space of six months the Thai stock-market had lost 38 per cent of its value; Malaysia’s lost 44 per cent, the Philippines’ lost 35 per cent; Indonesia’s lost 17 per cent; and Japan’s lost 4 per cent. By year’s end, the Indonesian and South Korean economies had been brought to their knees, and speculation had begun that East Asia would drag the global economy into a bout of chronic deflation.

Over the period 1996–2000 the handling of ’Asia’ as a theme in Australian foreign relations altered radically. The change could not have been easily predicted at the beginning of the tenure of the Coalition government in 1996. The new administration agreed with the previous one in insisting that the ’Asia Pacific is the region of highest foreign and trade policy priority’ for Australia, and predicted that East Asia would become ’even more important to Australia in trade and investment terms’. In addition to this, the new government ministers who were concerned with Asian relations – the Foreign, Trade, and Defence ministers – were obviously diligent in the way they set about their business in the region. Although there were a number of differences in emphasis between the new government and its predecessor, some offering genuine advantages, former prime minister Paul Keating himself noted the continuities, and these continuities remained predominant until 1999.

Australia’s international environment in the first half of the 1990s was heavily conditioned by global trends that had gathered force over the preceding decade. Among these trends were the internationalisation of production and of financial and commodity markets; the emergence of a technologically borderless world, characterised by new media, information and communication networks and symbolised above all by the World Wide Web; and within this context of globalisation, the rise of new centres of economic and technological power, very notably in East Asia. The increasingly widespread influence of free (or at least liberal) market ideology could be seen as concomitant with these changes, in part reflecting them, in part driving them. And interlinked with these phenomena at the geostrategic level there was the waning of the Cold War. While the Soviet implosion of the later 1980s might not have ushered in any new world order, it did signify the demise of certain verities – including superpower ideological rivalry, strategic bipolarity, and nuclear arms racing – which had done much to structure the pattern of international relationships for four decades.

This chapter presents a new, annotated translation of the famous treatise Airs, Waters, and Places (c. late 5th century BC), attributed, perhaps incorrectly, to the medical writer Hippokrates of Kos. The treatise sets out a model of how environment and seasonal conditions promote specific physiological conditions in the human body, and assesses the relationship between nature and custom as determinants of the physiology, ethical character, and social organization of Asian peoples, focusing on a comparison between European and Asian Skythians. A final passage identifies the greater variability among Europeans. The chapter introduction suggests a nuanced view of the controversial closing pages of the work: the author does not consistently regard Europeans as superior, but–perhaps under the influence of Athenian power–emphasizes the importance of understanding political systems.