Promoting sociology in Australia
Facilitating sociology teaching and research
Enhancing the professional development of TASA members
TASA media contact:
Dr Barbara Adkins
Email: b.adkins@qut.edu.au
Phone: +61 7 3864 4664
With other Australians, Australian sociologists have been appalled by the recent
attacks on New York and Washington DC. We extend our deepest sympathies to surviving
victims and to the families of the dead and injured. No political or religious
cause can begin to justify the cold-blooded brutality of the attacks and TASA
condemns any recourse to terrorist violence, whether unleashed by ‘terrorist’
groups or governments.
We share the almost universal outrage over the attacks, but as sociologists
we also have grave concerns about the emerging global response, including the
response within Australia. Under the label of a ‘war on terrorism’ that response
pays insufficient attention to two long-established principles concerning the
links between social science knowledge and public policy. The first principle
is that no attempt to eradicate a social evil is likely to succeed unless it
addresses the social causes of that evil. The second is that policy makers and
political leaders must act responsibly in the light of the foreseeable consequences
of their action. The global ‘war on terrorism’ will fail - indeed it may increase
rather than decrease terrorist violence around the world - unless it is accompanied
by a serious international effort to address the roots of terrorism in global
patterns of economic, political and cultural inequality. Those who planned and
executed the attacks on the United States may be dangerous fanatics, but their
fanaticism is not a sufficient condition of their success. They prosper only
because sober and serious members of their communities can quite rationally
share with them at least the view that their people are exploited, oppressed
and marginalised by the policies of the dominant Western powers, most notably
the USA. The link between the two principles is clear enough: it would be irresponsible
to pursue a ‘war on terrorism’ that did not address the roots of terrorism because
to do so would quite predictably intensify the resentments on which terrorism
feeds and therefore make the problem worse. Social scientists and others who
advocate attention to the causes rather than the symptoms of social evils are
often ridiculed as ’soft’ - on crime or on drugs or on terrorism. However, the
long-term and perverse policy failures of politically popular ‘wars’ on crime
and drugs are chilling small-scale warnings of the likely global effects of
a one-sided ‘war on terrorism’.
Within Australia, the response to the attacks on the United States has raised
the question of responsible political leadership in a particularly acute form.
The Australian political agenda had been dominated for some weeks by a particularly
egregious example of irresponsible leadership: the manufactured crisis surrounding
the asylum-seekers on board the Tampa. Australians had been encouraged to fear
that their country was under serious threat from waves of queue-jumping ‘illegal’
arrivals. Senior members of the government, from the Prime Minister down, were
more than happy to stir the possum of ethnically-based stereotypes and prejudices
to that end. If we assume that members of the government were not themselves
motivated by ethnic prejudice, they spoke and acted cynically and irresponsibly,
with a stunning lack of concern for the predictable effects of their words and
actions on ethnic relations in Australia. It was to be hoped that the attacks
on the United States and the understandable anxieties they provoked among Australians
would at least bring this disgraceful episode to an end as political leaders
made a priority of reassurance and community cohesion. Instead, fears of ‘terrorism’
were added to the already destructive and divisive mix: the queue jumping illegals
came from hotbeds of terrorism and may include terrorists among their number.
The reckless opportunism of senior ministers who peddled this line deserves
the strongest condemnation from responsible supporters of all political parties,
including their own. It is a measure of the failure of responsible political
leadership in Australia that senior members of the government addressed rising
ethnic tensions in Australia only belatedly and under pressure from two sources.
The first was President Bush’s markedly and visibly more conciliatory approach
to Islamic communities in the USA, while the second was the all too predictable
rise in anti-Islamic violence in Australia, notably the burning of a Mosque
in Brisbane.
TASA urges the Australian government and other political leaders in Australia
to pursue responses to the attacks on the United States that are responsible
in the senses discussed here and are informed by well-established social science
knowledge. Internationally, this requires pressure for a war on the economic,
political and social causes of terrorism rather than a purely military response.
Domestically, it requires the government to give overriding priority to measures
that will reduce ethnic tension and mistrust while promoting community cohesion,
social inclusion and a sense of security for all Australians.
Stephen Crook
TASA President and Professor of Sociology
School of Anthropology, Archaeology and Sociology, Faculty of Arts, Education
and Social Science JAMES COOK UNIVERSITY QLD 4811, Australia