Journals
2026 EN
Holliday Ian · Myat Aung Kaung · Cook Alistair D. B.
The article investigates humanitarian engagement with Myanmar in the wake of the 2021 coup. It opens by examining humanitarian action in Myanmar before 2010, during the 2010s, and after 2021. Drawing on key stakeholder interviews conducted in 2023, it then presents internal and external perspectives on humanitarianism in Myanmar in the 2020s. While the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the outbreak of war in Gaza in 2023 generated significant attention from donor nations, humanitarian needs in Myanmar, encompassing 18.6 million citizens, including 3.4 million internally displaced persons, go largely unmet. The argument from international society is that regional states should work towards a ‘Myanmar-led’ solution. Challenges faced by local and international actors, however, raise questions about the possibility of a solution that bridges the divide between these two humanitarian communities and is also acceptable to all groups in Myanmar. The article concludes by proposing that initiatives at the regional and global levels coalesce, overcome actor territoriality and generate political will by putting affected communities at the centre of humanitarian engagement to overcome current limitations and barriers to action.
Journals
2026 EN
Vaillancourt Thibaut
This paper examines the ideological and strategic links between Cold War-era authoritarian neoliberalism and contemporary climate obstructionism, arguing that the criminalization of dissent has shifted from anti-communism to anti-environmentalism. Through a genealogical and contextual analysis of think tank networks – particularly the Mont Pèlerin Society (MPS) and the Atlas Network (AN) – grounded in key texts and proceedings published by them or their affiliated institutions, I show how neoliberal thought has long been entangled with fossil capital, militarized epistemologies, and reactionary politics. The study reveals how neoliberal politics, despite its rhetoric of freedom, relies on illiberal measures to enforce market fundamentalism, from Pinochet’s Chile to the rise of figures like Milei and Bolsonaro. By tracing the theological, military, and epistemic dimensions of this dispositif, I analyze neoliberalism’s authoritarian dimensions, showing how climate change denial and the repression of environmental activism serve as modern iterations of Cold War-era ideological hunts. The Southern Cone emerges as a critical site where this continuum is tested, showing the alliance between neoliberalism and authoritarian governance.
Journals
2026 EN
Evans Jasmine Hunter
The First World War inspired artworks in which lived experiences were reimagined through visions of the classical world and while some of these guarded against despair others explored feelings of disillusionment. Painting and writing during the Second World War and beyond, and looking back past his own service in Ireland to his years in the trenches, David Jones (1895–1974) turned to ancient Rome to consider modern warfare. By reflecting upon the experience of Roman soldiers Jones attempted to come to terms with his own disillusionment with the British Empire and with the justifications made for the necessity of the First World War. His work provides complication to narratives of commemoration which support a fixed or stable vision of the past. Instead, Jones's memories of conflict gave transhistorical depth to his imagined Roman Empire – a creative landscape in which he could examine the causes and the costs of war.
Journals
2026 EN
McCluskey Karen
The commission and display of a classicizing Winged Victory statue in Marrickville NSW in April 2015 to mark the centenary of the Anzac landing at Gallipoli seemed at once predictable and extraordinary. Predictable, since the classical aesthetic was strongly associated with the war memorial movement in Australia more generally; extraordinary, as a hundred years after the event, perceptions of war, classicism and the Australian identity had fundamentally changed. The statue by artist Darien Pullen replaced an earlier one sculpted by Gilbert Doble on the same site in 1919 when the physical and mental wounds from the Great War were still ripe. This paper will examine the form and function of the new sculpture in its historical (ancient Greek and post-war Australian) and contemporary contexts. Through a detailed comparative analysis, the paper offers unique insight into changing attitudes to classicism, conflict, and identity in Australia over the past century.
Journals
2026 EN
de Matos Christine
Several scholars have made visible the links between the classical worlds of Greece and Rome and the construction of meaning in Australia’s Great War, including in CEW Bean’s multivolume Official History of the conflict. However, Australia’s postwar version of special masculine bonding and intimate friendship – called ‘mateship’ – was frequently claimed to be forged on the beaches and cliffs of Gallipoli and became central to Australian identity. With a focus on Homer’s the Iliad and framed by scholarship on Homeric masculinities, this article interrogates Bean and his writings to demonstrate that, from many angles, his rendition of mateship appears to be an antipodean interpretation of Homer’s Iliadic comradeship. In turn, the paper reveals that, rather than a unique national trait, Australia’s version of male bonding in war has transnational and transtemporal foundations.
Journals
2026 EN
Hardwick Lorna
First World War poetry has often been stereotyped in the public imagination as protest poetry, but scholarship has shown that the poetry composed during the war varied in its perspectives. Protest poetry did become a feature, but its didacticism contrasts with the more nuanced poetry of unease that was evident from the onset of the war. This article analyses ways in which the poetry of unease deployed the classical texts of ancient Greece and Rome to communicate the impact of conflict on individuals, societies and environments. The Trench poets discussed here came from a wide range of social and educational backgrounds. All used key figures, values and metaphors from ancient texts, especially Homeric epic, as touchstones for exploring the effects of industrialized warfare on conceptions of heroism and conflict, on funerary rituals, and on the relationships between war and environment, providing intertexts for subsequent creative writers and scholars.
Journals
2026 EN
Carden-Coyne Ana
This paper examines Australian artist Mervyn Napier Waller, whose arm was amputated after wounding in the fighting at Bullecourt during the First World War. During rehabilitation, Napier Waller adapted his left hand to draw and eventually became one of the most important muralists the country produced. The essay focuses on the large-scale works which depict an Australian postwar utopia envisaged through an idealized and modernist vision of the classical past, exploring the artist’s disability alongside his classical vision of muscular, whole bodies. It seeks to understand Waller’s oeuvre in the context of postwar discourses about the war disabled, and how he navigated his new disabled identity through the classical ideal and through large-scale works that transcended the trauma of war with beautiful bodies, free of pain or fragility. However, the artist himself sought help for phantom pain in his later life. The paper explores the artist’s experiments with self-representation and argues that Waller’s classicism reflects a personal, ambivalent interplay between real and ideal bodies, suggestive of a more complex understanding of classicism in response to modern war than is usually understood.
Journals
2026 EN
de Matos Christine · McCluskey Karen · Carden-Coyne Ana
This special issue addresses the entanglement of various expressions of classicism with modern war in the long twentieth century, from the Great War to its centenary commemorations. By revisiting varied expressions and concepts of classicism through broader geographic and temporal lenses and by approaching the various topics with fresh questions, the six essays in this collection bring new findings to the scholarship around classicism and war. The issue features themes on art and disability, war and disillusionment, local war memorials, masculine identities, the poetry of unease, and national aggrandizement. Collectively, the articles encourage us to think in terms of multiple classicisms, to recognize instability and fluidity within classicisms, to acknowledge paradoxes and ambiguities, to emphasize the role of culture, and to better engage with inclusivity.
Journals
2026 EN
Kazamias Alexander
This article examines how modern Greece drew on its ancient heritage to speak about the Cold War and the Greek Civil War in 1944–74. It shows how classical Hellenism was used by the official anti-communist discourse of Ethnikofrosyni to justify the fight against domestic and international communism. It argues that war was verbally, visually, and spatially constructed as an idealized notion of heroic and spiritual distinction by Western bearers of classical civilization over the ‘barbaric’ forces of the ‘East’, while on the ground, it was fought in a brutal manner that disregarded classical conventions of ‘just war’ and ‘respect for the defeated’. The analysis, finally, contrasts the official state discourse with alternative receptions of the classical past among avant-garde Greek artists, like filmmaker Michael Cacoyannis and playwright Iakovos Kambanellis, who used the country’s classical heritage to criticize war and challenge the bogus neoclassicism of the postwar Ethnikofron state.
Journals
2026 EN
Veuillet Emmanuelle
The article narrates how civil servants in South Sudan experienced the recent civil war, the subsequent economic crisis and related state bankruptcy. Despite the complete depreciation of civil servants’ salary and the absence of their payment for several months in a row, the situation did not result in a mass exodus from the civil service or the administration’s collapse. Indeed, the majority of state bureaucrats chose to remain and worked to maintain their position within the administration, which they tried to keep as neutral as possible. This article explores the various reasons and logics that make them remain part of this demonetised state. While exploring ordinary middle-ranking civil servants’ practices, beliefs and long-term projects during wartime, this article not only highlights often unaccounted civil servants’ perceptions and imaginations of the state, but it also demonstrates their role in holding up the state, especially in times of crisis, and their contribution to state-making processes more generally.