Articles by Jake Lynch
We found 129 results.
UP CLOSE AND SPINELESS WITH AUSTRALIA’S DEPARTMENT OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS
Jake Lynch,
14 Jun 2009
There’s a fascinating exhibition at the Australian museum in Sydney. Titled ‘Up Close and Spineless’, it features winning entries in a photography competition focusing on the colourful world of invertebrates. These, along with the permanent insect exhibits, struck me as an apt metaphor for Australia’s ‘Foreign Affairs community’: a swarm of politicians, public servants, think-tankers […]
→ read full articleMORE ON BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL
Jake Lynch,
6 Jun 2009
Responses have poured in to my column of last week (Why I’m Joining the Academic Boycott of Israel). All but a couple have been constructive. Some have raised important questions and counterpoints, worthy of serious consideration. Perhaps the chief concern has been over the effect the boycott may have on relationships that constitute indispensable raw […]
→ read full articleWHY I’M JOINING THE ACADEMIC BOYCOTT OF ISRAEL
Jake Lynch,
31 May 2009
Nearly two-thirds of Israelis in favour of direct, substantive negotiations between their own government and the leadership of Hamas. Some mistake, surely? Actually no – this was the finding of an opinion survey in February 2008 by Tel Aviv University. Barely ten months later, as ‘Operation Cast Lead’ got underway, pollsters were finding still higher […]
→ read full article“HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION”
Jake Lynch,
24 May 2009
‘Nationalist thug terrorises, massacres civilians in drive to crush separatists’. It’s a story which, when played out in southeast Europe a decade ago, brought fearful retribution on the head of the perpetrator, Yugoslavia’s president, Slobodan Milosevic. A Nato bombing campaign rained down ordnance on his country for 78 days, and he later ended up in […]
→ read full articleOUTRAGE OR OPPOSITION?
Jake Lynch,
15 May 2009
Several important objections have come in, from knowledgeable and experienced observers, to my last column (Civilian Populations) arguing that pronouncing oneself in favour of human rights should predicate opposition to war. One is from Professor George Kent of the University of Hawaii, who says: “I think it is important not to mix outrage at particular […]
→ read full articleCIVILIAN POPULATIONS
Jake Lynch,
12 May 2009
The ‘Ishaqi massacre’ of March 2006 made headlines because it triggered a rare public dispute between US occupying forces and Iraqi police, who accused Marines of rounding up 11 people, including five small children, shooting them and blowing up their house. At the time the Pentagon said it was “highly unlikely that [the allegations] were […]
→ read full articleTHE MANY AND THE FUGUE
Jake Lynch,
30 Apr 2009
fugue (fyo̵̅o̅g)nounDefinitions: 1. (MUSIC) a composition for a definite number of parts or voices, in which a subject is announced in one voice, imitated in succession by each of the other voices, and developed contrapuntally; 2. (PSYCHIATRY) a state of psychological amnesia during which the subject seems to behave in a conscious and rational way, […]
→ read full articleA TREAT OF WORDS AND MUSIC
Jake Lynch,
25 Apr 2009
What is peace journalism? How would peace journalists report on the conflicts in Afghanistan, or Israel and Palestine? Would it have made any difference in coverage of the G20 summit and the Global Financial Crisis? Or even the rise of Nazism and the Second World War? Jake Lynch reflects on these questions and more, and […]
→ read full articleWOMEN’S BUSINESS?
Jake Lynch,
18 Apr 2009
Both of our peace journalism films, News from the Holy Land and Peace Journalism in the Philippines, open with two versions of the same story. In the former, it’s a suicide bombing on a bus in Jerusalem, which killed seven children and 16 adults; the latter relates the deaths of eleven commuters in bomb attacks […]
→ read full articleTHE PLIGHT OF THE PAPUANS
Jake Lynch,
10 Apr 2009
Indonesia is heading in some promising directions. Triumph for the Democrat Party of President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono – ‘SBY’ – in the country’s parliamentary elections, amounts to a handsome endorsement for a general-turned-politician who is, in many ways, a significant reformer. Among his achievements are the peace deal that finally brought a glimmer of hope […]
→ read full articleTWO VIEWS OF THE MIDDLE EAST
Jake Lynch,
28 Mar 2009
Review of Innocent Abroad, by Martin Indyk and Arabian Plights, by Peter Rodgers. Pub quiz question: who was the only elected US president since World War II not to have sent American troops to war? Answer: Jimmy Carter, whose single term in the White House came during the crisis of military legitimacy following defeat in […]
→ read full articleTHE END OF NEO-LIBERALISM?
Jake Lynch,
21 Mar 2009
It’s a sign of the unholy alliance between journalists and political classes that we are so often told that radical, epoch-shifting change is in the air. Eras are regularly brought to an end. Every election represents an ‘historic choice’, even when the differences between parties are relatively slight. Every conflict puts our very survival at […]
→ read full articleINTERNATIONAL LAW IN THE NEWS
Jake Lynch,
14 Mar 2009
Was Israel’s attack on Gaza illegal under international law? The question was raised, to a position of prominence unusual in the reporting of conflict, in many media which covered the events in the first two months of this year. Complaints came from both humanitarian organizations and highly-placed UN officials, and governments called explicitly for the […]
→ read full articlePIERCING THE CARAPACE
Jake Lynch in Cleveland, Ohio,
4 Mar 2009
Are we just wasting our time? That’s the challenge, to those of us working in the peacebuilding field, from two of its most respected figures, Simon Fisher and Lada Zimina. Their Open Letter to Peacebuilders argues that this should be our moment. Cold war rivalries have receded into distant memory, while hot war as a […]
→ read full articlePEACE WITH JUSTICE FOR BURMA
Jake Lynch in Chiang Mai, Thailand,
28 Feb 2009
Why do Russian dentists extract their patients’ teeth through the nose? Because Russians are afraid to open their mouths. It’s a good joke, and one that’s acquired fresh relevance in recent times, fit to rank alongside Soviet-era classics like the one about Moscow policemen and their habit of patrolling in threes (one could read, one […]
→ read full articleA LIBERAL DEMOCRACY?
Jake Lynch,
19 Feb 2009
Whenever I see a BMW Mini I think of home. Our last English address, before moving to Australia, was in Cowley, a suburb of Oxford, which has been a centre of car-making for nearly a century. Indeed, the hall at the top of our road had been the old Morris Social Club, where workers went […]
→ read full articleBRINGING IT HOME
Jake Lynch,
13 Feb 2009
I live in the northern Sydney suburb of St Ives, in an area known as Ku-ring-gai, so called after the Aboriginal people who are its traditional owners and custodians. Ku-ring-gai was named in a survey last year as having the highest quality of life of anywhere in Australia. Australia being, at the same time, top […]
→ read full articleHOW THE ‘SPECIAL RELATIONSHIP’ WORKS
Jake Lynch,
6 Feb 2009
“In building a balance of power that favors freedom, the United States is guided by the conviction that all nations have important responsibilities”. So says the US National Security Strategy, the 2002 version in this case, and just one more iteration of a long-established strategic posture: the so-called ‘hub and spoke’ doctrine of American foreign […]
→ read full articleSTRUCTURE AND AGENCY
Jake Lynch,
1 Feb 2009
“The winds of change are blowing through American media”. So say the enterprising campaigners for peace and social justice at Avaaz.org, an independent not-for-profit organisation with offices in six countries. Avaaz means ‘voice’, in many languages, and their team “works to ensure that the views and values of the world’s people inform global decision-making”. Like […]
→ read full articlePROMISING SIGNS?
Jake Lynch,
25 Jan 2009
The incoming Obama Administration is making some promising noises on both nuclear weapons and relations with Iran. It’s a notable breach with previous US political discourse that a world free of nuclear weapons is back on the agenda at all, even as a distant dream. During the Democratic and Republican conventions, which anointed Obama and […]
→ read full articleSYMPTOMS AND CAUSES
Jake Lynch,
21 Jan 2009
One of my students is establishing herself as a freelance journalist in Sydney and helping to pay the bills by filling in, now and again, with shifts on the switchboard at one of the main television channels here. Since Israel’s assault on Gaza began, she relates, “the phones have been hot during the news with […]
→ read full articleOPERATION CAST LEAD: MILITARISM AGAINST HUMAN RIGHTS AND THE RULE OF LAW
Jake Lynch,
10 Jan 2009
“Israel is America’s unsinkable battleship in the Middle East”. So said Caspar Weinberger, US Secretary of Defense under President Ronald Reagan. And, as the imprisoned population of Gaza is pounded by F-16 jets, M109 self-propelled Howitzers and the latest American-made white phosphorous artillery shells, it’s difficult to miss the proxy character of the offensive against […]
→ read full articleTHE MIDDLE-CLASS COMMENTARIAT
Jake Lynch,
30 Dec 2008
The middle-class hegemony in British journalism makes itself felt when journalists themselves are put in the uncomfortable position of seeing their own futures on the line. This was never more evident than in the Andrew Gilligan affair of 2003-4. In the immediate aftermath of the invasion of Iraq, officials in the UK, in particular, were […]
→ read full articleCONFRONTING THE RACISM OF ENOCH POWELL
Jake Lynch,
16 Dec 2008
In the Media Education Foundation film, Race: the Floating Signifier, Stuart Hall discusses the cultural processes whereby differences of appearance come to stand for the natural or biological qualities of human beings. Race is a “discursive construct”, he argues, whose meaning can never be fixed. One of the key arenas of contestation and negotiation over […]
→ read full articleDEBATES IN JOURNALISM TRAINING
Jake Lynch,
11 Dec 2008
Amman, Jordan, 1999, and my first experience of peace journalism training. Reporters, and one or two editors, from Israel, Palestine and Egypt came to join their Jordanian counterparts for the second instalment of a program titled ‘Telling About The Other’, funded by the official Danish aid agency, DANIDA and run by an NGO, also from […]
→ read full articleINEQUALITY: THE NEW (OLD) DYNAMIC OF CONFLICT
Jake Lynch,
6 Dec 2008
I started teaching the first ever peace journalism university course in October 2000, just days after the outbreak of what became known as the ‘Al-Aqsa Intifada’. The blanket media coverage of ‘clashes’ between Israelis and Palestinians afforded a rich source of material for students to get their teeth into, with the characteristic patterns of omission […]
→ read full articleHOW REAL IS REAL?
Jake Lynch,
28 Nov 2008
Can you imagine being caught up in the attack on the Indian city of Mumbai? If so, how? What images do you summon to your mind’s eye, and where do they come from? Such an ordeal is, thankfully for most of us, far removed from personal or social experience. It is, to use a vogue […]
→ read full articleINTERVENTION OR COMPLICITY?
Jake Lynch,
22 Nov 2008
What are we going to do about Somalia? A question, seemingly, now pushing its way up the agenda of foreign and defence ministries concerned at the antics of ‘pirates’, who recently added a tanker of Saudi oil to a haul already including a shipment of Russian tanks. They constitute a ‘threat to global trade and […]
→ read full articleWHAT IS PEACE JOURNALISM?
Jake Lynch,
13 Nov 2008
This is the first of a series of weekly columns, exclusive to TMS, by Jake Lynch. Jake is Associate Professor and Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. Before that, he spent nearly twenty years in journalism, including spells as a newsreader and presenter for BBC World television, […]
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