The dramatic impact of the 11 September 2001 attacks on New York and Washington sharply intensified relations between Australia and the USA. The bilateral relationship was reconfirmed as the two states joined in war against an elusive, and unexpected, enemy. As the war on terrorism broadened, Australia enthusiastically joined the so-called ‘coalition of the willing’, sending troops to fight in Afghanistan and, more controversially, deploying forces alongside the USA in the invasion and occupation of Iraq. From late 2001 commentary in Australia invariably accepted that ‘relations with the United States dominated Australian foreign affairs’ or more subtly observed that ‘the central dynamics of Australian foreign policy revolved around the issue of relations with the superpower, and the implications of this relationship’ for the broader exercise of Australian foreign policy.

As 2001 began, Australia’s relationship with West Asia could be characterised as one between perfect strangers. Despite regular military forays into the region, largely in support of the USA, and a burgeoning commercial relationship, the region had never been considered part of Australia’s primary area of strategic interest nor had political relations between the Australian Government and its regional counterparts ever really moved beyond occasional visits and diplomatic courtesies. Meanwhile, to the extent that Australia entered the consciousness of regional elites and the broader population, it was mainly as a supplier of primary products, such as sheep and wheat, and as a steadfast, if somewhat lower-profile, ally of the USA. In effect, there was a degree of mutual, if largely happy, ambivalence between Australia and the region.

In the early 1990s, scholars talked about Australia’s neglect of South Asia, in particular Australia’s failure to understand the rising importance of India. We spoke of indifference, blind spots, missed opportunities, general indifference and even ideological differences between the two countries that began with Jawaharlal Nehru and Sir Robert Menzies. During the last ten years, Australia’s engagement with South Asia has changed dramatically – Australia has been involved in a counterinsurgency war against the Taliban in Afghanistan intermittently since 2002, and India has emerged as Australia’s fourth largest export market. The paradox that this chapter addresses is the way in which Australia’s strategic engagement with South Asia was dominated by Afghanistan while Australian commercial national interests lay with India. These two relationships have overwhelmingly defined Australia’s connection with South Asia. The focus is on Kevin Rudd’s period as prime minister of Australia (2007–10) and his subsequent role as foreign minister (from 2010), because the Rudd years capture the essence of Australia’s new relationship with this part of the world where some two billion people live.

Examining the history and institutions of the legal systems in Afghanistan, we contend that there is an under-examined set of plural legal systems – those where different legal traditions remain in continual contention. Unlike mixed legal systems, these plural legal systems are not composed of mixed, blended, or accommodated models, but of conflicting legal influences that fail to create a well-functioning legal order, contributing to social and political conflicts. In this chapter, we first discuss the different characteristics of divided legal systems. Next, we explain why Afghanistan has failed to overcome the problem of a divided legal system.

In 2019, ICC Pre-Trial Chamber II decided not to open an investigation into potential Taliban and US crimes in Afghanistan on the grounds that it would not be in the ‘interests of justice’. In arriving at this conclusion, the judges relied upon management concerns about organisational sustainability and the proposed use of resources to justify their position. While heavily criticised by scholars at the time, the judges’ reasoning alludes to the pervasiveness of management ideas and reasoning throughout the court, even in the realm of legal argumentation. This chapter takes the Afghanistan decision as the starting point for a discussion on management’s relationship to core argumentative dilemmas comprising the ICC legal field. Whether in framing case selection as a matter of court capacity or fashioning past obstacles to victim participation as ‘lessons learnt’, management ideas and practices enact a flight from the dilemmas and complexities of ICC-style justice by experts, deferring critique and sustaining the institutional project of global justice.

This chapter documents the constellation of films and literary works extending outward from the Eastern international in the late- and post-Soviet years when socialist internationalism pivoted from an east–west to a north–south axis and then dissipated (1960s–1990s). It affirms the enduring coherence of the Persianate literary space, now bound together by Soviet models of literary representation. The chapter samples the occasional poetry produced by Eastern literary representatives involved in Soviet–Third-World cultural diplomacy at Cold War literary congresses, especially through the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association. However, it also shows how artists gripped by classical Persianate forms continued to find and respond to each other after Soviet-backed literary institutions lost international legitimacy. The chapter discusses several Persian and Uzbek texts from the Soviet–Afghan War, including a leading Afghan communist literary bureaucrat’s mystical love poem to an Islamist insurgent, written continuously from 1980–2020. Its other central case study is the impact of the Soviet Armenian filmmaker Sergei Parajanov’s film The Color of Pomegranates as a model for Persianate poetics on film, including in the Islamic Republic of Iran, including in the art films of Muhsin Makhmalbaf. The chapter tempers the elegiac impulse of the post-Persianate left with an affirmation of the tradition’s continued vitality.

The conclusion reviews the arguments developed throughout the book. This summary is framed by a consideration of the changing meanings of the poetic figures of the rose and nightingale in the Persianate twentieth century. Accordingly, each chapter is elucidated through a reading of that chapter’s classical Persian or Turkic epigraph.

If the war in Afghanistan, even more than that in Iraq, was meant to win the hearts and minds of the locals so they would not sponsor the terrorists we were seeking to defeat, how were Western forces supposed to accomplish the task – or indeed, know when they had accomplished the task? The answer, at least initially, was what was called the Human Terrain project, which might as well have been called the anthropologists full employment scheme, as it sought to use anthropologists to guide Western forces in assessing local support. Coupled with the American administration’s naturalistic belief that once terror states were torn down democracy would spring up unaided, the project was a colossal failure. By tracing the assumptions that went into this particular encounter, we can, perhaps, more readily avoid such actions in the future.

This chapter extends the argument of anticolonial critics, such as Ania Loomba and Sylvia Wynter, to suggest that we think of race less as a distinct, autonomous category and more as an underpinning force contributing to the destabilizing elements of the fin-de-siècle social world. By expanding our theoretical framework to consider late-nineteenth-century manifestations of anti-Blackness, the chapter argues that we can enrich our mapping of the ways that “race” as an expansive category both propped up and disordered the British empire and thereby build on earlier critical interpretations of the workings of empire and difference in fin-de-siècle narratives. To help write toward this reframing, the author turns to Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Story of the Brown Hand” (1899). This short tale about the ghost of an Afghan hillman haunting a British surgeon upon his return from Mumbai (“Bombay”) to Wiltshire teaches us how the brownness of Asians took shape through biocentric terms against the period’s longstanding anti-Blackness in ways that are historically specific but also ongoing in the present.

This chapter deals with an analysis of sovereignty and complementarity, including the political idea of ‘sovereignty costs,’ in which powerful actors will commit to actions which limit their power to achieve overarching aims. The exercise of complementarity in both postcolonial States and wealthy, Western States are also examined to determine whether such exercises of complementarity undermine the Court, or if these could reinforce the Court’s authority. The issue of shielding, as the protection of citizens from international prosecution through obfuscation, as a natural corollary to the preceding discussion, is then analysed, taking the examination of the situation in the UK/Iraq as a prime example. This serves as a precursor to a discussion of the examination of Afghanistan, which may confront the same issues and should be considered given that the UK/Iraq examination by the Court has now been concluded.

The International Criminal Court seeks to end impunity for the world’s worst crimes, in order to contribute to their prevention. But what is its impact to date? This book takes an in-depth look at four countries under scrutiny of the ICC: Afghanistan, Colombia, Libya and Uganda. It puts forward an analytical framework to assess the impact of the ICC on four levels: on the domestic legal systems (systemic effect); on peace negotiations and agreements (transformative effect); on victims (reparative effect); and on the perceptions of affected populations (demonstration effect). It concludes that the ICC, through its expressive function, is having a normative impact on domestic legal systems and peace agreements, but it has brought little reparative justice for victims and it does not necessarily correspond with affected populations view justice priorities. The book concludes that justice for the world’s worst crimes has no “universal formula” that can easily be captured in law.

Chapter 7 discusses the societal impact of Court on the affected communities, known as demonstration effect. Different elements are important to “demonstration effect,” including (1) whether the Court is perceived as impartial in a specific context, (2) whether the ICC’s interventions are perceived as relevant and responsive to local communities and their justice struggles, (3) whether the Court is viewed as a legitimate justice institution, and (4) whether it is perceived as independent. Relying on qualitative data, the chapter seeks identify trends in perceptions in Afghanistan, Colombia, Libya, and Uganda. The chapter concludes that the Court suffers from negative perceptions in all four countries. In Uganda and Libya, its failure to prosecute actors from different sides contributes to an impression that it is not impartial. In Afghanistan or Libya, it is perceived as Western-influenced and not independent. In different contexts including Afghanistan, Uganda, and Colombia, it was perceived as an external imposition, and not aligned with local justice priorities arising from many decades of conflict. The architecture of the Court, with limited capacity to conduct preliminary examinations to better contextualize its interventions, limited field offices and little outreach, hinders effectively addressing these negative perceptions.