An essay examining some of what the world has been witnessing the past three years, in Gaza and beyond. It focuses on the ethics and law of just war and the mechanisms those moral and legal disciplines employ to limit the killing of civilians in wartime (the discussion referring to different historical contexts but mainly Gaza). It describes how those mechanisms tend to permissively enable rather than robustly prevent that killing, and then how genocide as an intentional set of acts with a final purpose is understood in order to legally punish it. But I argue, via a discussion of the failure of ethical universalism, that determining genocidal intent in these terms largely ignores the unconscious dimension of its psychogenesis, and appeal to psychoanalytic theory to describe what is really happening psychosocially, including among those who might not be doing the killing directly but are otherwise in support of those who are.
Despite declining globally as a legal punishment, the commission of the death penalty has risen in recent years – especially in Islamic countries like Iran, but also in the culturally Buddhist lands of East Asia and Singapore. China executes more people by far than anyone else in absolute numbers, and Singapore has the highest rate of capital punishment per capita of any nation.
Other liberal democracies, like Israel and the US, have expanded its applicability and means – introducing the death sentence exclusively for Palestinians, in the former case, and death by firing-squad, in the latter.
Lucrezia Rizzelli and Daniel Cullen at Oxford University invited my Buddhist-philosophical response to this situation, now available as a short research paper in their DPRU series, here –
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short fiction, written 2019
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Short article on the ethical status of classical music performance in a time of war. Do musicians who publicly espouse a national identity have a duty to represent that nation in more or less consciously political senses? If not, is music free of all obligation to respond to political crises, when its cultural identity is implicated in war? Published online in Overland Literary Journal, March 29th, 2025: https://overland.org.au/2025/05/a-change-of-program-classical-music-performance-in-a-time-of-war/
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Heideggerian and post-Heideggerian concerns around the ontology of technology in its relations with human being, the capitalist subject, and political autonomy have long been a feature of recent continental thought. This brief take on the ‘post-human’ development of technobiological symbiosis between Dasein (or the humanly possible), the techno-capitalist state, and recent moves in the technologisation of state medical and security interventions, considers how the current state of play might be broadly construed in and as an ever-shifting ontology of ‘biotechnological prosthesis’.
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“Axis Mundi (a love-song)” and “Involuntariness” respond to the theme of contemporary INVOLUTION, for Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Issue 82: https://vvpoetry.com/
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“Aquamarine” and “Who Asked?” in Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine, Issue 81: “Lying Flat”: https://vvpoetry.com/2025/01/12/issue-81/
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A short article on the social-political receptions of the ‘Assange case’, especially among Western liberal democracies and that of Australia in particular, and what they mean for the future of robust relations between the exercise of human rights and national sovereignty. Published in Overland Journal (online), June 26th, 2023: https://overland.org.au/2023/06/five-questions-about-assange/
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“A Buddhist perspective on the ethics of violence” – ABC Radio National Philosopher’s Zone interview
A half-hour interview with political theorist Dimitri Vouros on the theme of Buddhist philosophy, ethics, and lethal violence. With thanks to producer David Rutledge of The Philosopher’s Zone, and the AAP (Australasian Association of Philosophy) for sponsoring the programme.
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Poem in Westerly Magazine 67.2: https://westerlymag.com.au/issues/67-2/
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