Journal articles on the topic 'Justice deals negotiated'

The determination of truth in the aftermath of war aiming at establishing justice and peace is a key element of a transitional justice (TJ) process. The theory of justice of Roland Dworkin deals with an approach in which the interpretation of values such as equality, liberty or truth are paramount. Dworkin’s theory of justice is applied to constitutional states and lays out how democratic values are negotiated. The goal of a TJ process is to lead a state towards democracy after a war or internal armed conflict. TJ processes as well as Dworkin’s theory of justice are to be understood as dynamic, which implies that they are subject to constant change and thus to be considered in their respective social, cultural, political, and economic contexts. This paper explores the relationship between truth and justice in the framework of a TJ trial and Roland Dworkin’s theory of justice. The TJ process in Colombia serves as a case study because that was where I conducted field research in TJ in 2019.

AbstractDo legal amnesties for combatants help end civil wars? International policy experts often take it for granted that amnesties promote negotiated settlements with rebels. However, a large number of amnesties are followed by continued fighting or a return to the battlefield. What, then, are the factors that make amnesties effective or ineffective? In this article I use a disaggregated data set of all amnesties enacted in the context of internal war since 1946 to evaluate a bargaining theory of amnesties and peace. Testing hypotheses about conflict patterns using models that account for selection, I find that (1) only amnesties passed following conflict termination help resolve civil wars, (2) amnesties are more effective when they are embedded in peace agreements, and (3) amnesties that grant immunity for serious rights violations have no observable pacifying effects. These policy-relevant findings represent a new breakthrough in an ossified “peace versus justice” debate pitting security specialists against global human rights advocates.

Does the communitarian perspective on politics offer a credible account of the conception of the relationship between the self and the other, which can provide a valid conceptual basis for justice among states? How does the understanding of the state as a nation-state impact the possibility of international justice? These questions constitute the primary concern of this work. It must be mentioned that although any attempt to analyze the international realm through the lens of communitarianism would necessarily entail invoking the politics of nationalism, this study deals with nationalism only to assess how communitarianism contributes to international justice. The study is not concerned with the validity or authenticity of a people's claims to nationalism; rather, the aim is to work out a communitarian perspective on international justice. This work argues that though the communitarian understanding of justice does offer a valid and credible account of the conception of the self and his relationship with the other, it fails to apply to the international context. Justice can only be required, negotiated, and implemented among members of a community. To understand international justice, what is required is the recognition of common humanity, a commonly shared conception of the good outside the boundaries of the nation-state. The communitarian perspective does not offer space for such recognition.

The case study deals with the attempted resolution of the conflict betweenthe Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) and the Turkish state during the rule ofthe Justice and Development Party (AKP) in 2009–2011. William Zartman’stheory of ripeness is applied to the case. The study analyses the state of theconflict and subsequently determines if the state of the conflict increasesthe chances of a negotiated peaceful resolution to the conflict (i.e. whetherthe conflict is in a state of ripeness). The analysis indicates that the conflictdid not fulfil the criteria of ripeness in the examined period. An alternativeexplanation of particular positive steps and the rhetoric in the conflict isprovided primarily by connecting them with an attempt to politicallymarginalize the PKK.

Research on workers’ proactive behaviors has increased in recent years, emphasizing the need for a more active workforce. In this context, research has been carried out on idiosyncratic deals (i-deals), that is, individualized work arrangements that employees negotiate with their employers about aspects that are mutually beneficial. Because this research topic focuses on individuals’ actions, most of the studies analyzing its antecedents examine individual characteristics. However, group and organizational characteristics have been suggested to play a role. The aim of the present paper is to analyze the interplay between individual and group level factors in the development of i-deals. More specifically, we consider the role of psychological capital and justice climate in the development of i-deals. A total of 520 employees working in 83 work-units in Spain participated in a panel study. A cross-level approach was adopted to analyze the relationships among psychological capital (psycap), justice climate and i-deals. The results revealed group differences in the enactment of i-deals. Individual and group level factors showed a significant positive relationship with i-deals. After controlling for individual characteristics, Justice Climate still added predictive power.

Abstract This article revisits the package deal nature of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOSC) and its implications for determining customary international law. A survey of the case law illustrates that the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has not given particular weight to the fact that the LOSC was negotiated and accepted as a package deal. Nevertheless, the ICJ’s declaration that Article 121, paragraph 3 of the LOSC is a customary rule tends to be based on a ‘package deal approach’, which focuses on the textual and logical links between the paragraphs that manifest an ‘indivisible régime’. By exploring the difficulties of determining the customary status of Article 76(2)–(7) concerning the continental shelf beyond 200 nautical miles, which may arise in the pending Nicaragua v. Colombia II case, this article calls for a cautious attitude towards determination of customary rules from the LOSC.

Being an ‘ideal woman of Muslim version,’ or muslimah in Indonesia, is the expectation from any family, and studying at pesantren (Islamic boarding school) is an option. However, female students confronted cultural shock when switching to a campus environment and experienced identity mediation. Experiences of study and interaction with the campus environment as well as the confrontation of gender norms between different pesantren and university, require them to renegotiate the meaning of gender and reinterpret Islamic teachings to meet their developing identity needs. To enhance our comprehension of the potential impact of higher education on gender identity negotiations, this study researched three female students who graduated from pesantren and then continued their education at university. The researchers employed in-depth interviews, discussions, and sharing of experiences through essays to obtain comprehensive information. This study found that pesantren and campus create ­­­­­an environment for thinking development. Some took the middle path to become more moderate, and others even resisted the pesantren doctrine. It generates novel assumptions concerning gender rather than the two prevalent perspectives, traditionalists who preserve the old system or principles and feminists who battle for gender justice based on their interpretation. Therefore, it is suggested that pesantren begin to adapt to the curriculum and public-school materials relevant to the era. Preserving a conservative notion of gender will diminish interest in studying at the pesantren.

On 29 November 2023, the Court of Appeal held in James Churchill v Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council, that the courts of England and Wales are entitled lawfully to order parties to engage in non-court-based dispute resolution processes. This important decision should not come as a surprise. This article will argue by reference to case law, judicial commentary and the Civil Procedure Rules (CPR) that this decision is the most recent expression of an impulse the courts have long maintained: that a case can be dealt with justly by moving (by various means) litigants away from the judgment seat to one of negotiated, consensual outcomes. The decision corrects an anomaly within the CPR that obliges parties to further the overriding objective by considering alternative dispute resolution but deprives the court of a particular remedy to enforce that obligation. This article will trace the roots of the Court of Appeal decision and identify to what extent it is the natural progression in judicial thinking, and it truly breaks new ground. Keywords: ADR; justice; civil justice; court reforms; overriding objective; Halsey; CPR; Churchill v Merthyr Tydfil; Article 6; arbitration agreements.

<p>This study deals with the different distribution of Complex Conditional Connectors (CCCs) in a monolingual comparable corpus made up of judicial rulings in Spanish delivered by two high courts, one Spanish (Tribunal Supremo de España, TSE) and one European (Court of Justice of the EU, CJEU). After observing the logic functions and the normalised frequency of such connectors in both subcorpora and in a comparison corpus of standard Spanish, the asymetric distribution of these conditional operators in the rulings of these two judicial authorities is highlighted. The Appraisal Theory is brought to bear in order to interpret the results, emphasizing that the Spanish and the European judges negotiate the interpersonal meaning of their rulings differently, through an idiosyncratic use of CCCs. In fact, both courts show dissimilar heteroglossic positioning, opening up or closing the argumentative space to possible dialogistic alternatives in a divergent way.</p>

Global climate policy till date has focused on building consensus around a differentiated roadmap for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Equally important yet receiving less attention is the need to support adaptation of the most vulnerable communities to the increasingly severe impacts of climatic changes. The Paris Agreement, negotiated at the 21st COP in December 2015, ‘stitches up’ national contributions on adaptation and mitigation into a global agreement. This article first reviews the adaptation components of the Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs) submitted by developed, emerging and least developed nations. Second, we examine how adaptation and the related themes of loss and damage have been dealt with in the Paris Agreement in terms of: global goal, legal form, review mechanisms and financing arrangements. Finally, we look at the possibility of evolving new arrangements and opportunities for strengthening global response to adaptation by drawing on references to human rights and climate justice in the Paris Agreement. We contend that the global response cannot be relegated to action by individual nations—partly and loosely supported by global financial and technological flows. The Paris Agreement has made significant steps in raising the importance of adaptation vis-à-vis mitigation in climate action but a lot of work remains to be done. In a sense, the top-down elements of adaptation action reflect long held negotiating positions and the skepticism of developed nations with respect to adaptation. For the post-Paris climate regime to be legitimate and earn the trust of developing nations, it must focus equally on adaptation and mitigation and address the special needs of vulnerable communities across the world.

PurposeIdiosyncratic deals (i-deals) have been shown to influence several employee outcomes positively. To extend the research, the authors examine the effect of i-deals on employees’ perceptions of organizational justice, in particular, how the relationship between employees’ own i-deals and organizational justice is affected by employees' job performance as well as their perceptions of coworkers’ i-deals.Design/methodology/approachThe authors tested the theoretical model using survey data from 182 hotel employees.FindingsResults show that i-deals are positively related to employees’ perceptions of organizational justice and that such effects are stronger among high performing employees. The effect of i-deals on organizational justice was also more pronounced among employees who viewed coworkers as having successfully negotiated i-deals.Practical implicationsThe authors' findings suggest that organizations can benefit from providing i-deals through employees’ enhanced perceptions of organizational justice. The paper thus recommends that organizations understand the impact of providing more flexible human resources (HR) practices and customized work arrangements that are aligned with individual goals and needs. This may be particularly relevant to high performers. Furthermore, the findings suggest that organizations may want to make i-deals available to employees more widely than to just a few selected individuals.Originality/valueThis study is one of a few attempts that empirically investigate the relationship between i-deals and organizational justice. The findings of this study shed light on the possibility that employees develop positive justice perceptions toward employeesʼ organization based on the appreciation of the customized work arrangements granted to both themselves and others.

This work deals with the plea bargaining (plea agreement) as an institution which isintended to be entered by means of the new Romanian Code of Criminal Procedure, adoptedby Law no. 135/2010, in the light of the conditions, of the conclusion procedure, of itscontents and consequences. Similar negotiated justice proceedings are found both in theadversarial and in the inquisitive systems (USA, England, as well as in Germany, France,Belgium, Greece, Republic of Moldova, Czech Republic, Croatia.

The increasing social and political instability in South Africa and an emergent view that links it to the negotiated political settlement invite for a critical review of the ‘South African political miracle’. A central question such a review should attempt to address is whether the political settlement dealt fundamentally with the legacy of colonialism and apartheid, which came to define so much of social, economic and political life in South Africa. This article attempts such a review. Unlike critics of the negotiated settlement who tend to dismiss it totally, I contend, following on Mamdani's Neither Settler nor Native ( 2021 ), that its major achievement was establishing an inclusive political order in which civil and political rights were extended to all South Africans. The article begins by providing a broad outline of the colonial and apartheid orders in South Africa. While Mamdani (2021) details the political dimensions of these two exclusionary political orders, especially the divisive political identities they fostered and enforced, this article summarises the social and economic dimensions, focusing in particular on land and cattle dispossession. By highlighting these two dimensions, the article seeks to demonstrate the limitations of the negotiated settlement and the risk these limitations pose to the sustainability of inclusive democracy in South Africa. The article then examines what Mamdani calls the ‘South African moment’, which was marked by a challenge to the logic of apartheid and colonialism and the transformation of the political identities those orders had imposed. The third section of the article discusses the promise and limitations of the negotiated settlement. Overall, the article questions the desirability of the ‘South African model’ where social justice is compromised to achieve political inclusion.

Traditional contract architectures and structures do not address indigenous communities’ needs and can hinder them from accessing justice. As indigenous communities have a growing stake in current business deals and structures, they have been misrepresented in negotiation and contracting processes. Access to justice does not only mean the right to file a lawsuit or go to court, but for a person to effectively understand and exercise their own rights. Therefore, traditional standard contracts are not proper business instruments to deal with the growing business opportunities presented to indigenous communities today. Those standards have historically been created to cover corporate needs, generally comprising a homogeneous group of people. Therefore, such contracting instruments keep such communities from accessing justice. This article explores the resources that legal design techniques present to create more accessible documents as a tool for social justice. By using a different and innovative contract architecture, design features, and user experience (UX) principles, documents may increase empathy for their users, diminish sales cycles, and avoid conflicts during negotiations. Legal design techniques applied to a carbon credit generation agreement during a negotiation between a Colombian company and a Brazilian indigenous community led to the closing of a fair deal, respecting the community's interests. This article explores the resources used in the contract and its results. The analysis also explores a prior attempt to use a standard document version, which created resistance from the community's leaders to negotiate the deal due to its structure and language. The language and structure used in the traditional contract model led to misinterpretation, mistrust, and communication problems between the parties, hindering them from closing a deal. Such a case demonstrates that legal design can benefit any group in which legalese can represent a barrier to the full understanding of a document. By using UX and design principles to better organize content and make it clearer to a document's user such resources help them fully exercise their rights. In addition, this case advocates for the use of legal design for documents that aim at other minority groups as their end users.

The gendered dynamics of informal work in southern cities across the globe has been well documented. Women in the informal sector, usually already marginalised through racialised and class positionalities, face predictable work challenges in patriarchal society, lower pay, longer work hours, more family responsibilities, less social protections, and safety concerns linked to workspaces. In this article, we explore the specific challenges that women waste pickers in the inner city of Durban, South Africa, experience. The study draws on ethnographic research with eight waste pickers. Beyond the challenges, the narrative data illustrates how and why women waste pickers navigate and negotiate for space and safety in the inner city of Durban. We highlight how women build social relationships as a mitigation strategy against material and varied safety concerns. These social relationships work across formal business linkages and relationships on the street. These mitigation strategies are simultaneously gendered responses to work in the city and innovative business practices. The experiences of women waste pickers in the city indicates that it is left to the women themselves, individually and in small collectives, to find ways to navigate issues of discrimination and exclusions linked to work, gender and space in the city. Ultimately, we draw on the experiences of women waste pickers in inner city Durban to ask questions about what lessons can be learnt to advocate better municipal planning that proactively deals with gender and justice in the city.

IntroductionThe role, function, and future of the Western public intellectual have been highly contested over the last three decades. The dominant discourse, which predicts the decline of the public intellectual, asserts the institutionalisation of their labour has eroded their authority to speak publicly to power on behalf of others; and that the commodification of intellectual performance has transformed them from sages, philosophers, and men of letters into trivial media entertainers, pundits, and ideologues. Overwhelmingly the crisis debates link the demise of the public intellectual to shifts in public culture, which was initially conceptualised as a literary and artistic space designed to liberate the awareness of citizens through critique and to reflect upon “the chronic and persistent issues of life, meaning and representation” (McGuigan 430). This early imagining of public culture as an exclusively civilising space, however, did not last and Jurgen Habermas documented its decline in response to the commodification and politicisation of culture in the 20th century. Yet, as social activism continued to flourish in the public sphere, Habermas re-theorised public culture as a more pluralistic site which simultaneously accommodates “uncritical populism, radical subversion and critical intervention” (436) and operates as both a marketplace and a “site of communicative rationality, mutual respect and understanding (McGuigan 434). The rise of creative industries expanded popular engagement with public culture but destabilised the authority of the public intellectual. The accompanying shifts also affected the function of the curator, who, like the intellectual, had a role in legislating and arbitrating knowledge, and negotiating and authorising meaning through curated exhibitions of objects deemed sacred and significant. Jennifer Barrett noted the similarities in the two functions when she argued in Museums and the Public Sphere that, because museums have an intellectual role in society, curators have a public intellectual function as they define publics, determine modes of engagement, and shape knowledge formation (150). The resemblance between the idealised role of the intellectual and the curator in enabling the critique that emancipates the citizen means that both functions have been affected by the atomisation of contemporary society, which has exposed the power effects of the imposed coherency of authoritative and universal narratives. Indeed, just as Russell Jacoby, Allan Bloom, and Richard Posner predicted the death of the intellectual, who could no longer claim to speak in universal terms on behalf of others, so museums faced their own crisis of relevancy. Declining visitor numbers and reduced funding saw museums reinvent themselves, and in moving away from their traditional exclusive, authoritative, and nation building roles—which Pierre Bourdieu argued reproduced the “existing class-based culture, education and social systems” (Barrett 3)—museums transformed themselves into inclusive and diverse sites of co-creation with audiences and communities. In the context of this change the curator ceased to be the “primary producer of knowledge” (Barrett 13) and emerged to reproduce “contemporary culture preoccupations” and constitute the “social imagery” of communities (119). The modern museum remains concerned with explaining and interrogating the world, but the shift in curatorial work is away from the objects themselves to a focus upon audiences and how they value the artefacts, knowledge, and experiences of collective shared memory. The change in curatorial practices was driven by what Peter Vergo called a new “museology” (Barrett 2), and according to Macdonald this term assumes that “object meanings are contextual rather than inherent” or absolute and universal (2). Public intellectuals and curators, as the custodians of ideas and narratives in the contemporary cultural industries, privilege audience reception and recognise that consumers and/or citizens engage with public culture for a variety of reasons, including critique, understanding, and entertainment. Curators, like public intellectuals, also recognise that they can no longer assume the knowledge and experience of their audience, nor prescribe the nature of engagement with ideas and objects. Instead, curators and intellectuals emerge as negotiators and translators of cultural meaning as they traverse the divides in public culture, sequestering ideas and cultural artefacts and constructing narratives that engage audiences and communities in the process of re-imagining the past as a way of providing new insights into contemporary challenges.Methodology In exploring the idea that the public intellectual acts as a curator of ideas as he or she defines and privileges the discursive spaces of public culture, this paper begins by providing an overview of the cultural context of the contemporary public intellectual which enables comparisons between intellectual and curatorial functions. Second, this paper analyses a random sample of the content of books, newspaper and magazine articles, speeches, and transcripts of interviews drawn from The Australian, The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald, The Sydney Institute, the ABC, The Monthly, and Quadrant published or broadcast between 1996 and 2007, in order to identify the key themes of the History Wars. It should be noted that the History War debates were extensive, persistent, and complex—and as they unfolded over a 13-year period they emerged as the “most powerful” and “most disputed form of public intellectual work” (Carter, Ideas 9). Many issues were aggregated under the trope of the History Wars, and these topics were subject to both popular commentary and academic investigation. Furthermore, the History Wars discourse was produced in a range of mediums including popular media sources, newspaper and magazine columns, broadcasts, blogs, lectures, and writers’ forums and publications. Given the extent of this discourse, the sample of articles which provides the basis for this analysis does not seek to comprehensively survey the literature on the History Wars. Rather this paper draws upon Foucault’s genealogical qualitative method, which exposes the subordinated discontinuities in texts, to 1) consider the political context of the History War trope; and 2) identify how intellectuals discursively exhibited versions of the nation’s identity and in the process made visible the power effects of the past. Public Intellectuals The underlying fear of the debates about the public intellectual crisis was that the public intellectual would no longer be able to act as the conscience of a nation, speak truth to power, or foster the independent and dissenting public debate that guides and informs individual human agency—a goal that has lain at the heart of the Western intellectual’s endeavours since Kant’s Sapere aude. The late 20th century crisis discourse, however, primarily mourned the decline of a particular form of public authority attached to the heroic universal intellectual formation made popular by Emile Zola at the end of the 19th century, and which claimed the power to hold the political elites of France accountable. Yet talk of an intellectual crisis also became progressively associated with a variety of general concerns about globalising society. Some of these concerns included fears that structural shifts in the public domain would lead to the impoverishment of the cultural domain, the end of Western civilisation, the decline of the progressive political left, and the end of universal values. It was also expected that the decline in intellectuals would also enable the rise of populism, political conservatism, and anti-intellectualism (Jacoby Bloom; Bauman; Rorty; Posner; Furedi; Marquand). As a result of these fears, the function of the intellectual who engages publicly was re-theorised. Zygmunt Bauman suggested the intellectual was no longer the legislator or arbiter of taste but the negotiator and translator of ideas; Michel Foucault argued that the intellectual could be institutionally situated and still speak truth to power; and Edward Said insisted the public intellectual had a role in opening up possibilities to resolve conflict by re-imagining the past. In contrast, the Australian public intellectual has never been declared in crisis or dead, and this is probably because the nation does not have the same legacy of the heroic public intellectual. Indeed, as a former British colony labelled the “working man’s paradise” (White 4), Australia’s intellectual work was produced in “institutionalised networks” (Head 5) like universities and knowledge disciplines, political parties, magazines, and unions. Within these networks there was a double division of labour, between the abstraction of knowledge and its compartmentalisation, and between the practical application of knowledge and its popularisation. As a result of this legacy, a more organic, specific, and institutionalised form of intellectualism emerged, which, according to Head, limited intellectual influence and visibility across other networks and domains of knowledge and historically impeded general intellectual engagement with the public. Fears about the health and authority of the public intellectual in Australia have therefore tended to be produced as a part of Antonio Gramsci’s ideological “wars of position” (Mouffe 5), which are an endless struggle between cultural and political elites for control of the institutions of social reproduction. These struggles began in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s over language and political correctness, and they reappeared in the 1990s as the History Wars. History Wars“The History Wars” was a term applied to an ideological battle between two visions of the Australian nation. The first vision was circulated by Australian Labor Party Prime Minister Paul Keating, who saw race relations as central to 21st century global Australia and began the process of dealing with the complex and divisive Indigenous issues at home. He established the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation in 1991; acknowledged in the 1992 Redfern speech that white settlers were responsible for the problems in Indigenous communities; and commissioned the Bringing Them Home report, which was completed in 1997 and concluded that the mandated removal of Indigenous children from their families and communities throughout the 20th century had violated their human rights and caused long-term and systemic damage to Indigenous communities.The second vision of Australia was circulated by Liberal Prime Minister John Howard, who, after he came to power in 1996, began his own culture war to reconstruct a more conservative vision of the nation. Howard believed that the stories of Indigenous dispossession undermined confidence in the nation, and he sought to produce a historical view of the past grounded in “Judeo-Christian ethics, the progressive spirit of the enlightenment and the institutions and values of British culture” (“Sense of Balance”). Howard called for a return to a narrative form that valorised Australia’s achievements, and he sought to instil a more homogenised view of the past and a coherent national identity by reviewing high school history programs, national museum appointments, and citizenship tests. These two political positions framed the subsequent intellectual struggles over the past. While a number of issues were implicated in the battle, generally, left commentators used the History Wars as a way to circulate certain ideas about morality and identity, including 1) Australians needed to make amends for past injustices to Indigenous Australians and 2) the nation’s global identity was linked to how they dealt with Australia’s first people. In contrast, the political right argued 1) the left had misrepresented and overstated the damage done to Indigenous communities and rewritten history; 2) stories about Indigenous abuse were fragmenting the nation’s identity at a time when the nation needed to build a coherent global presence; and 3) no apology was necessary, because contemporary Australians did not feel responsible for past injustices. AnalysisThe war between these two visions of Australia was fought in “extra-curricular sites,” according to Stuart Macintyre, and this included newspaper columns, writers’ festivals, broadcast interviews, intellectual magazines like The Monthly and Quadrant, books, and think tank lectures. Academics and intellectuals were the primary protagonists, and they disputed the extent of colonial genocide; the legitimacy of Indigenous land rights; the impact of the Stolen Generation on the lives of modern Indigenous citizens; and the necessity of a formal apology as a part of the reconciliation process. The conflicts also ignited debates about the nature of history, the quality of public debates in Australia, and exposed the tensions between academics, public intellectuals, newspaper commentators and political elites. Much of the controversy played out in the national forums can be linked to the Bringing Them Home: National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families report Stolen Generation inquiry and report, which was commissioned by Keating but released after Howard came to office. Australian public intellectual and professor of politics Robert Manne critiqued the right’s response to the report in his 2001 Quarterly Essay titled “In Denial: The Stolen Generation and The Right”. He argued that there was a right-wing campaign in Australia that sought to diminish and undermine justice for Aboriginal people by discounting the results of the inquiry, underestimating the numbers of those affected, and underfunding the report’s recommendations. He spoke of the nation’s shame and in doing so he challenged Australia’s image of itself. Manne’s position was applauded by many for providing what Kay Schaffer in her Australian Humanities Review paper called an “effective antidote to counter the bitter stream of vitriol that followed the release of the Bringing Them Home report”. Yet Manne also drew criticism. Historian Bain Attwood argued that Manne’s attack on conservatives was polemical, and he suggested that it would be more useful to consider in detail what drives the right-wing analysis of Indigenous issues. Attwood also suggested that Manne’s essay had misrepresented the origins of the narrative of the Stolen Generation, which had been widely known prior to the release of the Stolen Generation report.Conservative commentators focused upon challenging the accuracy of those stories submitted to the inquiry, which provided the basis for the report. This struggle over factual details was to characterise the approach of historian Keith Windschuttle, who rejected both the numbers of those stolen from their families and the degree of violence used in the settlement of Australia. In his 2002 book The Fabrication of Aboriginal History, Volume One, Van Diemen’s Land 1803–1847 he accused left-wing academics of exaggerating the events of Aboriginal history in order to further their own political agenda. In particular, he argued that the extent of the “conflagration of oppression and conflict” which sought to “dispossess, degrade, and devastate the Aboriginal people” had been overstated and misrepresented and designed to “create an edifice of black victimhood and white guilt” (Windschuttle, Fabrication 1). Manne responded to Windschuttle’s allegations in Whitewash: On Keith Windschuttle’s Fabrication of Aboriginal History, arguing that Windschuttle arguments were “unpersuasive and unsupported either by independent research or even familiarity with the relevant secondary historical literature” (7) and that the book added nothing to the debates. Other academics like Stephen Muecke, Marcia Langton and Heather Goodall expressed concerns about Windschuttle’s work, and in 2003 historians Stuart Macintyre and Anna Clark published The History Wars, which described the implications of the politicisation of history on the study of the past. At the same time, historian Bain Attwood in Telling the Truth About Aboriginal History argued that the contestation over history was eroding the “integrity of intellectual life in Australia” (2). Fractures also broke out between writers and historians about who was best placed to write history. The Australian book reviewer Stella Clarke wrote that the History Wars were no longer constructive discussions, and she suggested that historical novelists could colonise the territory traditionally dominated by professional historians. Inga Clendinnen wasn’t so sure. She wrote in a 2006 Quarterly Essay entitled “The History Question: Who Owns the Past?” that, while novelists could get inside events through a process of “applied empathy,” imagination could in fact obstruct the truth of reality (20). Discussion The History Wars saw academics engage publicly to exhibit a set of competing ideas about Australia’s identity in the nation’s media and associated cultural sites, and while the debates initially prompted interest they eventually came to be described as violent and unproductive public conversations about historical details and ideological positions. Indeed, just as the museum curator could no longer authoritatively prescribe the cultural meaning of artefacts, so the History Wars showed that public intellectuals could not adjudicate the identity of the nation nor prescribe the nature of its conduct. For left-wing public intellectuals and commentators, the History Wars came to signify the further marginalisation of progressive politics in the face of the dominant, conservative, and increasingly populist constituency. Fundamentally, the battles over the past reinforced fears that Australia’s public culture was becoming less diverse, less open, and less able to protect traditional civil rights, democratic freedoms, and social values. Importantly for intellectuals like Robert Manne, there was a sense that Australian society was less able or willing to reflect upon the moral legitimacy of its past actions as a part of the process of considering its contemporary identity. In contrast right-wing intellectuals and commentators argued that the History Wars showed how public debate under a conservative government had been liberated from political correctness and had become more vibrant. This was the position of Australian columnist Janet Albrechtsen who argued that rather than a decline in public debate there had been, in fact, “vigorous debate of issues that were once banished from the national conversation” (91). She went on to insist that left-wing commentators’ concerns about public debate were simply a mask for their discomfort at having their views and ideas challenged. There is no doubt that the History Wars, while media-orchestrated debates that circulated a set of ideological positions designed to primarily attract audiences and construct particular views of Australia, also raised public awareness of the complex issues associated with Australia’s Indigenous past. Indeed, the Wars ended what W.E.H Stanner had called the “great silence” on Indigenous issues and paved the way for Kevin Rudd’s apology to Indigenous people for their “profound grief, suffering and loss”. The Wars prompted conversations across the nation about what it means to be Australian and exposed the way history is deeply implicated in power surely a goal of both intellectual debate and curated exhibitions. ConclusionThis paper has argued that the public intellectual can operate like a curator in his or her efforts to preserve particular ideas, interpretations, and narratives of public culture. 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