Emeritus Professor William Maley1, Prof. William Maley2
1Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Acton, Australia, 2Monash University, Melbourne, Australia
Biography:
William Maley is Emeritus Professor of Diplomacy at The Australian National University, where he was Professor of Diplomacy from 2003-2021. He is also a lawyer, a Member of the Order of Australia, a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia and a Fellow of the Australian Institute of International Affairs. In November 2003, he received the AUSTCARE Paul Cullen Humanitarian Award for services to refugees. He is author of Rescuing Afghanistan (London: Hurst & Co., 2006), What is a Refugee? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), Transition in Afghanistan: Hope, Despair and the Limits of Statebuilding (New York: Routledge, 2018), The Afghanistan Wars (London: Red Globe/Macmillan, 2021), Diplomacy, Communication, and Peace: Selected Essays (New York: Routledge, 2021), and Australia: The Politics of Degraded Democracy (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2024). In addition, he co-authored Afghanistan: Politics and Economics in a Globalising State (New York: Routledge, 2020) (with Niamatullah Ibrahimi); and The Decline and Fall of Republican Afghanistan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2023) (with Ahmad Shuja Jamal), and edited Fundamentalism Reborn? Afghanistan and the Taliban (New York: New York University Press, 1998).
Abstract:
The panel examines the limitations and contestation of the liberal rules-based international order as seen through the case of Afghanistan. After two decades of international intervention and investment, what lessons can we draw about in the protection of human rights and humanitarian values, the rhetoric and the practices, there are lessons and reflections to be made that contribute to the liberal international orders. Foreign and international policies toward Afghanistan reveal significant challenges and contestation of international norms, as well as manifest failures with regard to governance. The panel will discuss how the situation in Afghanistan under Taliban de facto authority sets a precedent for other countries and regions and indeed the multilateral system where opposition and/or resistance to liberal norms and rules based on rights challenge approaches to peacemaking, democracy, human rights, and humanitarianism.
The panel brings together experts on international diplomacy, international law, norms and gender, Afghan domestic politics and security studies. The panel will explore themes of peace, democracy, human rights, and humanitarianism within the context of the longest military intervention aimed at liberal state-building, which ultimately failed and ceded power to an insurgent group, leading to the institutionalisation of gender apartheid. The significant implications of this in international politics will be debated.