Dr Victoria Mason

Numbering over 5 million people, Palestinians comprise one of the longest-standing refugee populations in modern history. This article argues that the ongoing dispossession of Palestinian refugees is the result of the liminality they have been accorded within international law and global politics. This liminality includes Palestinians being the only refugee cohort not explicitly protected by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) mandate; and their right to return to their homeland – one of the most widely recognised basic rights under refugee law – occluded and reframed as a matter for political negotiation with Israel. The liminality of Palestinian refugees, this article demonstrates, results from the dominant narrative concerning the displacement of Palestinians from their homeland in 1947–8; the role this narrative plays in the hegemonic discourse shaping Israeli-Palestinian relations more widely; and how this narrative and wider discourse are mutually reproducing, resulting in significant intergenerational injustice for Palestinian refugees.

While the gravity of the injustice and inequality experienced by Palestinians is now widely documented, evidenced, and acknowledged, when it comes to action the situation appears ‘impervious’ to international law and norms of global politics, with Israel largely enjoying impunity. This article argues that this state of affairs can be most coherently understood through a critical interdisciplinary emancipatory framework centred on ‘liminality’. Referring to situations and actors ‘betwixt and between’, the framework of liminality offers significant potential for understanding how particular actors and spaces are intentionally marginalised, disempowered, and silenced within global politics and international law. Furthermore, in revealing the root causes of liminality, and the inherent vulnerability of such spaces to contestation and subversion, the framework also opens up potential pathways of transformative emancipation. Applying the lens of liminality to Palestine, it is demonstrated that Palestinians have been deliberately corralled to a liminal space within international law and global politics in order to enable an expansionist Zionist/Israeli settler colonial enterprise. After exploring how Palestinian liminality manifests in global politics and international law, the article turns to a range of efforts to subvert Palestinian liminality and assesses prospects for a teleological emancipation for Palestinians.

H.G. Wells is best known as "the father of science fiction". However, the bulk of his writing is both non-fiction and concerned with social justice. While it is widely held that The Rights of Man (1940) helped shape the drafting of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, this article argues that Wells' influence extended well beyond this. Through his contribution to rights-based debates concerning social liberalism, internationalism, liberal internationalism, and international law, between the late 1890s and his death in 1946, Wells made crucial interventions in emerging discourses around rights and was a significant actor in rights-based civil society.

"If only there was a Palestinian Gandhi" has been a common refrain in recent years. Yet in reality, Palestinians have a long history of relying on nonviolence. However, this nonviolence has received no constructive response from either Israel or the international community. The failure to acknowledge and welcome the Palestinian nonviolent movement serves to prolong the conflict and its negative effects, and lays bare the refusal of the international community to address the rights abuses at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This article narrates Palestinian use of both violence and nonviolence in their struggle to achieve national self-determination and other basic rights, and assesses the potential of nonviolent action to enable a just resolution of their situation.

This paper explores the experiences of Iraqi refugees in Jordan through the lens of their motility. In doing so, it demonstrates that the motility of Iraqis is largely shaped by pan-Arab ideologies concerning 'hospitality' and the politics surrounding the category of the 'refugee' in Jordan. The intersection of these factors have meant that Iraqis occupy an ambiguous and precarious socio-legal position in Jordan and the populist view in the Kingdom regards them as a politically and socially problematic demographic. Processes demonising Iraqis in Jordan, however, also reflect wider global processes that have pathologised and criminalised - and in the process im-mobilised - the figure of the refugee.

Since their introduction to Australia in the early 1970s, the politics of multiculturalism have entailed a degree of state control over the cultural affairs of (principally immigrant) ethnic communities. This was largely obtained by consent rather than coercion, and this consent was often purchased with various forms of state resourcing for community needs, with a measure of coercion attached to the threat, where necessary, of funding withdrawals. Beyond the basic framework of liberal-democratic norms, very little of the ground rules for the acceptable practice of minority culture were inscribed in legislation or state pronouncements.

The pursuit of the 'War on Terror' since 9/11 has increasingly seen the intrusion of the state into cultural, and especially religious, matters of minority populations, overwhelmingly among Muslims, in Australia. Pronouncements are now routinely made by political leaders of what is acceptable in a sermon, for example, and what is 'extreme', 'radical' or unacceptable. Religious leaders themselves have been identified by state actors as exemplary or beyond the pale and to be replaced. The government has involved itself in the process of selection of religious representatives, and made strong representations about the selection of leaders and their necessary attributes, such as fluency in English, attitudes favouring 'integration', beliefs in women's rights, positive disposition towards the alliance with the United States, and so on. There have also been government demands for ethnic/religious schools to teach 'Australian values'. At present there is no legal basis for such prescription and proscription, which operates rather by hectoring and harassment and the implied conditionality of the remnants of multicultural funding. All of this action can be shown to be discriminatory, in that it is directed only towards Muslims. It also represents a dangerous trend in terms of undermining the right to religious freedom, enshrined in a number of international treaties to which Australia is a signatory. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved,

Some 5 million people live in the Palestinian diaspora today, with the possibility of their return to their homeland ever bleaker due to the failure of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. As a result of the nature of their dispossession from their homeland and their politicised exile, understanding the complexities of their lived experiences requires us to go beyond conventional notions of "first'' and "second'' migrant generations. This paper argues that the experiences of diaspora Palestinians are in many ways framed not so much by what "generation'' they belong to in terms of migration, but by how many generations they have been in exile. It examines shifts in negotiations of concepts of identity, belonging and home for successive generations of diaspora Palestinians. It then explores these ideas through the case study of the community of Palestinians from Kuwait who relocated to Australia as a result of the 1990-91 Gulf conflict.

Since 11 September 2001, Muslim minorities have experienced intensive "othering'' in "Western'' countries, above all in those US-led anglophone nations which invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to prosecute their "war on terror''. This paper examines the cases of Britain and Australia, where whole communities of Muslims have been criminalised as "evil'' and a "fifth column'' enemy within by media, politicians, the security services and the criminal justice system. Although constituted by disparate ethnic groups, the targeted communities in each of these nations have experienced similar treatment in the State's anti-terrorist measures, as well as ideological responses and everyday racism, making comparable the two cases.

Since 11 September 2001, Muslim minorities have experienced intensive "othering'' in "Western'' countries, above all in those US-led anglophone nations which invaded Afghanistan and Iraq to prosecute their "war on terror''. This paper examines the cases of Britain and Australia, where whole communities of Muslims have been criminalised as "evil'' and a "fifth column'' enemy within by media, politicians, the security services and the criminal justice system. Although constituted by disparate ethnic groups, the targeted communities in each of these nations have experienced similar treatment in the State's anti-terrorist measures, as well as ideological responses and everyday racism, making comparable the two cases.