During the first five years of the twenty-first century the Howard Government took on a more activist role in the South Pacific. This trend was influenced by the ‘war on terror’, particularly the Bali bombings, which struck home in a manner that the 11 September attacks could not, but it also firmly reflected policy orthodoxies. This is not to say that responding to terrorism closer to home has not become a justification for intervention in the region, but it must be acknowledged that declaratory policy was not always matched by operational realities. The ‘war on terror’ opened up the political space in which increased intervention in the South Pacific could be undertaken, but events within the region itself were the central factor contributing to intervention. In particular, domestic crises in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea, and to a lesser extent Nauru, presented major challenges for Australia, and the creation and maintenance of an environment conducive to intervention was a significant foreign policy shift by the government.

The ICJ’s contribution to the law on jurisdictional immunities is elucidated by Professor Roger O’Keefe. He argues that, through its case law in this area, the ICJ has affirmed basic aspects of the international law of jurisdictional immunities, clarified a few more specific points, and variously crystallised, consolidated, and catalyzed the further development of important customary rules on controversial issues in relation to civil and criminal proceedings respectively. Through its work in this field, the Court has reasserted an orthodox, possibly conservative vision of the role of jurisdictional immunities in the international legal order.

The first part of this paper looks into the question of Lucretius’ philosophical sources and whether he draws almost exclusively from Epicurus himself or also from later Epicurean texts. I argue that such debates are inconclusive and likely will remain so, even if additional Epicurean texts are discovered, and that even if we were able to ascertain Lucretius’ philosophical sources, doing so would add little to our understanding of the DRN. The second part of the paper turns to a consideration of what Lucretius does with his philosophical sources. The arguments within the DRN are not original. Nonetheless, the way Lucretius presents these arguments establishes him as a distinctive philosopher. Lucretius deploys non-argumentative methods of persuasion such as appealing to emotions, redeploying powerful cultural tropes, and ridicule. These methods of persuasion do not undercut or displace reasoned argumentation. Instead, they complement it. Lucretius’ use of these methods is rooted in his understanding of human psychology, that we have been culturally conditioned to have empty desires, false beliefs and destructive emotions, ones that are often subconscious. Effective persuasion must take into account the biases, stereotypes and other psychological factors that hinder people from accepting Epicurus’ healing gospel.

There are many books on climate change and cities, so why another one? In this literature cities feature variously as victims (threatened by the rise of sea levels), solutions (compact living) and models (various new ‘green’ settlements), but always as adjuncts, effectively just add-ons, to the subject of climate change. The basic argument is that given climate change is happening, how are cities affected and what can be done about it?

Acknowledging Hassett's (2017: 14) wide-ranging evidence that cities have made us humans – as she states, ‘we haven't just built cities. Cities have built us’ – this book offers a completely different take: cities are the key human component in anthropogenic climate change. Our basic argument is that without cities, there would never have been anthropogenic climate change. So there – if you want to engage with this unique argument, read on. We think you should because to deal effectively with any emergency – and climate change is now an emergency – it is vital to understand the fundamental mechanism behind the crisis. And we might just be right.

Our book has been a long time in the making. The path to this text begins in 2010 when we three found ourselves together in the same academic home, the Department of Geography at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. By coincidence we were in the process of researching and writing two books that were soon to be published: Taylor's Extraordinary Cities: Millennia of Moral Syndromes, World-Systems and City/State Relations (Edward Elgar, 2013) and O’Brien and O’Keefe's Managing Adaptation to Climate Risk: Beyond Fragmented Responses (Routledge, 2014). This book has its origins in our trying to bring together some of the core ideas of these two texts, the human potentials of urban agglomerations and connectivities, and the building of resilient communities to reduce risks from disruptive events. Although the original texts are very different, they shared common concern for holistic thinking, bottom-up practice and anthropogenic climate change. These starting points were consistent with others’ research agendas in the Department of Geography so that when The Leverhulme Trust invited bids to initiate a major research programme on climate change in 2013, we threw our hat into the ring.

Introduction: unthinking a thoroughly modern discourse

Without a sustained input from a critical social science, climate change science and policy-making have been condemned to being thoroughly modern. Whereas future scenarios – posited, projected or predicted – take humanity into uncharted waters (literally for many!), mainstream thinking about how we got into this predicament and how we might get out of it have been severely constrained by an embedded modern mindscape. Hence the need for a dose of Wallerstein's (1991) ‘unthinking’:

Our attempt at loosening these constraints involves confronting conventional modern theses on the framing of human activities in time (chronology) and space (chorography) with plausible antitheses, thereby pointing towards a different understanding of the ‘anthropo’ in anthropogenic climate change. For chronology this means developing a ‘trans-modern’ approach that brings the ‘pre-modern’ into play in order to understand the possibilities of a ‘post-modern’. The result is a break from the modern progress myth of humanity moving ever forward and upwards with its concomitant faith in technology to deliver a safe future. For chorography this means thinking outside the mosaic world created by nation-states that frame modern actions, economic and cultural, as well as political. Thus we break with modern state pre-eminence and its concomitant faith in good governments delivering a safe future. We view both dimensions of conventional thinking – progress/technology and state/policy – to be severely problematic: modern sinks dragging us into an abyss.

Our critical concerns are overtly manifest in the mainstream of climate science and policy-making, as represented by the IPCC and UN Climate Change Conferences (known as COP from ‘Conference of the Parties’ to the 1992 UNFCCC; the meeting in Paris in 2015 was COP 21) respectively. Quite overtly, these two remarkable global institutions epitomise state framing in both the science and policy-making.

Introduction: Jane Jacobs beyond urban celebrity

Zipp and Storring (2016b: xvii–xviii) have made a powerful case for revisiting Jane Jacobs’ rich intellectual legacy:

The description of her as ‘greatest theorist of the city’ is probably derived from a Planetizen survey (Planetizen is a US urban planning news website) in 2009, where Jacobs was ranked first among the ‘Top 100 Urban Thinkers’ by a readers’ poll (Goldsmith and Lynne, 2010: xxiv). A similar survey from the same source in 2017 again ranked her first, this time as ‘The Most Influential Urbanist’ of all time (see www. planetizen.com/features/95189-100-most-influential-urbanists). The accompanying citation refers to two aspects of her work: the book The Death and Life of Great American Cities (Jacobs, 1961) and her battle with Robert Moses over New York planning issues in the 1950s and 1960s. This surely represents her prime legacy (Hirt, 2012a). Still in print today and always mentioned on the front cover of all her subsequent books, Death and Life catapulted Jacobs into literary stardom as an authority of things urban: the book is credited with igniting paradigmatic change in the theory and practice of city planning.

But Jacobs’ reputation rests on much more than her writing. She was a protestor and activist, defender of communities and advocate of civil disobedience. Her successful struggles to stop Moses physically destroying communities complemented her book and have become the stuff of legends, a modern David and Goliath story (Flint, 2009; Lang and Wunsch, 2009), even making its way onto the silver screen – see Altimeter Films’ Citizen Jane: Battle for the City.