THE AUSTRALIAN PEACE HONOUR ROLL

Family Name:

Camilleri

Given Names:

Joseph Anthony

Gender:

Male

Date of birth:

21 November1944

Death-Date:

NA

Marital Status:

Married

Age Range:

25 years to present

Location:

VIC, Melbourne

Occupation:

Academic, author, consultant

Primary Motivation:

Peacemaker, Commitment to a just and ecologically sustainable peace

Military Event:

Suez Crisis (1956) to present

Further Information:

Joseph Camilleri was born of a Maltese father and Greek mother in Alexandria, Egypt on 21 November 1944. The family migrated to Melbourne when Joseph was 12 years old. Heattended Catholic schools in Egypt, and in Melbourne St. Fidelis primary school in Pascoe Vale South, and then St. Bernard’s College in Essendon. He went on to graduate with a

Bachelor of Arts (Hons) degree at the University of Melbourne, and later obtained a Mastersdegree at Monash University. In 1969, he was awarded a Noel Buxton Fellowship at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he pursued further study in International Relations. He obtained his PhD in 1972.

From the outset Joseph was intent on pursuing a career in teaching and research in the fieldof International Relations. He first tutored in the Department of Politics at Monash University in 1967-69, and again in 1972. The following year he was appointed to a lectureship at LaTrobe University, where he introduced the study of International Relations. By the 1980s, he

had helped to establish La Trobe as an important centre for interdisciplinary teaching andresearch in International Relations. After several promotions, he was awarded a personalchair in International Relations in 1994, a position he held until his retirement at the end of 2012.

His teaching career at La Trobe spanned 40 years, during which he introduced some 35 different undergraduate and postgraduate subjects, ranging across International Relations theory, the international legal order, conflict analysis, the theory and practice of dialogue, peace and security studies, nuclear weapons and nuclear power, international development,

and the foreign policies of the United States, China, Russia, France, Japan and Australia. He has supervised over 40 doctoral students and mentored many others. In 2005, he founded the La Trobe Centre for Dialogue which soon gained a national and international reputation.

Joseph has written some thirty books, edited several others, and authored numerous book chapters and journal articles. Over the past two decades he has convened some twenty international dialogues and conferences and provided advice to a range of government departments and community organisations. He has delivered several keynote addresses, and

for some twenty years chaired the editorial board of the scholarly Journal Global Change, Peace and Security. He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australiain 2002.

From an early age, Joseph developed what became an abiding interest in issues of peace and war, clearly reflected in his teaching and research, his writings, and importantly in many areas of public advocacy and civic engagement. From an early age he assumed leadership roles in a number of community, cultural and political organisations. In the 1960s he was actively involved in the Catholic Young Men’s Society, and became its president in 1967. In this role he helped develop a wide-ranging educational program for the spiritual and social formation of young adults. In what was then

regarded as a highly controversial initiative, he created opportunities in meetings and public gatherings for the airing of opposition to the Vietnam war.

While pursuing his PhD studies at the London School of Economics he became involved in the Pax Christi movement, an international peace organization established after World War II to foster reconciliation between France and Germany. In 1970 he became Pax Christi Secretary in England and assumed a coordinating role for the organisation of the 1970 Pax

Christi International Congress held in London. During this time he worked closely with Pax Christi and London University Chaplain Bruce

Kent, who would become a household name in England and a widely admired leader of the international peace movement. For Joseph this was the beginning of a remarkable lifelong friendship and collaboration. In 1980 Bruce Kent became General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Under his leadership CND experienced a phenomenal

revival. He was greatly assisted in this by the UK government’s announcements of a £5billionprogram to replace Polaris with Trident and plans to host Cruise missiles at Greenham. By the end of the year Bruce was addressing 80,000 supporters in Trafalgar Square, and the next

year 250,000 gathered in Hyde Park. Joseph would remain in close contact with Bruce rightthrough to his death in 2022.

During his stay in England, Joseph was appointed secretary of the Peace Committee of the Catholic Justice and Peace Commission in England. He established the Campaign against Arms Sales to South Africa and was the founding convener of the British Campaign for Justice in Rhodesia. Together with Dennis Brutus he visited a number of African countries and met with several foreign ministers as part of a worldwide campaign for an embargo on arms sales to South Africa and a boycott of South African participation in international sport.

He was actively involved in international efforts to bring the Vietnam War to an end and took part in several initiatives to promote reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. On his return to Australia in 1972, Joseph lost no time applying the experience, contacts and skills he had gained in the UK, Europe and the US to the Australian context. After a series of lectures on peace and development, he together with his wife Rita and a group of friends established Pax Christi in Australia, which from its inception functioned as an ecumenical peace movement. He served as its founding president for over twenty years. In 2024 Pax Christi Australia celebrated its 50th anniversary. More or less at the same time as Pax Christi’s establishment, Joseph helped establish Aboriginal Action (later renamed Action for Aboriginal Rights), a white support group committed to justice and self-determination for indigenous Australians. He served as founding convener of Aboriginal Action from 1973 to 1983.

In the mid-1970s he took an increasingly public stance in support of nuclear disarmament and opposition to the expansion of nuclear power. This was one of the key considerations that prompted him to provide evidence as an expert witness to the Ranger Uranium Environmental Inquiry, specifically on the issue of nuclear weapons proliferation. Most of the analysis and recommendations he presented featured prominently in the Inquiry’s report. In the wake of that report, he was strongly urged to assume a leadership role of the emerginganti-nuclear movement. He became the founding convener of the Movement Against Uranium Mining.

As international tensions rose and the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union intensified in the late 1970s, he became an increasingly vocal advocate of nuclear disarmament. In Australia he helped establish and was founding convener of People for Nuclear Disarmament (PND), the umbrella organization which spearheaded the call for an end to the Cold War and organised the large Melbourne Palm Sunday rallies in the early to mid-1980s, attended by more than 100,000 people four years in a row. At its height PND in Victoria had 110 local groups and some 500 affiliated organisations, including unions, religious groups and professional associations.

Having joined the Australian Labor Party in 1979, and having served on several of its policycommittees, notably the foreign affairs committee, he resigned in 1986 in the light of thefailure of the Labor government to give effect to several of the Party’s foreign, social andeconomic policies. In 1987 he was instrumental in the formation of the Rainbow Alliance, a

political/cultural movement that developed over a period of a few years an extensive educational program, networked with many groups in Australia and overseas, and participated in numerous campaigns on such issues as climate change, Native Title, the Republic, and issues of peace and war. He served as its founding convener from 1987 to 1996.

In the decade that followed Joseph devoted much energy to the establishment of the Centre for Dialogue at La Trobe University, of which he served as founding director between 2006 and 2012. At his invitation Elizabeth Proust agreed to chair the Board of the Centre in its

first three years (2007-2009), and the former Victorian Premier, the Hon Steve Bracks, in the following three years (2010-2012). Joseph played a leadership role in the development of

several dialogues, including:

• The Australia-Indonesia Dialogue (2010-2014)
• The Australia-China High Level Talks (2012-2013)
• the Athens Dialogue on a Middle East Zone free of weapons of Mass Destruction and
• their Means of Delivery (2012)
• Dialogues on International Conflict, Religion and Culture: Southeast Asia and

Australia (2007-2009)

Over the last 30 years Joseph has convened or played leadership roles in over twenty

national and international conferences, many of them focusing on issues of peace, security,

dialogue and nonviolence. All of them led to publications, including books, articles and

media engagements. Five are especially noteworthy:

• Night Falls in the Evening Lands: The Assange Epic (March 2024)
• Earth At Peace (April 2019)
• Europe and Asia between Islam and the United States (December 2007)
• Religion and Culture in Asia-Pacific: Violence or Healing? (October 2000)
• The United Nations between Sovereignty and Global Governance (July 1995) to mark the 50 th anniversary of the United Nations.

Over the last five years, Joseph has driven the establishment of two important initiatives:

• Conversation at the Crossroads – an initiative that aims to create congenial

physical and virtual spaces where people can come together across the generational and cultural divides and make an informed contribution to the public conversation on the pressing issues of our time (website: http://www.crossroadsconversation.com.au).

• Saving Humanity and Planet Earth (SHAPE) – an international project (led by Prof Richard Falk, Dr Chandra Muzaffar and Prof Joseph Camilleri) committed toexposing the perils of confrontation in the nuclear age and exploring pathways to a
• safer, just and sustainable future (website http://www.theshapeproject.com).

Joseph sits on numerous boards of journals and organisations, each contributing in someway to a better informed public. He is a regular contributor to Pearls and Irritations, anonline platform for the exchange of ideas from a progressive, liberal perspective, with an emphasis on peace and justice. He is the recipient of several awards, including the St Michael’s Award for distinguished service to the community, the Victorian Premier’s Award for his contribution to Community Harmony, the Honorary Award, Soka University, Japan, and the Order of Australia Medal for service to the community and to International Relations as scholar, educator and advocate.

Joseph Camilleri’s lifelong exploration of peace is best encapsulated in these words:

We can’t be really interested in peace unless we’re interested in addressing both physical violence and structural or social violence. And then there’s a third component,which has become more and more important in the 20th century and now in our century. And that is ecological violence, the destruction we are inflicting on the planet. For peace to prevail, it has to be both just and ecologically sustainable.

In 2019, Joseph offered two commentaries on the theme of a Just Peace. The first was titled“Just Peace: The only antidote to the age of violence”. He argued that: The shift to a just peace agenda offers a potent antidote to the dynamic of exclusion. Itallows for an inclusive ethic which transcends the five maladies of our time: parochialism, populism, militarism, extremism and anthropocentrism. It places the focusas much on the citizen as on the policy maker. It empowers citizens and communities to make ethically informed judgements and engage directly with the defining issues of our

time.

The second was titled “Just Peace: A timely roadmap for Australia or impossible dream?” For him, Just peace points to the construction of an ethically based Australian narrative thatreinterprets our past and reimagines our future. Australia’s past, he suggests, has two important elements: the Anzac legend, and the longstanding addiction to imperial power. He questions the idea that Australia came of ageas a nation with the ANZAC expedition: Sadly, this memory of Gallipoli is as erroneous as it is dangerous for it evokes a sense ofAustralia’s identity as steeped in war and conflict, seemingly oblivious to the other currents that have made contemporary Australia what it is.

In relation to the alliance, he warns that in the hope of securing the protection of ‘the greatand powerful friend’, the United States, Australians have to pay a high premium which he believes greatly outweighs any benefits.

In relation to the contemporary issue of Taiwan (2021) he points out:

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that what drives Australia’s megaphone antipathy to the Chinese government is not so much its commitment to so-called liberal values, as it is to America’s continued predominance in the Asia-Pacific region. And this helps explain why Australian criticism of China’s Taiwan policies has become increasingly vitriolic.

As to the AUKUS security pact he describes it as a story of recklessness and delusion. If Australia is to work towards a just peace in its region and beyond, much will need to change in its foreign and defence policies.

With so much rhetoric, money and institutional energy directed to the tightening of the US alliance, it is little wonder that Australian diplomacy has lost whatever freedom ofaction it once had. The timidity of Australia’s response to war crimes and likely genocide in Gaza is the most glaring instance of it.

Joseph has made a significant contribution to the cause of peace, dialogue and reconciliation. He has subjected the recourse to violence at home and internationally to withering scrutiny, and has consistently advanced carefully researched alternatives to the status quo. To all this he continues to devote time, energy and unwavering enthusiasm.

There is much more that can be said of his contribution, but what is included here offers ample support for his inclusion on the Peace Honour Roll.

Confirmatory Sources:

Professor Emeritus Joseph A Camilleri, https://www.josephcamilleri.org/ accessed 18

September 2024

John Menadue, Public Policy Journal-Pearls and Irritations, Writer Joseph Camilleri,

https://johnmenadue.com/author/joseph-camilleri/ accessed 23 September 2024.

La Trobe University, Emeritus Professor Joseph Camilleri Publications,

https://scholars.latrobe.edu.au/jacamilleri/publications accessed 25 September 2024.

Soka Gakkai International, A Call for a Flourishing of Conversations: Interview with Professor Joseph A Camilleri, 2022. [Available online: https://sgi-peace.org/resources/a-call-for-a-flourishing-of-conversations-interview-with-professor-joseph-a-camilleri accessed 23September 2024.

Joseph A. Camilleri, The Australia-New Zealand-U.S. Alliance: Regional Security in the

Nuclear Age, Boulder, Co.: Westview Press, 1987.

Joseph A. Camilleri et al., Athens Dialogue on A Middle East zone free of nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction as well as their means of delivery (WMDFZ), The European Public Law Organization, Athens and the Centre for Dialogue, La Trobe University,Melbourne, 2013.

Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, The End of Sovereignty? The Politics of a Shrinking and Fragmenting World, Aldershot, UK: Edward Elgar, 1992.

Joseph A. Camilleri and Jim Falk, Worlds in Transition: Evolving Governance across a Stressed Planet, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2009.

Joseph A Camilleri, Between War and Peace: Australia’s Past and Future, Tasmanian Peace Trust Annual Lecture, 2014 [available online:] https://josephcamilleri.org/content/between- war-and-peace-australia%E2%80%99s-past-and-future accessed 25 September 2024.