The idea of ‘recovery’ now permeates a great deal of international mental health policy. In opening this themed issue on recovery, we address three related international issues. First, what does re...

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Recovery: Past progress and future challenges

Efforts to transform the mental health service delivery system to a more consumer-driven and recovery-orientated approach has its roots in a somewhat radical anti-psychiatry and civil-rights movement dating back to the 1970s. This grass-roots effort gained momentum and credibility with Harding's landmark study published in 1988 followed by the work of Anthony et al. from Boston University in beginning to define the term 'recovery'. In 1998 the Office of the US Surgeon General issued its first report on mental health, and this critical view of the shortcomings of the existing service system set the stage for the 2003 President's New Freedom Commission and its recommendations for recovery-orientated systems transformation. The recovery movement has evolved from a more radical view in the early days, to participatory involvement in systems, to returning to alternative models of care that are more independent. Now as more peer specialists work in systems, there is an increased emphasis on non-medical alternatives and the cycle continues. Regardless, recovery, self-determination, choice, etc. are always at the centre. This paper notes the interesting cycles of recovery-orientation and how they spin around the values/tenets of the movement's early roots.

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Recovery in the USA: From politics to peer support

This monograph examines military doctrine and explains why understanding its evolution and the influences that shape it are of vital importance to military practitioners, strategists, and statesmen alike. Doctrine, defined herein as the expression of a military's institutional 'belief system', constitutes a significant yet hitherto unrecognized means by which this belief system can be understood and evaluated. This understanding and evaluation is in turn important because it is this belief system that determines the way a military fights, the relationship it will have with the state and society that sustain it, and its institutional culture. To get the belief system right means good strategy, victory, stable civil-military relations, and organizational wellbeing. Getting it wrong means sub-optimal strategy and operational outcomes or even defeat, strained civil-military relationships, and organizational dysfunction. This is why it is vital that military practitioners, strategists, and statesmen all have a well-developed understanding of this belief system and its implications. Yet currently, many do so only subconsciously, if at all. The aim of this monograph is to help make this understanding explicit.

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The Roots of Military Doctrine: Change and Continuity in Understanding the Practice of Warfare

Police find themselves operating in difficult times. High expectations and increased accountability do not sit comfortably with rigid organisational and hierarchical rank-based command structures. Competing notions about what policing ought to be are currently being played out. A contest over a ‘service’ or ‘force’ perspective mirrors the political and social unease about how to deal with law and order issues amid the complexity of contemporary life. Struggling to deal with these uncertain times, senior police managers understand the need for a transformational shift in order to keep policing relevant. They recognise that a significant part of that movement is about taking new approaches to training and education. While it is reasonable to say that police do not always comprehend the training and education environment, they do have a stated commitment to professional formation and development. That commitment has waxed and waned and poor choices have been made in the past. But policing has not be...

Educating police for uncertain times: the Australian experience and the case for a ‘normative’ approach

International Review of

As the world moves into a particularly fluid phase of global politics, interdisciplinary engagement between international law and international relations is becoming a critical task. Reformulating how we theorise the ‘global’ will be central to the development of institutions, laws, policies, and norms that govern how we manage conflict, deal with environmental challenges, smooth out the highly uneven political economy, and allow new political communities to develop beyond the nation-state. The role of international law and international relations scholarship will be central to this endeavour. Practitioners and policymakers have a particular responsibility to help develop and shape new global systems and institutions. Teachers have a responsibility to current and future generations of young scholars to equip them with the requisite intellectual tools for making choices in the policy arena that frequently straddle the various levels of international law and international relations. This article explores ho...

The Unhappy Marriage Between International Relations Theory and International Law

In this article we discuss the contemporary challenges facing the delivery of Professional Military Education (PME) in Australia. Rather than criticising the current state of PME, we believe it is more productive to explore how positive outcomes can be secured within the constraints facing decisionmakers over the next five to ten years. PME should, we argue, be regarded as an umbrella term that incorporates a much broader set of defence and security related educational processes and outcomes. Chief of the Defence Force (CDF), Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, recently announced a review into Joint Education and Training. Our intention is to discuss PME issues within the context of the historical development of Defence’s key PME provider in Australia—the Australian Defence College—and in so doing offer some points relevant to CDF’s review.

David Cox

Papers

The Unhappy Marriage Between International Relations Theory and International Law

Professional military education in Australia: has it all gone terribly right?