Samuel White
I am the Senior Research Fellow for Peace & Security at the National University of Singapore’s Centre for International Law, after entering academia as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Adelaide Law School. I hold titles as Visiting Fellow at the Australian Defence Force Academy (2023 – 2025) and the Army Visiting Fellow at the Australian War Memorial (2024 – 2027). In 2024, I was made an Associate Fellow of the Royal Historical Society for my work on cross-cultural understandings of warfare. In 2025, I was appointed a Fellow of the National Library of Australia for my research on Australian legal history.
I have particular research interests in international and domestic military law, and their intersection with other branches of law - industrial relations and disputes, administrative law and judicial review, as well as international and domestic criminal law.
Editor of the Laws of Yesterday's Wars Series (Brill Nijhoff, 2021 - ongoing) - https://brill.com/view/title/60246
Author of Keeping the Peace of the Realm (LexisNexis, 2021) - https://store.lexisnexis.com.au/products/keeping-the-peace-of-the-realm-skukeeping_the_peace_of_the_realm
I have particular research interests in international and domestic military law, and their intersection with other branches of law - industrial relations and disputes, administrative law and judicial review, as well as international and domestic criminal law.
Editor of the Laws of Yesterday's Wars Series (Brill Nijhoff, 2021 - ongoing) - https://brill.com/view/title/60246
Author of Keeping the Peace of the Realm (LexisNexis, 2021) - https://store.lexisnexis.com.au/products/keeping-the-peace-of-the-realm-skukeeping_the_peace_of_the_realm
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Papers by Samuel White
This article addresses the manner in which executive power can enable and support ADF operations from a jurisprudential and operational perspective. With reference to earlier ADF operations such as the Bowral call out in 1978 and the 2002 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting deployment, this article argues that executive power could provide a capability and legal authority for a suite of operations that may be seen as otherwise breaching Australian law.
This has all changed. Now, rather than simply writing a message on stone at popular watering holes, foreign interference operations (IOs) can leverage the ubiquity of the Internet in order to deliver personally tailored, micro-targeted messages to individuals in their homes. The changing nature of warfare has led, formally and informally, to practitioners of the Profession of Arms to claim that grey zone operations unfairly exploit the gaps between peace and war, exploiting the vulnerabilities of Western democracy – free speech – in an unacceptable manner.
This paper looks to explore this notion, and opines that rhetoric claiming conflicts fought in ‘the grey zone’ are somehow unacceptable fails to grapple with the basic concept of armed conflict and competition – to win. In order to demonstrate this point, it is first necessary to canvass what is meant by the concept of ‘grey zone’. To do so requires, axiomatically, covering ‘traditional’ legal frameworks of peace and war and exploring how this binary distinction has shaped legal thinking since Rome. It will then look to unpack the underlying logic in identifying something as being ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ exploitations in war, demonstrating that even through the Eurocentric lens of chivalry – a high water mark in the idea of unacceptable exploitation – the exploitation of traditional legal thresholds was more than acceptable. Finding that it is unsafe to maintain a moralistic stance to security threats, and that the current strategic framework is inappropriate, it then addresses what domestic remedies are available for the Australian Government to take, under the Australian Constitution.
which they are authorised or delegated, as well as for the risks that might be posed by indiscriminate use of those systems. Accordingly, this paper rst canvasses the lexicon and meaning of terms such as arti cial intelligence and machine learning, before discussing technical aspects of the processes and tools these capacities can produce. Next, it applies the solution to three problems: assisting individuals when sentencing ADF members within the military discipline system; assisting ADF decision-makers to make consistent decisions when imposing administrative sanctions; and assisting central bodies such as the Career Management Agency with posting plots and career plans. This paper will not deal with some of the more nuanced legal issues surrounding automated decision-making.
This article will canvass the viability of the internal security prerogative, the so-called sister prerogative to the war prerogative, to authorise the use of the ADF in counter-interference operations. This is an important area to explore, noting that interference operations will often fall within the ‘domestic violence’ threshold for the ADF to be permitted to be called out under pt IIIAAA of the Defence Act 1903 (Cth). This article first looks at the nature of the internal security prerogative of ‘keeping the peace of the realm’, and how it is constrained by federalism in the Australian context. This requires a historical exploration of both Anglo-Saxon and Australian domestic military deployments. This article then explores the principle of desuetude as a rule of extinguishment, and whether it is applicable to this little-used prerogative power. It then concludes by arguing for a re-interpretation of the legal foundations for earlier ADF operations — such as the Bowral call-out in 1978 and the 2002 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (‘CHOGM’) deployment — in accordance with the prerogative, rather than under an implied nationhood power.
This article addresses the manner in which executive power can enable and support ADF operations from a jurisprudential and operational perspective. With reference to earlier ADF operations such as the Bowral call out in 1978 and the 2002 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting deployment, this article argues that executive power could provide a capability and legal authority for a suite of operations that may be seen as otherwise breaching Australian law.
This has all changed. Now, rather than simply writing a message on stone at popular watering holes, foreign interference operations (IOs) can leverage the ubiquity of the Internet in order to deliver personally tailored, micro-targeted messages to individuals in their homes. The changing nature of warfare has led, formally and informally, to practitioners of the Profession of Arms to claim that grey zone operations unfairly exploit the gaps between peace and war, exploiting the vulnerabilities of Western democracy – free speech – in an unacceptable manner.
This paper looks to explore this notion, and opines that rhetoric claiming conflicts fought in ‘the grey zone’ are somehow unacceptable fails to grapple with the basic concept of armed conflict and competition – to win. In order to demonstrate this point, it is first necessary to canvass what is meant by the concept of ‘grey zone’. To do so requires, axiomatically, covering ‘traditional’ legal frameworks of peace and war and exploring how this binary distinction has shaped legal thinking since Rome. It will then look to unpack the underlying logic in identifying something as being ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ exploitations in war, demonstrating that even through the Eurocentric lens of chivalry – a high water mark in the idea of unacceptable exploitation – the exploitation of traditional legal thresholds was more than acceptable. Finding that it is unsafe to maintain a moralistic stance to security threats, and that the current strategic framework is inappropriate, it then addresses what domestic remedies are available for the Australian Government to take, under the Australian Constitution.
which they are authorised or delegated, as well as for the risks that might be posed by indiscriminate use of those systems. Accordingly, this paper rst canvasses the lexicon and meaning of terms such as arti cial intelligence and machine learning, before discussing technical aspects of the processes and tools these capacities can produce. Next, it applies the solution to three problems: assisting individuals when sentencing ADF members within the military discipline system; assisting ADF decision-makers to make consistent decisions when imposing administrative sanctions; and assisting central bodies such as the Career Management Agency with posting plots and career plans. This paper will not deal with some of the more nuanced legal issues surrounding automated decision-making.
This article will canvass the viability of the internal security prerogative, the so-called sister prerogative to the war prerogative, to authorise the use of the ADF in counter-interference operations. This is an important area to explore, noting that interference operations will often fall within the ‘domestic violence’ threshold for the ADF to be permitted to be called out under pt IIIAAA of the Defence Act 1903 (Cth). This article first looks at the nature of the internal security prerogative of ‘keeping the peace of the realm’, and how it is constrained by federalism in the Australian context. This requires a historical exploration of both Anglo-Saxon and Australian domestic military deployments. This article then explores the principle of desuetude as a rule of extinguishment, and whether it is applicable to this little-used prerogative power. It then concludes by arguing for a re-interpretation of the legal foundations for earlier ADF operations — such as the Bowral call-out in 1978 and the 2002 Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (‘CHOGM’) deployment — in accordance with the prerogative, rather than under an implied nationhood power.