- School of Social Sciences
Menzies Building Level 4
20 Chancellors Walk
Clayton Campus
Monash University
Victoria 3800
Australia
Tom Chodor
Monash University, School of Social Sciences, Faculty Member
Donald Horne famously called Australia ‘the lucky country’. So how did we become the locked-up country and how might the future look different? Australia has changed enormously since Horne’s 1960s, but its response to the COVID-19... more
Donald Horne famously called Australia ‘the lucky country’. So how did we become the locked-up country and how might the future look different? Australia has changed enormously since Horne’s 1960s, but its response to the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrates the enduring truth of his thesis that our ‘luck’ was undeserved and wouldn’t last. By closing its borders and imposing a nationally coordinated lockdown, Australia unexpectedly eliminated COVID-19 in 2020, achieving one of the world’s lowest excess mortality rates. But as governments proceeded to bungle key planks of the pandemic response, by mid-2021, Australia was ‘locked up’ – closed off to the world and fragmented along state and territory borders, with its major cities enduring repeated and extended lockdowns. It soon became clear that Australia’s regulatory state had let us down. But these failures were not inevitable, and we can manage future crises more successfully. In The Locked-up Country, political experts Tom Chodor and Shahar Hameiri identify the source of Australia’s recent challenges and suggest a better way forward
Research Interests:
Unraveling the Crime-Development Nexus interrogates the claim that crime represents a significant threat to economic development. Combining historical analysis with a unique empirical perspective based on interviews with high-level... more
Unraveling the Crime-Development Nexus interrogates the claim that crime represents a significant threat to economic development. Combining historical analysis with a unique empirical perspective based on interviews with high-level international crime policy insiders, it accounts for how and why the ‘crime-development nexus’ has been invoked by international actors, including the United Nations, to advance and secure variations of a global capitalist development agenda since the 19th Century.
Drawing on perspectives anchored in critical criminology, International Relations, and development studies, Unraveling the Crime Development Nexus reveals that the international crime policy agenda today remains overwhelmingly responsive to those who benefit from the further expansion of neoliberal globalisation, while simultaneously marginalising subordinate actors throughout the ‘developing’ world.
The book concludes by considering how international organisations, civil society actors, and major donors might support a more equitable and sustainable model of global crime governance that addresses the structural causes of crime and uneven development at a global level.
Drawing on perspectives anchored in critical criminology, International Relations, and development studies, Unraveling the Crime Development Nexus reveals that the international crime policy agenda today remains overwhelmingly responsive to those who benefit from the further expansion of neoliberal globalisation, while simultaneously marginalising subordinate actors throughout the ‘developing’ world.
The book concludes by considering how international organisations, civil society actors, and major donors might support a more equitable and sustainable model of global crime governance that addresses the structural causes of crime and uneven development at a global level.
Research Interests:
Chodor examines the struggles against neoliberal hegemony in Latin America, under the 'Pink Tide' of leftist governments. Utilizing a critical International Political Economy framework derived from the work of Antonio Gramsci, he looks at... more
Chodor examines the struggles against neoliberal hegemony in Latin America, under the 'Pink Tide' of leftist governments. Utilizing a critical International Political Economy framework derived from the work of Antonio Gramsci, he looks at its two most prominent members – Venezuela under Hugo Chávez and Brazil under Lula and Dilma Rousseff. The author argues that Venezuela's Bolivarian Revolution represents a counter-hegemonic project that seeks to construct a radical alternative to neoliberalism, while the Brazilian project is better understood as a passive revolution aiming to re-secure consent for neoliberal hegemony by making material and ideological concession to the Brazilian masses. Despite their differences, the two projects cooperate at the regional level, driving the process of regional integration that aims to make Latin America more politically, economically and ideologically autonomous in the neoliberal world order. The book suggests this process opens up opportunities for a fairer, more prosperous and more democratic Latin America in the 21st century, challenging American hegemony and its neoliberal project in doing so.