Message from Richard Tanter,
Director, Nautilus Institute RMIT,
Project Coordinator, Austral Peace and Security Network
15 December 2010
Dear APSNet reader
After six years of publication, I have to tell you that this week we will be publishing the final APSNet bulletin and the final APSNet Policy Forum essays and APSNet Special reports.
Unfortunately, RMIT University will longer able to fund Nautilus’ work at RMIT. Peter Hayes and Arabella Imhoff will continue with Nautilus work in Global Studies at RMIT supported by US funding. Nautilus Institute Australia will be reborn under new auspices shortly, which we will tell you about in due course. Our Nautilus RMIT colleague Jonathan O’Donnell will remain with RMIT University in another capacity.
On March 1st, 2011, Nautilus will launch a new information service incorporating work from all three of the Nautilus Institute nodes in Melbourne, Seoul and San Francisco. The new service will borrow an acronym from our longtime lead publication, Northeast Asia Peace and Security Network : NAPSNet. Only this time NAPSNet will signify the NAutilusPeace and Security Network. In addition to our thematically focused new Policy Forum and Special Reports, we will issue a new periodic report, most likely a weekly, which will reflect the priority areas of Nautilus Institute’s work involving its three nodes in San Francisco, Seoul, and Melbourne.
This new NAPSNet report will cover critical developments on nuclear deterrence, proliferation, and disarmament, energy security, climate change adaptation, and links between these themes and the three regions in which our nodes are found—North America, East Asia, and Austral-Asia. We will be in touch in due course to ask if you would like to receive this publication.
APSNet began publication in September 2005. We aimed to broaden the concept of security in the Australian community and to widen the range of voices beyond the conventional academic and security practitioner communities to include others peace and security competence. Through its email and web publication the regular APSNet information bulletin, edited first by Jane Mullett and then by Arabella Imhoff and Mihiri Weerasinghe, reaches an extraordinarily large and diverse range of readers.
Over the years, we refined and honed the concept to produce a unique information service in this country of providing a readership centred on Australia – but in fact going to over 20 countries – with coverage of the essential peace and security news, and background links to make more sense of the news.
APSNet published Policy Forum essays and Special Reports from a who’s who list of writers in Australia, Indonesia, the Pacific Islands, the United States and Japan. We are immensely grateful to those writers for the time and effort they put into writing under tight timelines, and with a goal of writing from a position of deep knowledge for an audience looking for serious engagement with issues of policy salience, whether in the academe or not.
I look back on the work of the Nautilus RMIT office with great pride in our work on peace and security issues, climate change and security, nuclear deterrence, nuclear weapons free zones, Australian involvement in war and peace-keeping, and nuclear energy development in Southeast Asia.
The Australian Forces Abroad, Australian Defence Facilities and Indonesian Nuclear Power Briefing Books will remain and will be maintained on the Nautilus website. They have been highly successful in providing public documentation of key issues in the political lives of people in Australia and the region. They are now widely used, as we intended, by journalists, policy makers, parliamentarians, activists and researchers.
I particularly want to thank Nic Maclellan for his lead on collaboration on four of the Australian Forces Abroad Briefing Books. His work on the Australia in Solomon Islands Briefing Book has set the global standard for public documentation for such whole-of-government interventions.
I should also say that I am leaving RMIT University, and with great reluctance, Nautilus Institute. I will continue to collaborate with Nautilus on specific projects, but after six years it was time to move. I wish the new incarnation of Nautilus Australia well, and look forward to the new NAPSNet with great anticipation.
Please stay in touch with Arabella Imhoff (arabella.imhoff@rmit.edu.au), Peter Hayes (peter.hayes@rmit.edu.au), Jonathan O’Donnell (jonathan.odonnell@rmit.edu.au) and myself (rtanter@nautilus.org).
Again, we thank you for your support over the past six years.
Richard Tanter