Peace Studies

What does justice mean when the subject seeking justice—and seeking a Declaration of Peace—is a River? It argues that justice cannot begin with the River: as an object awaiting allocation, injury or representation by others. Under First Law, Martuwarra is living Country: an ancestral being, source of Law and participant in relationships among Peoples, groundwater, tributaries, floodplains, ecological communities and generations. The Fitzroy River Declaration is therefore reframed as both a declaration of relational justice and a Declaration of Peace. Peace does not mean the temporary absence of conflict over development. It means maintaining right relations so that the River can live, flow, renew life and carry Law into the future. We develop Cultural Flow Integrity to identify the hydrological, ecological, cultural and ancestral relationships necessary for that peace. Against the 2026 Fitzroy-Derby Water Resources Management Plan and project-specific pressures, this manuscript distinguishes First Law authority from the narrower remedies available under Western Australian water and heritage law, Commonwealth heritage and environmental law, native title processes, merits review and judicial review. It advances six propositions for a River seeking justice: recognise the River as the subject of justice; treat the Fitzroy River Declaration as a governance mandate for peace; determine what must remain before asking what may be taken; require proponents and governments to demonstrate a commitment to the principle of Do No Harm; assess the whole connected River rather than administratively fragmented parts; and create culturally legitimate institutions through which the River can speak. Justice is prospective: Martuwarra should not have to be damaged before the legal system listens.

Historically, Japanese Prime Ministers’ (PMs’) war apologies have been intensely scrutinised both internationally and domestically. This study first identifies how Japanese PMs’ public apologies on imperial Japan’s wartime wrongdoings have been analysed and evaluated by reviewing some key research. Secondly, it investigates the former PM Mr. Ishiba’s statement at Japan’s National Memorial Ceremony for the War Dead in 2025, which marked the 80th anniversary of the end of WWII, and his subsequent public statement titled “戦後80年に寄せて Sengo hachijuu nen ni yosete” (On the 80th Anniversary of the End of the War). Drawing on Speech act Theory, the notions of apology vs apologia, balancing obligations, and ‘comprehensive’ and ‘successful’ apology based on the Political Apologies Across Cultures project, the study problematises deductive and rule-based approaches to evaluate the apology statements offered by the leaders of nation states. It argues that political apologies cannot simply be viewed as a set of carefully selected linguistic components that tick all boxes according to emerging rules and expectations. Rather, they are a site of struggle where different audiences articulate, negotiate and evaluated historical obligations, reflecting their own interests in a given context.

This paper asks whether the potential for peaceful integration of asylum seekers (and ultimately refugees) to make a legitimate claim to a new home in the UK exists. Based on extensive interviews with both asylum seekers and community voices as well as vox pops with local citizens, we find the answer to this question to be ambiguous. The ambiguity resides in the meaning of ‘home’ as both a deeply personal and private residence and a civil-political one. We argue two things: first, that asylum seekers’ ambiguous experience of home is best captured by distinguishing between four phases: (i) the loss of home: reasons for having to escape; (ii) forced exit: the journey as a struggle for survival in search of a new home; (iii) denial of home upon arrival in the UK; and (iv) a taste of home: community engagement and communicative peacebuilding. Second, we argue that it is civil resistance at local level to state domopolitics that bears the potential for peaceful integration and reveals the fundamental link between home and peaceful integration for asylum seekers.