Alumni profiles & achievements

In 2006, Mike was appointed as a Visiting Scholar with CPACS to work on turning his 30, 000 word Master of Letters treatise “Debility, Dependency and Dread: The Development, Deployment and Defense of American Torture, 1945-2005”, into a book. An expanded text and selection of documents based on his treatise was published in February 2007 by Melbourne University Press, in conjunction with Pluto Press (London and Ann Arbour, Michigan), titled American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond. He is also author of the forthcoming title, Collateral Carnage: The Human Cost of the War in Iraq, with Dr Richard Hil and Dr Paul Wilson. Mike spent much of 2007 promoting the book in Australia, Europe and America, with the assistance of Amnesty International, and continues to be a Visiting Scholar at CPACS.

Luke completed two postgraduate units of study with CPACS (PACS6902 Reconciliation and Conflict Transformation and PACS 6909 Cultures of Violence) as part of his Honours year with the Department of History. After completing his BA (Hons) degree, Luke was appointed National Coordinator for Jubilee Australia, a non-government organisation working to support Third World debt relief. Luke’s article “Turning Interahamwe: Individual and Community Choices in the Rwandan Genocide” based on his Honours thesis (co-supervised between CPACS and the Department of History) was published in the Journal of Genocide Research. In 2007 Luke took up a Rotary scholarship for postgraduate study in Peace and Conflict Studies with the University of California, Berkeley.

After completing her MA (PACS) degree, journalist Dilnaz Boga returned to India to work for the Times of India publication, the Mumbai Mirror. But she also continued work on her passion, building on her MA dissertation research about the children of Kashmir who are suffering from the ongoing conflict in the region. With co-director and fellow journalist, Aliefa Vahanvaty, Dilnaz made the documentary film Invisible Kashmir: The Other Side of Jannat. The film has been shown at numerous colleges, film clubs and film festivals in India and abroad, and has received support and praise from both Muslim and Hindu Kashmiris for its depiction of the alienation felt by many young people in Kashmir.

After completing his MA (PACS) degree, Kevin spent a year as a Research Officer in Fiji’s Ministry of National Reconciliation and Unity under AUSAID’s Australian Youth Ambassador for Development Program before returning to Australia to work on reconciliation with the Office of Indigenous Policy Coordination in the Federal Government of Canberra. He then took an assignment serving on UNHCR’s emergency humanitarian mission in earthquake affected Kashmir, Pakistan, and completed a Graduate Diploma in International Law from the University of Sydney. Kevin published a book chapter on Fiji’s justice and reconciliation process (East-West Center, Hawai’I & Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007).