DrEileen Hanrahan

I am a discursive analytical scholar. My research interest first emerged from a general fascination with an exploration of the language of legitimation. This was specifically in the contexts of official national historical narratives and how they are harnessed to legitimise political agendas ‘in the now’. Drawing on the theories of Indigenous Politics and Settler Colonial Studies, my original scholarship mapped and analysed contesting narratives which emerged in the early 2000s concerning the failed decolonisation process of the NSGT of West Papua forty years earlier. My work frames Indigenous West Papuans political experience as one of ‘sovereignty within sovereignty’ (Simpson 2014). Thus, in Polis terms, my qualitative approach goes beyond western notions forms of sovereignty and nationhood by taking up central notions of Indigenous Politics of same (Bruyneel 2014).

More recently, my International Law history scholarship has turned to the phenomenon of the 'politics of international law' and its role in the failed decolonisation trajectory outlined above. It addresses a turn to History in the discipline of International Relations. 

I have published a book with Springer in the Palgrave Pivot Series and co published a law article with Dr Herlambang P. Wiratrawan (consitutional lawyer) in the Australian Journal of Asian Law.