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Michael commenced a PhD in the Department in 2007 and will be completing early in 2010. The issue that motivates his thesis is the interrelationship between global processes, the state and the continuing evolution of state-society relations; that is, how the state may be constrained or enabled by different aspects of sovereignty and political legitimacy in both the international and domestic spheres. His thesis will argue that the relationship between the international and domestic spheres vis-à-vis the state should be represented as a mutually constitutive dynamic - that a state's interrelationship with global processes is constructed and reconstructed by the shape of its state-society relations which are themselves forged and reforged by the state's interrelationship with global processes. Michael's thesis argues that (re)conceptions of and contestations over national identity are a lens through which to examine the mutually constitutive dynamic between society, the state and global processes. He further contends that sovereignty bargains and legitimacy/legitimation are appropriate sites to analyse such refashionings of national identity.

In order to give shape to the contestations which characterise mechanisms of governance, Michael argues that an examination of the role of discourse is required. In each of his case studies - Malaysia and Indonesia - discursive representations of national identity have rendered complex relationships between the national and the global understandable. The primary discourse that informs his research project involves the (re)defininition of the boundaries of the imagined communities called Malaysia and Indonesia.

Michael has taught high school in Southeast Asia and has tutored at the undergraduate level at ANU. When he's not working on his thesis Michael attempts to enjoy life in general.

Email: michael.oshannassy@anu.edu.au