Please note: This is an online event.

Please join us for another session of the Readings / Australian Red Cross book club on the laws and impact of war.

In this session we are joined by former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans AC QC, to discuss his latest book, Good International Citizenship: The Case for Decency.

Good International Citizenship poses the question: why should Australia or any other country care about poverty, human rights atrocities, health epidemics, environmental catastrophes, weapons proliferation and other faraway problems, regardless of any direct impact on our own safety and prosperity? Gareth Evans’s answer is that to be, and be seen to be, a good international citizen—a state that cares about other people’s suffering, and does everything reasonably possible to alleviate it—is not only a moral imperative but a matter of national interest. In Good International Citizenship, Gareth Evans outlines four benchmarks for assessing a country’s record as a good international citizen: its foreign aid generosity; its response to human rights violations; its reaction to conflict, mass atrocities and refugee flows; and its contribution to addressing the global existential threats posed by climate change, pandemics and nuclear war.

Gareth Evans was a Cabinet minister in the Australian Labor Government, including as foreign minister from 1988 to 1996. Since leaving politics he has served as the president of the International Crisis Group and chancellor of the Australian National University. He co-chaired the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty (2001), which initiated the ‘responsibility to protect’ concept, and the Australia–Japan International Commission on Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament (2009). He has received a number of national and international awards, including the 2010 Roosevelt Institute Freedom from Fear prize for his work on mass atrocity crimes, conflict prevention and resolution, and arms control and disarmament, and he has written or edited thirteen books.

The ‘laws and impact of war’ book club is a partnership between Readings and the Victorian International Humanitarian Law Advisory Committee of the Australian Red Cross.

International humanitarian law (IHL), also known as the laws of war, is the body of law that applies during war to protect those who are not, or who are no longer participating in hostilities, and that seeks to limit the means and methods of warfare. Find out more by visiting the website of Australian Red Cross.

This event is free to attend but bookings are essential.

Please book here.

How to ‘attend’ a virtual event at Readings

This event commences online at 7pm using the video conferencing platform Zoom.

To book for this event, you must provide your email address.

To ensure the Zoom event stays private, participants will be emailed a unique zoom link and a password 30 minutes before the event begins on the day of the event. Please check your email.

All bookings for online events will be closed one hour before the event begins.

You do not need to have a Zoom account to join a meeting, but mobile users will need to download the Zoom app for their device. Desktop and laptop users can either download the Zoom application or access the event via their web browser.