%0 Book %A Jones, David Martin %T An Edifice of Denial : Australia's regional delusions %X This article examines the question of why a generation of Australian specialists in Southeast Asian security and political affairs failed to take seriously evolving threats to Australia's security, in the form of radicalized Islam, that were developing across the region, most notably in Indonesia. These threats culminated in the Bali bombing of October 2002, in which many Australians perished. This analysis maintains that, despite the relative ease with which it was possible to trace contemporary political currents in Indonesia, political and security analysts in Australia overlooked the growth of islamist extremism because of the concurrence of two political phenomena. The first was the official promotion of a regional destiny that called on Australia toenmesh itself in Southeast Asia. The second was the development of a fashionable post-structural academic orthodoxy which argued that threats were merely ideological constructs designed to serve a political agenda. These two factors combined to from an edifice of denial that even today continues to inhibit dispassionate assessment of Southeast Asia, with debilitating consequences for accurate threat perception