Tony Coady. Credit:Simon Schluter Youthful idealism Hunger for adventure, risk and a sense of solidarity are common to those who signed up for the Great War and contemporary jihadi recruits from the suburbs, says Professor Coady, an expert in political violence and applied ethics at the University of Melbourne. He points to the typical recollection of one World War I soldier, on display at Melbourne Museum's Centenary exhibition, who signed up because "it was a chance to get out of Perth". A fervent belief in the "romance of war" is another shared hallmark, Coady says. "Euphoria about the liberating nature of war … the idea we were in a stultifying era and now would be cleansed by the wonders of war" is how Coady characterises it, quoting World War I poet Rupert Brooke's poem Peace, which describes soldiers:

Professor Marilyn Lake. … as swimmers into cleanness leaping,

Glad from a world grown cold and old and weary. A similar romantic yearning is evident among the small number of young Muslims who go off to the Middle East to fight for – or against – IS, Coady argues. But he cautions there are significant limits to drawing analogies between each era's recruits. One is the disparity in the hundreds of thousands of Australians who served overseas in World War I , compared to the mere dozens of IS recruits now. "Most of the people with similar social and religious views to [the local jihadists] are not interested in going over there," Coady says. Monash University's Professor Greg Barton broadly agrees. As well as "youthful idealism", recruits to the two wars share "a positive sense of self sacrifice, supporting [their] mates, and wanting to be seen to be courageous fighting for something bigger than oneself," he says. However, the recruits 100 years ago were joining a regular military as regular combatants, "not an irregular militia that was fighting against their own state" – and this marks a stark difference in moral equivalence, he says.

Those signing up to World War I believed they were responding to aggression, battles would be fought in an ethical and proper way, and it was a just war. They didn't have to wrestle as individuals with the moral dilemma of violence because that was the responsibility of the state – and the state justified the violence, Barton argues. Those signing up to a jihadi militia in Syria and Iraq, however, are moving against the country of their birth, or the country they grew up in, and engaging in something that many family members or friends regard as "deeply, morally wrong but also foolish". "They've come to a point of radicalisation where they regard mainstream society as corrupt and deserving of punishment," Barton says. "They've crossed over and made a foreign allegiance – in technical terms, its a conscious decision to treason." As a result they can't outsource their moral responsibility to the state, he says, but must take individual responsibility for the violence they commit. They also bear moral responsibility for atrocities and war crimes perpetrated in their name. Although war crimes were committed by the allies in World War I, Barton says, the slow pace of communications meant that it could take years for news to travel. Now, we live in an age of easy communication via mobiles and social media. "Today, there's no reasonable excuse for saying they didn't know IS or al-Nusra Front were involved in atrocities. Instead, they are forced to engage with it, to wrestle with the issue of constant reports of violence – falling back on asserting 'I don't trust mainstream media' or that 'the violence is justified'. It's a very different context." Justifications for war – the ethics of political violence – is one of Coady's main areas of research. He argues World War I was not unquestionably a "just" war – a point he says, which is rarely raised, overwhelmed instead by memorialisation of the tragedy, waste and horror of the slaughter.

"There was a real question about whether we should have been fighting at all. Germany was undoubtedly an aggressor, but it doesn't follow that every nation should get involved in warfare to deal with it. I think there's a very good case to say that the war was unjust on both sides, and that we shouldn't have been fighting." Marilyn Lake, historian and professorial research fellow at the Melbourne University, agrees the broader politics of World War I is often reduced to a binary of good allies and bad enemies in a simple nation-building narrative, when the reality of the past is more complex. When the Anzacs went to Gallipoli, they were part of a British imperial force invading the Ottoman Empire, because it was an ally of the German Empire. Lake points out: "It was a war between empires." To occupy Constantinople (now Istanbul) would, among other things, help Britain's ally Russia "which in 1914-15 was a Tsarist autocracy – and hardly a beacon of freedom and democracy, which is what children today are taught we went to fight for. "Binary oppositions are essential to politics, she says, but they are not useful to understanding history." So World War I might not be so axiomatically a case of an uncomplicated victory for the good guys. What about the fight against IS though – surely a self evidently "just war" given the atrocities its soldiers have perpetrated? Coady calls its campaign "a particularly brutal and immoral one".

Nevertheless, he cites the West's use of torture in the War on Terror and its "irresponsible bombing and killing in parts of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, including the number of civilian casualties that has arisen from Obama's drone campaign, as a blot on our record. "It's something that has contributed enormously to the sense of grievance and desire to stand against it that some young Muslims in various places feel." Sometimes those grievances are exaggerated and misconceived, he says. "But there's a sort of kernel of reality in the fact that our invasion of Iraq is not only viewed by so many in the Middle East as an immoral undertaking, but, given the spurious justifications about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction and supposed role in terrorism, I think they're probably right." To gain such insight into Australians who get involved with IS would mean having to face up to the reality of the West's actual and perceived injustices in the war on terror, Coady argues. Developing some empathy however, Barton suggests, is urgent, on expedient and ethical grounds. "We need to understand the power and attraction of groups like IS and we need to, as far as we possibly can, place ourselves into a situation where we can empathise with those who are being radicalised and see things from their point of view – not to justify it, but to understand it so we can find a way to defeat it," Barton says.

Those going to fight in Iraq and Syria overwhelmingly believe that what they are doing is good; that conviction is naive, reckless and problematic on many levels, he says, but it is utterly essential to understanding the difference between criminal violence, which has largely selfish motivations, and terrorist violence, which is motivated by altruism. "If we don't understand the difference between the motivation for terrorist violence and other kinds of criminal violence, we won't understand how to try and defeat it with a counter narrative of both our messaging but also our social interactions, so we can win them over." Lake, describes the polar opposition drawn between the "evil" young jihadis drawn to a "death cult" (phrases used in the past week by Premier Daniel Andrews and Prime Minster Tony Abbott) and the Anzacs who sacrificed their lives in a nation-building "Great War", as political rhetoric rather than historically-based understanding. She rejects any historical parallel between the huge numbers enlisting in World War I and the tiny number of religious converts joining IS. The parallel, Lake argues, is rather between "the Anzacs who fought the Caliphate of the Ottoman Empire in 1915 and the current 'sons of Anzacs', as Abbott called them recently, dispatched to fight the self-proclaimed caliphate of IS. Such a parallel and continuity suggests we're embarked on a crusade of a very old-fashioned kind." Lake points to new histories, such as Eugene Rogan's acclaimed The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, and Margaret Macmillan's The War That Ended the Peace, that trace how the British incursion at Gallipoli was the first step in the British and French Occupation of the Middle East.

After World War I , the former lands of the Ottoman Empire were divided into mandated territories and placed under British and French control. "From that were created the modern states – with the boundaries now being desperately fought over," Lake says. The chaos in the Middle East is in a very real sense the outcome of Western incursions into that region in World War I. She is disappointed the chance – presented by the massive spending on the centenary – to broaden people's knowledge of the historical context and consequences of Australia's participation, is being wasted. "In many ways the centennial commemoration is a travesty of history," she says. "The point about history is that it's complex and contextual. Thus the willingness to sacrifice one's life for a cause can be praised as commendable courage or condemned as mindless fanaticism depending on context and perspective."