Intervention and State-Building in the Pacific

Intervention and State-Building in the Pacific PDF Author: Greg Fry
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Intervention and State-Building in the Pacific explores state-building intervention in weak, war-torn, or failing states through a critical examination of a new model that has recently emerged in relation to the Pacific "arc of crisis." Initiated by the Australian Government in 2003, this "cooperative intervention" doctrine--built on declared principles of partnership and respect for sovereignty--seems to offer a legitimate way to engage in state-building intervention. Drawing on a group of distinguished Pacific specialists, this book mounts a critique of these claims, showing how international legitimacy does not automatically translate into political legitimacy among those in the affected societies and how the attempt to legitimize the intervention internationally may actually work against such legitimacy in the recipient state.

Statebuilding and State Formation in the Western Pacific

Statebuilding and State Formation in the Western Pacific PDF Author: Matthew Allen
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131546375X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
This book provides a rigorous and cross-disciplinary analysis of this Melanesian nation at a critical juncture in its post-colonial and post-conflict history, with contributions from leading scholars of Solomon Islands. The notion of ‘transition’ as used to describe the recent drawdown of the decade-long Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) provides a departure point for considering other transformations – social, political and economic –under way in the archipelagic nation. Organised around a central tension between change and continuity, two of the book’s key themes are the contested narratives of changing state–society relations and the changing social relations around land and natural resources engendered by ongoing processes of globalisation and urbanisation. Drawing heuristically on RAMSI’s genesis in the ‘state- building moment’ that dominated international relations during the first decade of this century, the book also examines the critical distinction between ‘state-building’ and ‘state formation’ in the Solomon Islands context. It engages with global scholarly and policy debates on issues such as peacebuilding, state-building, legal pluralism, hybrid governance, globalisation, urbanisation and the governance of natural resources. These themes resonate well beyond Solomon Islands and Melanesia, and the book will be of interest to a wide range of students, scholars and development practitioners. This book was previously published as a special issue of The Journal of Pacific History.

Failed Statebuilding

Failed Statebuilding PDF Author: Oliver Richmond
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300175310
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
Western struggles—and failures—to create functioning states in countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan have inspired questions about whether statebuilding projects are at all viable, or whether they make the lives of their intended beneficiaries better or worse. In this groundbreaking book, Oliver Richmond asks why statebuilding has been so hard to achieve, and argues that a large part of the problem has been Westerners’ failure to understand or engage with what local peoples actually want and need. He interrogates the liberal peacebuilding industry, asking what it assumes, what it is getting wrong, and how it could be more effective.

Politics and State Building in Solomon Islands

Politics and State Building in Solomon Islands PDF Author: Sinclair Dinnen
Publisher: ANU E Press
ISBN: 1921313668
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Politics and State Building in Solomon Islands examines a crisis moment in recent Solomon Islands history. Contributors examine what happened when unrest engulfed the capital of the small Melanesian country in the aftermath of the 2006 national elections, and consider what these events show about the Solomon Islands political system, the influence of Asian interests in business and politics, and why the crisis is best understood in the context of the country's volatile blend of traditional and modern politics. Until the disturbances of April 2006 and subsequent deterioration in bilateral relations between Australia and Solomon Islands under the Sogavare government, experts had hailed the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) as an unqualified success. Some saw it as a model for 'cooperative intervention' in 'failing states' worldwide. Following these developments success seems less certain and aspects of the RAMSI model appear flawed. Using the case of Solomon Islands, this book raises fundamental questions about the nature of 'cooperative intervention' as a vehicle for state building, asking whether it should be construed as a mainly technical endeavour or whether it is unavoidably a political undertaking with political consequences. Providing a critical but balanced analysis, Politics and State Building in Solomon Islands has important implications for the wider debate about international state-building interventions in 'failed' and 'failing' states.

Mapping Security in the Pacific

Mapping Security in the Pacific PDF Author: Sara N Amin
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429626657
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This book examines questions about the changing nature of security and insecurity in Pacific Island Countries (PICs). Previous discussions of security in the Pacific region have been largely determined by the geopolitical interests of the Global North. This volume instead attempts to centre PICs’ security interests by focussing on the role of organisational culture, power dynamics and gender in (in)security processes and outcomes. Mapping Security in the Pacific underscores the multidimensional nature of security, its relationship to local, international, organisational and cultural dynamics, the resistances engendered through various forms of insecurities, and innovative efforts to negotiate gender, context and organisational culture in reducing insecurity and enhancing justice. Covering the Pacific region widely, the volume brings forth context-specific analyses at micro-, meso- and macro-levels, allowing us to examine the interconnections between security, crime and justice, and point to the issues raised for crime and justice studies by environmental insecurity. In doing so, it opens up opportunities to rethink scholarly and policy frames related to security/insecurity about the Pacific. Written in a clear and direct style, this book will appeal to students and scholars in criminology, sociology, cultural studies, social theory and those interested in learning about the Pacific region and different aspects of security.

Peace Infrastructures and State-Building at the Margins

Peace Infrastructures and State-Building at the Margins PDF Author: Balázs Áron Kovács
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319895664
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This book offers a critical examination of ‘infrastructures for peace’, originally proposed as a framework of conflict transformation. Through an exploration of the statist ideological underpinnings of peace-building, it traces how the concept was transformed by institutional actors – international organisations and states – into a tool to further the state-building goals of liberal peace-building.

Transforming Hawai‘i

Transforming Hawai‘i PDF Author: Paul D’Arcy
Publisher: ANU Press
ISBN: 1760461741
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
This study examines the role of coercion in the unification of the Hawaiian Islands by Kamehameha I between 1782 and 1812 at a time of increasing European contact. Three interrelated themes in Hawaiian political evolution are examined: the balance between coercion and consent; the balance between general structural trends and specific individual styles of leadership and historical events; and the balance between indigenous and European factors. The resulting synthesis is a radical reinterpretation of Hawaiian warfare that treats it as an evolving process heavily imbued with cultural meaning. Hawaiian history is also shown to be characterised by fluid changing circumstances, including crucial turning points when options were adopted that took elements of Hawaiian society on paths of development that proved decisive for political unification. These watershed moments were neither inevitable nor predictable. Perhaps the greatest omission in the standard discourse on the political evolution of Hawaiian society is the almost total exclusion of modern indigenous Hawaiian scholarship on this topic. Modern historians from the Hawai‘inuiākea School of Hawaiian Knowledge at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa argue that political leadership and socioeconomic organisation were much more concensus-based than is usually allowed for. Above all, this study finds modern indigenous Hawaiian studies a much better fit with the historical evidence than more conventional scholarship.

Pillars and Shadows

Pillars and Shadows PDF Author: John Braithwaite
Publisher: ANU E Press
ISBN: 192166679X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 213

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Book Description
This volume of the Peacebuilding Compared Project examines the sources of the armed conflict and coup in the Solomon Islands before and after the turn of the millennium. The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) has been an intensive peacekeeping operation, concentrating on building 'core pillars' of the modern state. It did not take adequate notice of a variety of shadow sources of power in the Solomon Islands, for example logging and business interests, that continue to undermine the state's democratic foundations. At first RAMSI's statebuilding was neither very responsive to local voices nor to root causes of the conflict, but it slowly changed tack to a more responsive form of peacebuilding. The craft of peace as learned in the Solomon Islands is about enabling spaces for dialogue that define where the mission should pull back to allow local actors to expand the horizons of their peacebuilding ambition.

War, Peace and Progress in the 21st Century

War, Peace and Progress in the 21st Century PDF Author: Mark Berger
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317983424
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
The history of development is one marked by insecurities, violence, and persistent conflict. It is not surprising, therefore, that development is now thought of as one of the central challenges of world politics. However, its complexities are often overlooked in scholarly analysis and among policy practitioners, who tend to adopt a technocratic approach to the crisis of development and violence. This book brings together a wide range of contributions aimed at investigating different aspects of the history of development and violence, and its implications for contemporary efforts to consolidate the development-security nexus. From environmental concerns, through vigilante citizenship, to the legacies of armed conflicts during and after decolonization, the different chapters reconstruct the contradictory history of development and critically engage contemporary responses and their implications for social and political analyses. In examining violence and insecurity in relation to core organising principles of world politics the contributors engage the problems associated with the nation state and the inter-state system and underlying assumptions of the promises of progress. The book offers a range of perspectives on the contradictions of development, and on how domination, violence and resistance have been conceived. At the same time it exemplifies the relevance of alternative methodological and conceptual approaches to contemporary challenges of development. This book was published as a special issue of Third World Quarterly.

Statebuilding by Imposition

Statebuilding by Imposition PDF Author: Reo Matsuzaki
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501734857
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 171

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Book Description
How do modern states emerge from the turmoil of undergoverned spaces? This is the question Reo Matsuzaki ponders in Statebuilding by Imposition. Comparing Taiwan and the Philippines under the colonial rule of Japan and the United States, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, he shows similar situations produce different outcomes and yet lead us to one conclusion. Contemporary statebuilding efforts by the US and the UN start from the premise that strong states can and should be constructed through the establishment of representative government institutions, a liberalized economy, and laws that protect private property and advance personal liberties. But when statebuilding runs into widespread popular resistance, as it did in both Taiwan the Philippines, statebuilding success depends on reconfiguring the very fabric of society, embracing local elites rather than the broad population, and giving elites the power to discipline the people. In Taiwan under Japanese rule, local elites behaved as obedient and effective intermediaries and contributed to government authority; in the Philippines under US rule, they became the very cause of the state's weakness by aggrandizing wealth, corrupting the bureaucracy, and obstructing policy enforcement. As Statebuilding by Imposition details, Taiwanese and Filipino history teaches us that the imposition of democracy is no guarantee of success when forming a new state and that illiberal actions may actually be more effective. Matsuzaki's controversial political history forces us to question whether statebuilding, given what it would take for this to result in the construction of a strong state, is the best way to address undergoverned spaces in the world today.