Oceania’s Security Challenges

A few blogs have recently been posting on security issues in Oceania. Since this is a topic we rarely cover, I wanted to point out a couple of posts that I found informative and enlightening.

Coming Anarchy, which has organized the series of posts, has a piece on Oceania’s regions: Micronesia, Melanesia, and Polynesia. (The post is actually by guest blogger Phil Howison of Pacific Empire) Howison notes:

To keep this series in context, we need to define these sub-regions, as they have distinct security concerns and challenges, as well as widely varying cultures and geography.

The Pacific contains up to 30,000 small islands. These can (broadly) be divided culturally into three regions: Micronesia (“small islands”), Polynesia (“many islands”) and Melanesia (“black islands”).

Over at The Strategist, the focus is on the conflicts of Melanesia:

And since the 1960s Oceania has been plagued by political conflict, particularly in Melanesia – the chain of islands stretching from New Guinea to New Caledonia:

• wars of independence in West Papua (1963 onwards), East Timor (1975-99), Vanuatu (1980), New Caledonia (1980s), Bougainville (1988-1997);
• ethnic warfare in Solomon Islands (1998-2003) and Papua New Guinea’s highlands (ongoing);
• military coups in Fiji (four since 1987) and Solomon Islands (2000), and mutinies in PNG, Fiji and Vanuatu.

So, why the ‘trouble in paradise’? The causes of instability are complex. They include ill-disciplined armies and paramilitary police, volatile ethnic politics, and attempts by states, often weak post-colonial constructs, to impose authority over clans.

To learn more about these issues, keep checking back to these sites for future posts.