Stewart Firth

• Australian National University

This chapter provides an overview of militaries and socio-political transformation in the Pacific. Formal security arrangements link some Pacific island countries with more powerful external states. New Caledonia, French Polynesia and Wallis and Futuna, as parts of overseas France, come under the security arrangements of the French Republic. The Co...

Since 2013, the Nauru government has undermined democracy by reducing the independence of the judiciary, treating opposition MPs as potential traitors, curbing freedom of speech and restricting visits by variously defined groups of people who include journalists, Australians and New Zealanders. New Zealand responded by suspending its aid to Nauru’s...

Melanesia is becoming a region of many partners, expanding diplomatic options and a new sense of independence. The wider context of the new Melanesian assertiveness is one in which China is a rising power and Indonesia is forging closer links with the western Pacific. The impetus to Fiji's new assertiveness arose from the diplomatic isolation impos...

Chinese development assistance, raw material exploitation, investment and trade increases in their region are causing Pacific Islanders to ask: ‘Why are the Chinese interested in Pacific Island states?’ and ‘Why has there been an upsurge of the Chinese influence in the Pacific?’. This article seeks to add to the debate on that issue by examining th...

Fiji’s 2014 election was its first in eight years, first under the 2013 constitution, and first using a common roll of electors with proportional representation. In the new parliament of 50 seats, the coup leader of 2006, Frank Bainimarama, emerged triumphant. His FijiFirst Party won 32 seats, with the Social Democratic Liberal Party, a successor p...

Events in Thailand, Fiji and Burma in 2006 and 2007 focused attention on Australia's foreign policy response to regional coup-prone states and military regimes. Australia's official reaction to these events took different forms: for Thailand, a mild rebuke that brought no change in Thai–Australian relations; for Fiji, condemnation, the imposition o...

Fiji's post-colonial journey has been fraught, a promising beginning hobbled by political instability, periodic military coups and stagnant economic growth. Political disagreements over the best form of political representation have featured prominently in Fiji's political discourse, with no enduring resolution in sight.

Globalization is having its most transformative effects in the Pacific in three areas of economic and political life: trade, labor, and security. The global move from protection to free trade has reached the Pacific and will have its greatest initial impact on Fiji’s sugar and garment industries, both of which face major restructuring and possibly...

The Contemporary Pacific 17.2 (2005) 359-362 For fifty years, from 1946 to the last French test in 1996, nuclear bombs exploded in pristine Pacific environments, in the atmosphere, underwater, and even in space, leaving behind radioactive contamination of islands, reefs, and sea, and stimulating powerful anti-nuclear sentiment in the region. Observ...

Pacific studies in Hawai‘i and possibly New Zealand, and certainly Hawaiian and Mäori studies, are mostly conceptualized as projects of cultural renaissance, in which the aim is to reclaim and reassert cultural identity. The fundamental research question becomes How can we understand the Pacific in ways that honor the past and reclaim the future fo...

The Contemporary Pacific 14.2 (2002) 478-479 This book is about the interaction between foreign policy and domestic politics in Australia, New Zealand, and the South Pacific, and it focuses on a number of regional case studies. First is the New Zealand World Court Project. Then come studies of Australia's policy on climate change; the settlement of...

Globalization is now a central theme in the affairs of the Pacific Islands, and Pacific Islands governments are caught up in the rhetoric, the ideol- ogy, and the economic policies of globalization. Policymakers in govern- ments and regional organizations pepper their conversations with phrases drawn from that branch of politics called economics. T...

The Contemporary Pacific 12.2 (2000) 498-506 Among the wider political and social forces that influence the Pacific Islands, none mattered more in 1999 than globalization, and in particular the globalization agenda now embraced by regional organizations such as the South Pacific Forum. If globalization is the ever-increasing integration of economie...

Compagnie et Consulat. Plantation development in Samoa until the outbreak of the First World War was overwhelmingly dominated by the Hamburg firm of J. C. Godeffroy & Sohn and their commercial successor, the DHPG. Far from being a triumph of free enterprise capitalism, the company's Samoan plantations were only successful because the directors in B...

Power and Prejudice, The Making of the Fiji Crisis. By Brij V. Lai. New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, Wellington, 1988, viii, 204 pp, notes, appendices.Fiji. The Politics of Illusion. The Military Coups in Fiji. By Deryck Scarr. New South Wales University Press, Kensington, NSW, 1988. xx, 161 pp, illus., references, index.Fiji. Shatte...

From Being Slaves To Being Freed-Women, From Immorality To Decency In moral living, from superstition to a degree of enlightenment and civilization, from semi-nudity to at least a partial conception of the necessity for clothes; such are some of the things Christianity has accomplished for and among the women and girls of the island of Nauru, Marsh...

Typescript. Thesis--Oxford. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 328-347). Photocopy.

The process of labour migration, especially through indenture, was essential to the operation of European enterprises in various parts of the Pacific in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Treatment and conditions of labourers varied considerably but not for nothing was indenture sometimes called the 'penal contract system'. This paper lo...

Globalization is having its most transformative effects in the Pacific in three areas of economic and political life: trade, labor, and security. The global move from protection to free trade has reached the Pacific and will have its greatest ­initial impact on Fiji's sugar and garment industries, both of which face major restructuring and possi...

The main aim of this study is to examine formal education as a means of social control, and its main subject is Public primary schooling in New South Wales from 1880 to 1914. There are two subsidiary themes as well: what Public schools were really like, as distinct from what the Department of Public Instruction intended them to be; and how the valu...