Bougainville

The Pacific year has closed with growing tensions over sovereignty and self-determination issues and growing stress over the ravages of covid-19 pandemic in a region that was largely virus-free in 2020. Just two days before the year 2021 wrapped up, Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama took the extraordinary statement of denying any involvement by the people or government of the autonomous region of Papua New Guinea being involved in any "secret plot" to overthrow the Manasseh Sogavare government in Solomon Islands. Insisting that Bougainville is “neutral” in the conflict in neighbouring Solomon Islands where riots last month were fuelled by anti-Chinese hostilities, Toroama blamed one of PNG’s two daily newspapers for stirring the controversy.

Im Supplément au voyage de Bougainville setzt sich Diderot am Beispiel Tahitis mit Fragen der Macht, der Sexualität und der Kolonialherrschaft auseinander. Der Text gilt als Paradebeispiel für die exotistische Verklärung eines fremden Naturvolkes als Kontrastbild zur Verkommenheit abendländischer Zivilisation. Und tatsächlich gibt es Stimmen im Text, die einer solchen Idealisierung und einem ‚Zurück zur Natur' das Wort reden. Aber es gibt auch andere. Erst die Auflösung der Stimmenvielfalt des Textes zugunsten der Identifikation einer eindeutigen Grundaussage lässt bestimmte Äußerungen im Text als Elemente einer systematischen ‚Naturtheorie‘ Diderots erscheinen. Jedoch muss eine solche Lesart nicht nur eine konstitutive Ebene des Textes – seine multiperspektivische Form – außer Acht lassen, sie verstrickt sich auch auf inhaltlicher Ebene in Widersprüche. In diesem Beitrag wird versucht, die verschiedenen Positionen im Text in ihrem Zusammenhang zu betrachten. Aus diesem Blickwinkel zeigt sich, dass Diderot sich keineswegs als autoritatives Sprachrohr der Natur aufführt. Im Gegenteil. Indem er die Vielfalt der Stimmen, die sich auf die ‚natürliche' Ordnung als Legitimitätsbasis ihrer jeweiligen Autorität beziehen, miteinander kontrastiert, zeigt er performativ, was es heißt, sich auf die Veränderlichkeit der Natur einzulassen, ohne den Anspruch zu erheben, sie ein für alle Mal festlegen zu können.

Rédigé en 1772 et donné pour la première fois au public en 1796, le "Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville" de Diderot occupe une place marquante dans l’histoire du primitivisme. Notre étude se propose de montrer comment, dans cet ouvrage, les procédés de création – les récits enchâssés, les prises de parole et la structure polyphonique de la narration – mettent en place un jeu subtil à valeur ontologique où se détache une image de l’Autre et du Moi en gestation. Bien loin d’être réglée, l’opposition de ces deux pôles dessine un sujet divisé qui se fait dans le langage et se manifeste dans et par un réseau complexe de voix dont le fonctionnement n’est ni identique ni même complémentaire. C’est par ce mouvement, fait d’apories et de paradoxes, que la pratique dialogique acquiert chez Diderot sa pleine fécondité, devenant à la fois une méthode d’interprétation et le produit de cette interprétation.

Diderot's 1772 text Supplément au Voyage de Bougainville (Supplement to Bougainville's 'Voyage around the World') is a 'riff', as Lynn Festa puts it, on the explorer Louis Antoine de Bougainville's memorable account of his landfall on Tahiti.1 The final text within a trilogy of moralising tales that includes Ceci n'est pas un conte (This is Not a Story) andMme de La Carlière, Diderot's Tahitian fable targets his era's constricting jealousies, petty passions and denatured conventions by juxtaposing Tahiti's 'natural society' with a series of European notions and customs.2 The overall structure of this clash of cultures is worth recalling. In the opening pages of the Supplément, Diderot stages a discussion between the witty and inquisitive interlocutors A and B, both of whom are enlightened relativists. In this initial part of the text, the two friends jump quickly from topic to topic, speculating on continental drift, the mores of ancient peoples on isolated lands and the seemingly contradictory psychology of Bougainville himself. In the ensuing section, A and B 'read' together the hidden manuscript ostensibly found within Bougainville's original text. This first Tahitian section begins, as it were, with a forceful, regressive view of history delivered by an old Tahitian man who enumerates the inevitable consequences of colonisation: contamination, enslavement and perhaps the eventual extermination of the Tahitians. The subsequent portion of the text shifts to a different era, where we witness more fruitful contacts between Tahitians and Europeans. In particular, we meet the very philosophically minded patriarch and chief, Orou, who begins a discussion with an aumônier (chaplain) regarding the backward and unnatural sexual restrictions imposed on the Catholic clergy. (This is also the section where B recounts the story of Polly Baker's incarceration for having had five children out of wedlock.) The suite (continuation) to this section relates Orou's later interactions with the aumônier after the clergyman has succumbed to the charms of Orou's daughter, Thia. At this point, the two men discuss the logic of the Tahitian sexual economy (where children have a greater value than any other 'commodity') at the same time as they deconstruct supposedly sinful notions such as adultery and fornication. The final section of the text brings back A and B, who speak about the 'denaturing' of humankind as well as the feasibility or non-feasibility of creating nature-based institutions in Europe, such as a more natural version of marriage. The final assessment of the text as supplied by A andB– that one should 'prendre le froc du pays où l'on va, et garder celui du pays où l'on est' ('wear the dress of the country to which one goes, but keep that of the country where one is')3 – seems to be a synthesis of cultural relativism and, on a certain level, pragmatic conservatism. Long considered something of an outlier among Diderot's major contributions to eighteenth-century thought, this short text is now among the philosophe's most taught and perhaps even most studied texts. While this

This thesis examines Papua New Guinean attitudes to money and modernity through an exploration of contemporary “fast money schemes” (Ponzi scams). The largest of these, U-Vistract Financial Systems, collected millions of Kina from 100,000s of “investors” on the promise of monthly returns on deposits of 100%. The scheme was declared bankrupt in 2000 but its founders escaped imprisonment, fleeing first to Solomon Islands and then to the “no go” zone of Bougainville, where the scheme re-established itself as the Royal Kingdom of Papala.

U-Vistract claimed to be a Christian reform of global finance systems that would deliver abundant prosperity to Papua New Guineans. U-Vistract cultivated a moral vision of its middle-class investors as compassionate Christian patrons whose coming wealth would deliver “development” to a nation disillusioned with social inequality and the postcolonial state.   

U-Vistract investors emerge from this study as morally engaged members of a transnational Christian civil society. This is a surprising conclusion to draw from studying fraud but it is all the more surprising in Papua New Guinea where anthropological interest has historically constructed the “village” as the central place where social meanings are generated. Here, urban Melanesians demonstrate moral and relational sensibilities that combine global aspirations for prosperity with Papua New Guinean disillusionment with the nation. In doing so, perhaps a more individualistic rendering of Melanesia emerges but these are individuals who are also more cosmopolitan in sentiment.

Christianity and politics seem to be intrinsically linked. In Central Bougainville, which is part of the autonomous province of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG), the Catholic faith introduced by Marist missionaries has been instrumental in building a national Bougainville identity and sustaining the political struggle for sovereignty. Although the first missionaries were often cautious not to disrupt socio-political organisations, Marists have been advocating both local and Marist political interests and views in the continuously shifting religious, and socio-economical political context of colonial and ‘post’-colonial Bougainville. This article follows the early Catholic missionaries to Bougainville, elucidating dialectics, tensions and politics of conversion. Moreover, it shows how devotion to Mary became entangled with a particular representation of Bougainville land as Holy, and the engendering of an ethnic-religious nationalism in the context of a ten-year-long devastating conflict and struggle for sovereignty.

‘The original [Panguna mine] agreement overrode our customs, denied us our land rights and was too rushed. It contradicts our way of life; what comes from the land should benefit the landowners … nobody else. ’
A Nasioi militant landowner

APART from convoys with soldiers riding shotgun and yellow ochre Bougainville Copper Limited trucks packed with security forces sporting M16s, you would hardly guess that a guerrilla war was in progress near the Bougainville provincial capital of Arawa. But once you reached the sandbagged machinegun nest in Birempa village at the foot of the rugged mountain jungles of the Crown Prince Range, the tension started to rise.
Scanning the dense vegetation for a sign of the militants of the Bougainville Republican Army (BRA)—known as Rambos in the first year of the decade-long civil war – the Papua New Guinea Defence Force soldier manning the machinegun didn’t notice the irony of the T-shirt he was wearing.
Chapter 16 of Don't Spoil My Beautiful Face: Media, Mayhem and Human Rights in the Pacific, by David Robie (2014). ISBN 9781877484254

As Keith Hart (1986) articulated in his neat phrase ‘two sides of the coin’, money and the state are inextricably intertwined. However, academic discussions of the state tend to fall under the heading of ‘governance’, with implicit reference to democratic ideals, while money is regarded as ‘economics’, a field dominated by ideas of the market. In this paper, I use material from U-Vistract, a mass Ponzi scam to show how quasi-magical ideas of money and wealth have grown out of the disillusioning experience of the state in its failure to deliver ‘development’. These imaginings of prosperity entail a different kind of state, based on the moral reform of Christian citizens and political leaders and the reorientation of the banking system to deliver benefits to ordinary people. As the Royal Kingdom of Papala, U-Vistract sought to be seen to be like a Christian state and so deceived its investors into thinking that they were participating in a moral project that would allow them to redress the short-comings of the Papua New Guinean state. As the scam took on the appearance of the state, so the state came to be seen as a scam.

This SSGM In Brief gives some background information to the recent arrest of an American national who arrived in Port Moresby carrying a briefcase of "Bougainville Kina', a pseudo-currency promoted by the notorious Ponzi fraudster Noah Musingku.

Sorcery in Buka, Autonomous Region of Bougainville, is understood as reprehensible in most present contexts, but it is also believed to have once played a constructive role in maintaining social order. This mytheme is important both to the analysis of how traditional systems of sorcery come to be rear-ticulated in postcolonial contexts, and as a means of understanding how villagers conceptualise social order itself. Here, an analysis of the selective means by which vernacular forms of sorcery are assimilated to the Tok Pisin term poisen is presented together with an examination of the history of institutions of social control in which sorcery is remembered-and forgotten-to have played key roles. In the past, sorcery would have been gavman blong peles, a 'village government', a power over and from people, accumulated by the hierarchical integration of lineages within houses known as tsuhana. Sorcery has been privatized and commodified, slipping out of control of traditional authorities, who now pursue a strategy of achieving power over land. Power from people entails, in the Buka context, sorcery or other forms of internalised violence; power over land entails the assertion exclusivist gene-alogical claims. The pursuit of such claims is mediated by courts, and frequently creates rifts in communities. Sorcery, once freed from its role as government, returns to haunt traditional authorities as the spectre of their former power, and as the spectre of resistance to their current power: to the extent that they emphasize the historical role of poisen, the more they are suspected of it; imagined as the anarchy of jealousies, poisen multiplies in proportion to their success in parlaying forms of traditional authority into economic and political advantage.

The Naasioi Otomaung alphabet first came to light during the Bougainville Crisis of 1988-1998. Created by the Naasioi speaking leader of a politico-religious movement in Kieta district, its emergence follows the pattern of numerous other scripts of Asia and the Pacific that have developed in recent times in the context of anti-colonial confrontations (Kelly, 2016; 2018a). This paper provides the first ever public report on the form, structure and context of the script, early efforts at documentation, and its prospects for future development. The script exhibits a formal influence from cursivised Roman while its inventory of letters presents as a cypher for the English alphabet, including letters such as <x> and <z> that are not present in standard Naasioi orthographies (Hurd and Hurd, 1966). From the perspective of its users, however, the alphabet is designed to universally encode any language: the word otomaung is in fact a neologism roughly meaning 'able to express anything'. The term is also polysemous, variously denoting the letter <A>, as well as the religious community in which the alphabet was created. The forms of the letters, meanwhile, are said to have been inspired by ceremonial scarring, a practice that is now rare. Reproducing these forms in writing is thus seen as an act of cultural preservation by other means. Although at one time the script became part of a local school curriculum, literacy is now limited to a small number of individuals. Systematic documentation and description of Naasioi Otomaung has suffered various set backs, from political disruptions to the COVID-19 pandemic. As a result, most of the documentation to date has been carried out by post, email, and social media correspondence. Despite the obvious limitations and inefficiencies of these channels, 'virtual' fieldwork has been unexpectedly productive, resulting in an accurate record of the script, preliminary information about its historical and ethnographic circumstances and the development of a new font. With Bougainville's recent advances towards political independence, the Otomaung Naasioi alphabet may soon rise to greater prominence.

This report examines the governmental organizational structures used in three Australian-led interventions in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the Southwest Pacific regions: Bougainville, East Timor, and the Solomon Islands. Whole-of-government efforts requiring coordination across many parts of the Australian Government characterized each of these unique operations, in which different organisational approaches were used to manage the participation of various agencies.

During the course of the research, it became apparent that, over time, numerous lessons were learned as branches of the Australian Government gained experience in how best to interact with one another and manage complex operations of this type. The report describes the key Australian agencies that participated in the three operations, the coordinating mechanisms they adopted, and the specific roles they played. In addition to providing insights that should be useful for the preparation and conduct of operations outside Australia, the information in this report also should be useful in terms of better whole-of-government operations inside Australian territory.

I wrote this paper in 2010 based on the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) and the Autonomous Bougainville Government (ABG) annual reports, while still working in the UNDP run Peace and Recovery project. The UNDP Bougainville Programme implemented a reconciliation exercise in 2008, after 2008 was declared by the late President Joseph Kabui as the “Year for Weapons Disposal and Reconciliation”. A Peace and Reconciliation Ministry & Division was immediately established by ABG to oversee the peace and reconciliation process. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the methodology used by UNDP and ABG.

Contemporary Melanesian communities face difficulties both because of the withdrawal of government services and the continued influence of clientelism within the politics of the distributive state. A notable reaction to both these problems is the organisation of a broad class of groups that may be termed ‘parastatal’: informal organisations, often evanescent, which form around the state and its absence. These may often appear as ‘mimetic’ of recognisable state forms. Characteristically, the analysis of such ‘mimesis’ in Melanesia is framed by doubt that the emulation of state forms extends to the alleged rationality or ‘interiority’ of the state. Here, a case in which villagers in the Autonomous Region of Bougainville undertook to prosecute themselves for non-payment of school fees is discussed in order to expose the substantial difficulties with understanding parastatal organisation in terms of ‘copying’. The case suggests integration of the villagers into the actually existing state system is much deeper than is often assumed.

The text will focus on some utopic themes present in French Enlightenment writers, and particular in Diderot’s Souplement au voyage de Bougainville. The aim is to try to understand why the major authors of French Enlightenment  prior to the French Revolution– Denis Diderot, Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau – did use Utopia as a way to express their cultural and political preferences.

In 1989, the massive Panguna copper mine,
which was at the centre of a decade-long conflict
in Bougainville, was forced to close. Twenty-five
years on, Bougainville is readying for a deferred
referendum on independence — one of the central
pillars of the Bougainville Peace Agreement — to
be held sometime between 2015 and 2020. As the
territory contemplates its political future, and how
it will generate the revenue needed to support
either meaningful autonomy or an independent
state, the possibility of reopening the Panguna
mine is prominent on the political agenda. Three
of the options being considered are: 1) The mine
never opens again; 2) The mine opens again under
Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL); 3) The mine
opens again under control of some other company.
This In Brief focuses on one of these possibilities:
reopening the mine under BCL. In particular, it
discusses a variety of local expectations in relation
to material and symbolic reparations that face BCL,
operator of the closed mine, if it were to resume
operations in Bougainville.

The use of referendums in conflict societies has increased significantly in recent decades. A planned referendum in Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, is a current example. Referendums potentially help a conflict society to progress towards a peaceful resolution of its conflict even in the face of entrenched opposition by certain elites. And, because they can enjoy broad social perceptions of democratic legitimacy, referendums may also help to ensure against subsequent breach of any settlement reached. Yet, in practice referendums have not always been beneficial. Little institutional effort has gone toward improving the popular discourse leading up to the final vote. Standard referendum campaigns often merely amplify the voices of contending and entrenched political parties and elites. In a conflict society, where social polarisation is pronounced, referendums thus risk aggravating, rather than ameliorating, tensions.

Research in deliberative democracy - with its concern for channelling disagreement into reasoned forms of persuasion - has yielded insights relevant to resolving violent inter-communal conflict. In this article we suggest the use of a specially-designed ‘deliberative referendum’ in Bougainville. Such a referendum may improve the conflicting parties' prospects of reaching common ground. Even a marginal improvement in the referendum’s deliberative quality may help to reconstruct the referendum from a potential destabilising factor to a more effective peace-building tool. Yet, while we explore how a deliberative referendum might help to impel the Bougainville peace process toward successful resolution, we also consider the referendum’s hazards.

This book examines the possibilities and limitations of corporate social responsibility in minimising the violent conflict often associated with natural resource exploitation.  Through detailed and penetrating empirical analysis, the author skilfully asks why previous corporate social responsibility practices have not always their achieved aims. 

This theme is explored though an analysis of two of the most complex and protracted conflicts linked to natural resources in the Asia Pacific region: Bougainville (Papua New Guinea) and West Papua (Indonesia). Drawing on first-hand accounts of corporate executives and communities affected by resource conflict, this book documents the translation of global corporate social responsibility into local peace. Covering topics as diverse as post-colonialism, law, revenue distribution, security, the environment and customary reconciliation, this ambitious text reveals how and why current corporate social responsibility initiatives may be unable to assist extractive companies avoid social conflict. The study concludes that this is attributable to the failure of extractive companies to respond to the social and environmental issues of most concern to local host communities. The idea is that extractive companies could actively contribute to peace building if they were to engage with the interdependencies between business activity and the root causes of conflict.

What sets this book apart is that it offers a holistic framework for extractive companies to engage with the complexity of resource conflict. ‘Interdependent Engagement’ is an integrated model of corporate social responsibility that encourages extractive companies to deal with the underlying causes of resource conflict, rather than applying solutions or critiques of their symptoms.

TRANSCRIPT
Papua New Guinea's resources boom could leave the country more susceptible to fraudsters and ponzi schemes, according to new research by the Australian National University.
John Cox has been studying the effect of fast money schemes like the U-Vistract scheme a decade ago, and why so many members of PNG's educated middle class fall for them.
He told Jamie Tahana that over 500 million kina has been lost to such schemes since 1998.
JOHN COX: I guess one thing I want to say at the start is that people fall for these kind of scams all over the world. You know, Australians send a lot of money to Nigeria, a lot of Americans fell for the Bernie Madoff scam so I guess these kinds of scams happen wherever money goes and wherever finance flows. So I'm not saying that Papua New Guineans are more gullible than else. So what I've discovered from the interviews that I've done with lots of Papua New Guineans is there's an element of greed but underneath it all there's also a really strong moral dimension to it.
JAMIE TAHANA: Just take us through what you've found with this research. Because it started with this thing in Bougainville didn't it?
JC: Yeah, the biggest scam was called U-Vistract and it's still kind of running out of Bougainville. So it was set up by Bougainvillians and spread through church networks, it spread through professional groups and it was really able to present itself as a way to make fast money and I guess the way these scams operate - they pay a few people out at the beginning, usually high level people so everybody knows them, everybody hears a story that this person made 10 thousand and the word gets around and people flood in and eventually they can't pay anymore and so they had to make explanations as to why. So I guess I looked at 'how can this scam keep going for 15 years and hasn't paid anybody since the year 2000?' But part of the stories these people started to tell their investors was 'look, it's not us. The government's stopped us from paying you, we've got our money overseas in a bank account in Singapore or somewhere and we want to transfer it into PNG but the government won't allow us to because they're corrupt, or because they're jealous of us' and that kind of stuff. So they're able to play on peoples lack of trust in the PNG state and manipulate them in that way.
JT: We do have a lot of development projects going on right now in PNG, especially with the mineral and resource projects going on right now. Does this make them kind of more susceptible?
JC: The resource projects certainly do create expectations that everybody should be wealthy, so what I'm hearing from the people that I speak to is 'PNG's a rich country we shouldn't need to have aid programmes, we shouldn't have poor people here, there's something wrong with our system' and they often blame it on corruption, sometimes they'll blame it on the Australian colonial history, but more often it becomes a what we call a negative nationalist account. They say 'we're underdeveloped it's because our politicians are corrupt.' What I'd say is background conditions don't necessarily create scams in themselves. So this U-Vistract scam really was a very, very ingenious and well thought-out attempt to defraud hundreds of thousands of people and that had an organisational structure, it had networks of influence that really drew people in and made itself seem real to them for quite a long time.

A referendum to decide on Bougainville&amp;#39;s future political relationship with Papua New Guinea was held in November 2019. The deferred, non‐binding, referendum is a key milestone contained in the Bougainville Peace Agreement (BPA), which sought to reconcile a violent conflict from 1988 to 1998. Although the Bougainville peace process has been deemed a success and significant milestones have been reached towards implementation of the BPA, the conflict continues to have enduring impacts. Particular concerns have been raised about Bougainville&amp;#39;s large youth population, often referred to as the ‘lost generation’. This paper documents observations of the 2019 referendum from the perspective of four university students born during the conflict in Siwai District, South Bougainville, whom participated officially in the referendum as an observer group. While trauma and a disrupted education have contributed to youth unemployment and substance abuse in Bougainville, the paper offers a stark contrast to negative narratives of young Bougainvilleans as lacking capabilities to contribute to social and political life. As Bougainville embarks on yet another period of political uncertainty, the paper calls for greater attention to finding avenues to support these young voices to ensure that their generation is not ‘lost’ forever.

In this chapter, I analyse the elaborate Papua New Guinean pyramid scam, U-Vistract, as a site where contemporary ideas of economy and society are being negotiated. Drawing on propaganda from the scam and my own fieldwork, I explore Papua New Guinean narratives of financial investment, national development and personal fulfilment. I conclude that the scam obtained much of its power to defraud its investors from its ability to insert itself into Christian moral critiques of corruption and inequality.

New Zealanders played a critical part in a flash-point that ignited a guerilla war threatening the economy and stability of Papuas New Guinea. DAVID ROBIE examines the New Zealand connection and the conflict centred on Bougainville island - a far-flung and troubled part of Papua New Guinea.

""The two books under review are part of a series of publications of the Peacebuilding Compared Project (http://peacebuilding.anu.edu.au) at the Australian National University. Reconciliation and Architectures of Commitment addresses the events and factors that led to the decade long conflict, from 1988, on Bougainville, Papua New Guinea (PNG), and analyses the various stages, factors and actors involved in its peace process. Catalyst of the conflict was the Panguna mining project in Central Bougainville, one of the world’s largest copper mines, owned by Conzinc Rio Tinto Australia (CRA) and operated by Bougainville Copper Ltd (BCL). The project faced increasing local resistance and demonstrations against it by landowners, which culminated in the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) fighting against the PNG security forces, and an increasingly widespread demand for secession. Peacebuilding evolved slowly and was shaped by “bottom-up traditional and Christian reconciliation practices and a carefully crafted top-down political settlement” (p.1). Pillars and Shadows examines the sources of social and political instability in Solomon Islands and evaluates the subsequent peacebuilding and statebuilding efforts. It focuses on the violent events, popularly known as ‘the tension’, that took place before and after the turn of the millennium. Overall disgruntlement and tensions between people from Malaita and Guadalcanal, partly related to poorly regulated urbanization, led to a civil conflict that began in 1998 and was only effectively subdued with the arrival of the Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) in 2003.

In the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARoB) in Papua New Guinea, the changes of Vatican II led to significant Church reform, creating “Liklik Kristen Komuniti” (small Christian communities) that gave more responsibility to the laity. Moreover, as elsewhere in the world, Charismatic Catholicism was introduced and embraced. At the same time, private devotions, and in particular devotions to Mary, became immensely popular and powerful in Bougainville. This is partly due to the Bougainville crisis (1988–1998), which caused immense suffering, but also triggered a surge in popular devotions as people looked for spiritual guidance to deal with the hardships of the crisis. This paper shows how in the context of social and economic upheaval, charismatic popular devotions became increasingly influential with rosaries and statues becoming important mediums in facilitating healing and socio-political renewal. This shows the strength of popular devotions and the importance of material religion in particular. It also elucidates how popular devotions in Bougainville are part of global Catholic developments, as well as transnational practices that place Mary in the center of devotional practices.

This paper brings together Žižek’s bartleby politics with the praxis of organic intellectuals emerging out of the “bougainville crisis”, in order to generate a new van- tage point for theorizing anti-colonial resistance to state violence. bartleby politics, it is argued, conceptualizes how socio-symbolic orders naturalize their existence, and the strategies required to disrupt this completeness of power, so we can begin again. applying this approach, it is argued during colonization metropolitan powers shatter the permanency of indigenous socio-symbolic orders, by situating them within a wider (con- trived) teleological historical sequence. However, the metropolitan power’s capacity to manage this risky enterprise—where the possibility of possibility emerges—is shaped by anti-colonial resistance. This resistance can shift a teleological moment to a contingent moment, where multiple vectors of history are opened up by the colonized “subjects,” that go beyond the set sequence offered by the colonial power. One of the most radical forms of violence colonized “subjects” can inflict on the colonial powers during this open historical moment, it is argued, is refusal. Refusal, that is to negotiate the terms and con- ditions of incorporation into Empire, and instead unilaterally setting a different historical course. The violence refusal inflicts on Empire, and the greater violence Empire inflicts back, will be examined through the case study of the bougainville war.

Australia has a strong record of contributing to peacekeeping and peace-building operations. Among the first to be deployed under UN auspices, Australian troops monitored the ceasefire between Dutch and Indonesian forces in 1947. Since that time Australians have served in more than 50 United Nations and other multilateral peace and security operations around the world.

As the nature of peace operations has evolved, so too has Australia’s contribution and engagement. We remain committed to active participation—as a dependable partner—in efforts to build peace and stability in our region and globally.

This report seeks to capture the experiences, innovations and practical lessons that have emerged over the last two decades from Australia’s contributions to peace operations in support of our regional neighbours—Papua New Guinea’s Autonomous Region of Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste. The analysis of peace operations in these three countries highlights the strength of partnerships between the operations and the local leadership, and underlines the core principle that in order to have a sustainable impact, peace operations must be aligned with local priorities and support local capacities.

Regional participation has been a key feature of successful peace operations in Australia’s neighbourhood, and this report draws out the significant advantages of the regional dimension to the operations in these three countries. We are grateful for the valuable advice and guidance provided by representatives from the governments of Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Timor-Leste during the preparation of this report. We are also grateful for the insights and advice received from a number of people who were part of these peace operations on the ground. We would like to acknowledge the important contributions of Australia’s regional partners to the success of the operations addressed in the report.

We also acknowledge the excellent work of the Australian Civil-Military Centre in producing this report. It is a further demonstration of the Centre’s success in strengthening national civil-military capacities to prevent, prepare for and respond to conflicts.

We hope this analysis will be a useful resource for ongoing and future peacekeeping and peace-building efforts within our region and beyond, and provide a practical contribution to national, regional and global dialogues on peace, security and development. We commend it to anyone working in the peacekeeping and peace-building domains.

The island of Bougainville is widely touted as the most likely candidate to become the world's next independent state and the 194th member of the UN. In December 2019, it was announced that it had voted by a huge majority for independence. However, hopes that the process was going to be quick seem to have been wildly optimistic. In this video, I explore what has happened since the result was announced and show that the things are being held up by both sides - the government of Papua New Guinea and by political developments in Bougainville.

Channel Link: http://www.youtube.com/c/JamesKerLindsay

"Corporate Social Responsibility and Natural Resource Conflict starts by introducing the geographic, cultural, economic, and environmental backgrounds of the case studies in Bougainville and West Papua. Here McKenna illustrates how the natural resource conflicts in these regions were caused primarily by the processes of colonization and decolonization. Colonial legacies have continued to influence and impact on resource exploration in recent times. For legal scholars, her work is a timely reminder of the utility and importance of considering the socio-cultural and historical contexts of natural resource conflicts, as opposed to crafting legal frameworks and theories that do not take into account the unique circumstances of each conflict" (Liu, 2017, p.376).

... Carroll (1991) argues that these four categories of corporate social responsibilities can be depicted as a pyramid, in which economic ... Discretionary responsibilities are at the apex. Nonetheless, firms are expected to fulfil these four social responsibilities simultaneously. ...