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The Contemporary Pacific 12.1 (2000) 287-289



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Book Review

Bougainville 1988-98: Five Searches for Security in the North Solomons Province of Papua New Guinea


Bougainville 1988-98: Five Searches for Security in the North Solomons Province of Papua New Guinea, by Karl Claxton. Canberra Papers on Strategy and Defence, 130. Canberra: Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1998. ISBN 0-7315-2750-x, xix + 193 pages, figures, maps, bibliography, notes. Paper, A$23.

Ten years of armed conflict on Bougainville Island have produced, together with more serious consequences, a substantial body of literature describing and analyzing the situation. The treatise under review is one of the most recent of such publications pouring out of the Australian National University. It offers a perspective, deriving from developing world security theory, different from those that have dominated most writing about the Bougainville conflict.

A key to Claxton's argument is the identification of five "stakeholders" whose interests and activities should be considered in order to expand understanding of the course and possible future of what has frequently been described as the most tragic disturbance in the Pacific since the Second World War. ("Stakeholder" is reportedly a popular term in Australian discussions of public management issues. American usage is rather different; contrast Ackerman and Alstott, The Stakeholder Society, 1999.) Stakeholders in the Bougainville conflict, according to Claxton, are the state of Papua New Guinea (PNG); political elites at transnational, national, and local levels; "bits of nation," including churches, nongovernment organizations, media, and the like; communal groups like clans and villages; and individuals. Their goals are, respectively, maintenance of sovereignty; political survival; creation of civil society; subsistence; and safety.

After an introductory chapter and a second describing the background and history of the war, Claxton lays out his theoretical perspective. He recognizes that many different groups' securities are simultaneously at stake in Papua New Guinea (33), and argues that a stakeholder approach has both theoretical and practical advantages for understanding conflict in developing nations. Reader response to this chapter will depend on individual interest in what may well be unfamiliar material drawn from the field of strategic studies, but subsequent chapters provide concrete applications of theory to Bougainville.

Bougainville's secessionist sentiments antedated 1998, but took their present form only after armed conflict began among landholders in the area surrounding the vast copper mine at Panguna. Claxton makes the interesting point that the great threat to sovereignty is "the crisis's potent symbolic demonstration of the essential [End Page 287] contestedness and weakness of the PNG state's authority over its citizens" (49, emphasis added). Here and elsewhere (eg, 56, 99) he seems to contest the argument advanced by others of a "domino effect" that would have the practical result of the state's political disintegration--a point worth further debate.

According to Claxton, the goal of political elites at whatever level in this conflict is their own survival in exercising power. Thus at the national level, those politicians most active in dealing with Bougainville have been "individuals with particularly strong personalities occupying insecurely tenured positions" (60). His discussion of national political infighting will present a challenge to readers not already well versed in PNG affairs. In considering local politics in Bougainville, he shrewdly observes, "the pressure of war appears to have compressed the period between moments of initiation of new generations of local elite while precluding the emergence of a commonly accepted local elite truly representative of the whole province" (91). One can only agree that intergenerational conflict in Bougainville presents a particularly thorny problem for those wishing to see peace and stability in the near future.

"Bits of nation"--a term Claxton has paraphrased from Colin Filer's "bits of state"--are elite bodies that are not concerned with their own political survival in the narrow sense of directly maintaining leadership positions. Churches, nongovernment organizations, media, students are all, according to Claxton, striving "to foster a more functional overall political and social environment" (114...

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