J Wallis
Biographic Data
| ID | 158598 |
|---|---|
| NAME | J Wallis |
| GIVEN NAMES | J |
| FAMILY NAME | Wallis |
| SIGNATURE | WALLIS J |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Adelaide |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8767-917X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 48 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 220 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 46 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
How can individuals determine the success of statecraft
This article examines the micro-level dynamics shaping contemporary statecraft in the Pacific Islands region, demonstrating the importance of individuals to the success of statecraft efforts. Existing analyses of statecraft largely privilege macro-level perspectives that treat states as unitary actors, overlooking the fact that people interact not with abstract policies but with the individuals who enact them. Indeed, relationships, networks, and…
Lost at sea? The European Union’s influence over understandings of order in the Pacific Islands
Three outposts of the European Union are found in the Pacific Islands region, far from the European homeland – French Polynesia, New Caledonia, and Wallis & Futuna – all French territories. As the region has become a microcosm of broader strategic competition, in this article we examine the efforts of the EU, and certain of its members, to seek to influence how Pacific Island countries perceive them and their policies and understand international…
Time for peace
This article reflects and responds to the question of ‘Towards a different IR?’ through the prism of the concept of peace (and the field of Peace and Conflict Studies). Building on a symposium discussion of these matters at the ANU in July 2024, we proffer the theme of temporality in peace study and processes as key to the future of the discipline. We wish to modestly contribute to debates in the discipline in two main directions. First, we explo…
Where are the Pacific Islands in the Political Science and International Relations scholarship
A decade ago, Amitav Acharya outlined his ‘new agenda’ for International Relations (IR) scholars: ‘Global International Relations’. This article seeks to modestly move forward two aspects of the Global IR agenda. First, we foreground a region largely missing from the Global IR literature: the Pacific Islands. That the Pacific has been ‘geo-politically marginal’ has consequences for the Global IR, and broader Political Science and IR scholarship, …
The United States as a 'Pacific Nation
In 2012, then United States (US) Secretary of State Hilary Clinton attended the leaders' meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum, the region's pre-eminent politics and security-focused multilateral institution. At the meeting, Clinton remarked that: 'I have said that the 21st century will be America's Pacific century, with an emphasis on Pacific', as the US is 'a Pacific nation'. In this article, we analyse how, in the decade since, US government di…
The Pacific Islands and Chinese power as presence, influence, and interference
Dominant debates about China’s growing presence in the Pacific Islands – through infrastructure, aid, trade, and investment – suggest that Chinese material power directly translates to influence and effective interference in Pacific states’ domestic and foreign affairs. These perspectives fail to clarify the causal link between Chinese economic statecraft and Pacific governments’ alignment with Beijing’s interests. They also deny Pacific people a…
The Australia-New Zealand alliance
Different nightmares, shared dreams? Australia and New Zealand's intuitive alliance
Ordering the Islands? Pacific Responses to China’s Strategic Narratives
Metropolitan powers are concerned that China is seeking to influence Pacific Island countries and reshape Pacific Islands’ regional order in its favour. But there is a risk that the effectiveness of China’s efforts has been overinterpreted by metropolitan powers. In this article we analyse the effectiveness of one element of China’s activities: the deployment of narrative power. We do this by examining the reception and role of China’s strategic …
Introduction to the special section
The ‘Blue Pacific’ strategic narrative
The developing literature on strategic narratives has analysed their attempted use by great powers, particularly China, to influence less materially powerful states. While there has been some consideration of how less materially powerful states can exercise their agency to, in response, construct narratives about their relationship to Chinese power, there has been far less analysis of less materially powerful states that have created and deployed…
An emotions agenda for peace
While the ‘emotion turn’ has emerged as an influential analytical lens in International Relations (IR), there is not yet a well-developed understanding of the role that emotions play in facilitating or inhibiting peace. This special issue of Cooperation and Conflict engages with the analytical potential of emotions and the promise this perspective holds for innovative analyses of peace processes and peacebuilding. To demonstrate the political sig…
How do the emotional and embodied experiences of international interveners influence their understanding and practice of peacebuilding
What happens if international interveners feel emotions that they consider unsanctioned, unwanted and unprofessional? What if they enact and manage their emotions in ways that they – or others – deem unacceptable? If international interveners face anxiety about being ‘too emotional’ or not feeling or expressing the ‘right’ emotions, does this challenge their sense of identity? And what consequences could this have for peacebuilding and the confli…
The enclosure and exclusion of Australia's 'Pacific family
Since 2018 the Australian government has displayed anxiety about its apparently declining influence in the Pacific Islands region due to the growing presence of China, a power with potentially inimical interests. The government has long been anxious about threats to its physical security that may arise from the Pacific Islands region. But reports in April 2018 that China was in talks to build a military base in Vanuatu were a wake-up call that it…
Tā, Vā, and Lā
Oceanic perspectives seldom appear in the geopolitical discourse of metropolitan powers, and the agency of Pacific Island states and peoples is often overlooked. Inspired by calls from political geographers for ‘a more ambitious geopolitical imagination’ (Sharp, 2013), and from Oceanic scholars ‘to examine indigenous epistemologies, ontologies and cosmological ideas and philosophes so that global conversations include local and indigenous underst…
Commentary
Maritime sovereignty and territorialisation
Security cooperation in the Pacific Islands
In the 2018 Boe Declaration, Pacific Islands Forum leaders recognized that the region is facing ‘an increasingly complex regional security environment’ and committed to ‘strengthening the existing regional security architecture’. Given uncertainty about the existence and nature of this architecture, we address the question: is there a security architecture in the region, or does security cooperation take a different shape? We find that security c…
Framing China in the Pacific Islands
How did many Australians come to accept that competition, rather than cooperation, with China was necessary in the Pacific Islands? We use discourse analysis techniques to examine the role that framings in Australian official discourse, media, and commentary over the last decade (2011–2021) played in constructing China’s presence in the region as threatening such that many Australians have accepted that policies aimed at competing with China are …
Evaluating the Legacy of State-building in Timor-Leste
With the benefit of almost 20 years of hindsight, in this article we evaluate the legacy of state-building in Timor-Leste. We find that much of the academic critique of the state-building mission has proven to be largely accurate: political and economic development has indeed been challenged by the legacy of key decisions made during the early state-building process. First, the focus on centralised state institutions has led to the underdevelopme…
It’s the Little Things
Much peace and conflict scholarship groups individual international interveners together as ‘the international’, treating them more as an ideational structure – the international peace architecture – than as individual agents. This article brings foreign policy analysis scholarship into conversation with constructivist scholarship to propose analytical questions that can be used to study the role that individual international interveners play in …
Contradictions in Australia's Pacific Islands discourse
The Australian government demonstrates strategic anxiety about the ‘crowded and complex’ geopolitics of the Pacific Islands region. This reflects its broader concerns about geostrategic competition in the ‘Indo-Pacific’, and its perception that Pacific states are ‘small’ and ‘weak’ and therefore vulnerable to influence from potentially hostile powers. Simultaneously, the government has vowed to ‘step-up’ its engagement with its ‘Pacific family’, …
The implications of Covid-19 for security in the Pacific Islands
The geographic isolation of Pacific states and people has meant that the region has managed to avoid the direct consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. But the indirect consequences have nevertheless been significant. This article attempts to answer the question: what are the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for understanding security in the Pacific Islands? To do this it considers three key questions. First, what does the COVID-19 pandemic r…
Burden-sharing
One of President Joseph Biden's foreign policy priorities is to 'renew' and 'strengthen' the United States' alliances, as they were perceived to have been 'undermined' during the Trump administration, which regularly expressed concern that allies were free-riding on the United States' military capability. Yet the broad range of threats states face in the contemporary context suggests that security assistance from allies no longer only-or even pri…
Displaced security? The relationships, routines and rhythms of peacebuilding interveners
This article considers what treating individual international interveners engaged in peacebuilding work as referent objects can tell us about emplaced security. This is important because individual interveners are diverse, embodied agents who can impact the agency, peace and security of conflict-affected populations. It argues that applying an ontological security lens can provide a partial explanation for why interveners develop narratives and p…
Patterns of predation by chimpanzees on red colobus monkeys in gombe national park, 1982–1991
Predatory patterns in wild chimpanzees are important evidence in the continuing debate about the role of hunting in the behavior of early hominids. Data are presented on the predator–prey ecology of red colobus monkeys ( Colobus badius tephrosceles ) and chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii ) in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, from 1982 through 1991. During this period chimpanzees were observed to kill 429 mammalian prey items, 350 of whic…
Political reconciliation in Timor Leste, Solomon Islands and Bougainville
In recent years, the study and practice of political reconciliation has experienced a turn to hybridity. This turn has been defined by the increased rate at which liberal international and local peacebuilding practices, and their underlying ideas, have become merged, integrated or co-located in time and space. While hybrid approaches to reconciliation have been praised as an effective means of engaging local populations in peacebuilding operation…
Contradictions in Australia's Pacific Islands discourse
The Australian government demonstrates strategic anxiety about the ‘crowded and complex’ geopolitics of the Pacific Islands region. This reflects its broader concerns about geostrategic competition in the ‘Indo-Pacific’, and its perception that Pacific states are ‘small’ and ‘weak’ and therefore vulnerable to influence from potentially hostile powers. Simultaneously, the government has vowed to ‘step-up’ its engagement with its ‘Pacific family’, …
An emotions agenda for peace
While the ‘emotion turn’ has emerged as an influential analytical lens in International Relations (IR), there is not yet a well-developed understanding of the role that emotions play in facilitating or inhibiting peace. This special issue of Cooperation and Conflict engages with the analytical potential of emotions and the promise this perspective holds for innovative analyses of peace processes and peacebuilding. To demonstrate the political sig…
A liberal-local hybrid peace project in action? The increasing engagement between the local and liberal in Timor-Leste
The liberal peace project has dominated state-building operations since the end of the Cold War, including in Timor-Leste. However, the attempt to institutionalise the liberal peace faced significant challenges in Timor-Leste's fragmented subsistence-based society. This resulted in the creation of shallowly rooted and poorly-understood liberal state institutions that were disconnected from the majority of Timorese, who continued to follow their l…
Is ‘good enough’ peacebuilding good enough? The potential and pitfalls of the local turn in peacebuilding in Timor-Leste
There is a palpable sense of humility within the United Nations and other international institutions regarding peacebuilding. Rather than seeking to implement the liberal peace, they now pursue the more modest goal of ‘good enough’ outcomes. This shift reflects a growing consensus in the critical literature that space needs to be provided for the local agency that will ultimately determine the outcomes of peacebuilding. At first blush this emphas…
The ‘Blue Pacific’ strategic narrative
The developing literature on strategic narratives has analysed their attempted use by great powers, particularly China, to influence less materially powerful states. While there has been some consideration of how less materially powerful states can exercise their agency to, in response, construct narratives about their relationship to Chinese power, there has been far less analysis of less materially powerful states that have created and deployed…
How do the emotional and embodied experiences of international interveners influence their understanding and practice of peacebuilding
What happens if international interveners feel emotions that they consider unsanctioned, unwanted and unprofessional? What if they enact and manage their emotions in ways that they – or others – deem unacceptable? If international interveners face anxiety about being ‘too emotional’ or not feeling or expressing the ‘right’ emotions, does this challenge their sense of identity? And what consequences could this have for peacebuilding and the confli…
Framing China in the Pacific Islands
How did many Australians come to accept that competition, rather than cooperation, with China was necessary in the Pacific Islands? We use discourse analysis techniques to examine the role that framings in Australian official discourse, media, and commentary over the last decade (2011–2021) played in constructing China’s presence in the region as threatening such that many Australians have accepted that policies aimed at competing with China are …
Displaced security? The relationships, routines and rhythms of peacebuilding interveners
This article considers what treating individual international interveners engaged in peacebuilding work as referent objects can tell us about emplaced security. This is important because individual interveners are diverse, embodied agents who can impact the agency, peace and security of conflict-affected populations. It argues that applying an ontological security lens can provide a partial explanation for why interveners develop narratives and p…
The enclosure and exclusion of Australia's 'Pacific family
Since 2018 the Australian government has displayed anxiety about its apparently declining influence in the Pacific Islands region due to the growing presence of China, a power with potentially inimical interests. The government has long been anxious about threats to its physical security that may arise from the Pacific Islands region. But reports in April 2018 that China was in talks to build a military base in Vanuatu were a wake-up call that it…
Building a liberal-local hybrid peace and state in Bougainville
There has been an increasing attempt to theorise the emergence of a liberal-local hybrid approach to state-building, which recognises the coexistence and interaction of liberal and local socio-political institutions. There has not yet been a sustained attempt to understand what occurs when a liberal-local approach is adopted from the outset of a state-building operation. This article seeks to fill this gap by applying the literature to the state-…
Ten Years of Peace
Between 1989 and 1997 Bougainville endured a complex secessionist war and localised conflict in which it is estimated that as much as 10% of its population died and up to 40% were internally displaced. In light of the extreme scale of the destruction wrought by the war, it is somewhat surprising how successful the peace process has been. In 2001 a comprehensive political settlement, outlined in the Bougainville Peace Agreement, granted Bougainvil…
Tā, Vā, and Lā
Oceanic perspectives seldom appear in the geopolitical discourse of metropolitan powers, and the agency of Pacific Island states and peoples is often overlooked. Inspired by calls from political geographers for ‘a more ambitious geopolitical imagination’ (Sharp, 2013), and from Oceanic scholars ‘to examine indigenous epistemologies, ontologies and cosmological ideas and philosophes so that global conversations include local and indigenous underst…
From constructivist to critical engagements with peacebuilding
From a critical perspective, what might we learn from applying constructivism to peacebuilding? We analyse a common clash that arises in the context of peacebuilding: between ontological assumptions based on liberal individualism and those based on local relatedness. We find that this clash has both epistemological and methodological consequences for critical research on peacebuilding, which highlights why the shift to more reflexive understandin…
Different nightmares, shared dreams? Australia and New Zealand's intuitive alliance
Ordering the Islands? Pacific Responses to China’s Strategic Narratives
Metropolitan powers are concerned that China is seeking to influence Pacific Island countries and reshape Pacific Islands’ regional order in its favour. But there is a risk that the effectiveness of China’s efforts has been overinterpreted by metropolitan powers. In this article we analyse the effectiveness of one element of China’s activities: the deployment of narrative power. We do this by examining the reception and role of China’s strategic …
Security cooperation in the Pacific Islands
In the 2018 Boe Declaration, Pacific Islands Forum leaders recognized that the region is facing ‘an increasingly complex regional security environment’ and committed to ‘strengthening the existing regional security architecture’. Given uncertainty about the existence and nature of this architecture, we address the question: is there a security architecture in the region, or does security cooperation take a different shape? We find that security c…
The South Pacific
The term ‘arc of instability’ was first used in 1999 to describe the security challenges facing the South Pacific. It subsequently came to dominate Australian political discourse, although its veracity was critiqued. This article considers how Australia's political discourse about the region has evolved since 1999 and what impact this has had on Australia's relationships in the region. It begins by outlining why the arc of instability characteriz…
What role can decentralisation play in state-building? Lessons from Timor-Leste and Bougainville
Decentralisation may play a role in building new and post-conflict states; where liberal state institutions are often built before a transition from local to state-level modes of political organisation has occurred. Decentralisation can provide space to recognise local sociopolitical institutions via a ‘liberal–local hybrid’, which may assist state-building. This article draws on case studies of Timor-Leste and Bougainville to argue that decentra…
The United States as a 'Pacific Nation
In 2012, then United States (US) Secretary of State Hilary Clinton attended the leaders' meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum, the region's pre-eminent politics and security-focused multilateral institution. At the meeting, Clinton remarked that: 'I have said that the 21st century will be America's Pacific century, with an emphasis on Pacific', as the US is 'a Pacific nation'. In this article, we analyse how, in the decade since, US government di…
Money, Manipulation and Misunderstanding on Manus Island
The treatment of asylum seekers at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has attracted much international attention, but there has been little analysis of its local and transnational impact. This article investigates the repercussions for the communities on Manus Island, on domestic affairs in PNG, and on the relationship between PNG and Australia. Overall, it concludes that the costs arising from the money, manipu…
Nation-Building, Autonomy Arrangements, and Deferred Referendums
After a protracted war of secession in 2001, the Bougainville region of Papua New Guinea was granted autonomy and deferred a referendum on its political future. This article argues that the Bougainville case highlights the challenges posed by attempts to settle self-determination disputes using these tools. It considers the challenges posed by deferred referendums, principally how to reconcile competing interpretations of the identity and future …
Victors, Villains and Victims
In 2006 a security crisis in Timor-Leste caused the collapse of the police force, dismissal of almost half of the army and the internal displacement of 150,000 people. The roots of the crisis lay in a range of societal divisions that became salient owing
Friendly islands’ in an unfriendly system
Tonga became the 151st member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in July 2007. This article considers the issues that Tonga faced during its WTO accession process, and the potential impact of the reforms it has made in compliance with the terms of its accession. It notes that WTO membership may offer some benefits to Tonga, including improved market access for its exports and the provision of technical assistance. The taxation and regulatory r…
Patterns of predation by chimpanzees on red colobus monkeys in gombe national park, 1982–1991
Predatory patterns in wild chimpanzees are important evidence in the continuing debate about the role of hunting in the behavior of early hominids. Data are presented on the predator–prey ecology of red colobus monkeys ( Colobus badius tephrosceles ) and chimpanzees ( Pan troglodytes schweinfurthii ) in Gombe National Park, Tanzania, from 1982 through 1991. During this period chimpanzees were observed to kill 429 mammalian prey items, 350 of whic…
Knowledge management in education; enhancing learning and education
Transnationalism and the Development of the Deterritorialised Tongan Nation‐State
The Kingdom of Tonga is commonly referred to as a ‘small island developing state’, and is consequently said to experience challenges that hinder its development. Yet significant levels of Tongan migration – and subsequent remittances – have led commentators to challenge this pessimistic view. In particular, Tonga has been characterised as a ‘deterritorialised nation‐state’, whereby the ‘state’ remains the geographically bounded territory of Tonga…
Friendly islands’ in an unfriendly system
Tonga became the 151st member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in July 2007. This article considers the issues that Tonga faced during its WTO accession process, and the potential impact of the reforms it has made in compliance with the terms of its accession. It notes that WTO membership may offer some benefits to Tonga, including improved market access for its exports and the provision of technical assistance. The taxation and regulatory r…
Victors, Villains and Victims
In 2006 a security crisis in Timor-Leste caused the collapse of the police force, dismissal of almost half of the army and the internal displacement of 150,000 people. The roots of the crisis lay in a range of societal divisions that became salient owing
Building a liberal-local hybrid peace and state in Bougainville
There has been an increasing attempt to theorise the emergence of a liberal-local hybrid approach to state-building, which recognises the coexistence and interaction of liberal and local socio-political institutions. There has not yet been a sustained attempt to understand what occurs when a liberal-local approach is adopted from the outset of a state-building operation. This article seeks to fill this gap by applying the literature to the state-…
A liberal-local hybrid peace project in action? The increasing engagement between the local and liberal in Timor-Leste
The liberal peace project has dominated state-building operations since the end of the Cold War, including in Timor-Leste. However, the attempt to institutionalise the liberal peace faced significant challenges in Timor-Leste's fragmented subsistence-based society. This resulted in the creation of shallowly rooted and poorly-understood liberal state institutions that were disconnected from the majority of Timorese, who continued to follow their l…
Ten Years of Peace
Between 1989 and 1997 Bougainville endured a complex secessionist war and localised conflict in which it is estimated that as much as 10% of its population died and up to 40% were internally displaced. In light of the extreme scale of the destruction wrought by the war, it is somewhat surprising how successful the peace process has been. In 2001 a comprehensive political settlement, outlined in the Bougainville Peace Agreement, granted Bougainvil…
What role can decentralisation play in state-building? Lessons from Timor-Leste and Bougainville
Decentralisation may play a role in building new and post-conflict states; where liberal state institutions are often built before a transition from local to state-level modes of political organisation has occurred. Decentralisation can provide space to recognise local sociopolitical institutions via a ‘liberal–local hybrid’, which may assist state-building. This article draws on case studies of Timor-Leste and Bougainville to argue that decentra…
Nation-Building, Autonomy Arrangements, and Deferred Referendums
After a protracted war of secession in 2001, the Bougainville region of Papua New Guinea was granted autonomy and deferred a referendum on its political future. This article argues that the Bougainville case highlights the challenges posed by attempts to settle self-determination disputes using these tools. It considers the challenges posed by deferred referendums, principally how to reconcile competing interpretations of the identity and future …
Unipolar Anxieties
As a consequence of its membership of a US ‐centred global alliance network, A ustralia's regional obligations in the S outh P acific are as pertinent to R egional A ssistance M ission to S olomon I slands's drawdown as they were to its inception. C anberra's imperatives in the P acific have been stabilization and the exclusion of hostile interests. Three challenges—the rise of C hina, the I slamic S tate insurgency, and the democratic discontinu…
The South Pacific
The term ‘arc of instability’ was first used in 1999 to describe the security challenges facing the South Pacific. It subsequently came to dominate Australian political discourse, although its veracity was critiqued. This article considers how Australia's political discourse about the region has evolved since 1999 and what impact this has had on Australia's relationships in the region. It begins by outlining why the arc of instability characteriz…
How important is participatory constitution-making? Lessons from Timor-Leste and Bougainville
How can fragmented or divided post-conflict societies best be accommodated and adjust to state structures in order to achieve sustainable peace? Reflecting on the contrary experiences of Timor-Leste and Bougainville, an autonomous region of Papua New Guinea, this article argues the answer to this question rests partly on the role that participatory constitution-making can play in state-building, nation-building and peace-building. Constitution-ma…
Political reconciliation in Timor Leste, Solomon Islands and Bougainville
In recent years, the study and practice of political reconciliation has experienced a turn to hybridity. This turn has been defined by the increased rate at which liberal international and local peacebuilding practices, and their underlying ideas, have become merged, integrated or co-located in time and space. While hybrid approaches to reconciliation have been praised as an effective means of engaging local populations in peacebuilding operation…
Is ‘good enough’ peacebuilding good enough? The potential and pitfalls of the local turn in peacebuilding in Timor-Leste
There is a palpable sense of humility within the United Nations and other international institutions regarding peacebuilding. Rather than seeking to implement the liberal peace, they now pursue the more modest goal of ‘good enough’ outcomes. This shift reflects a growing consensus in the critical literature that space needs to be provided for the local agency that will ultimately determine the outcomes of peacebuilding. At first blush this emphas…
Money, Manipulation and Misunderstanding on Manus Island
The treatment of asylum seekers at the Manus Island Regional Processing Centre in Papua New Guinea (PNG) has attracted much international attention, but there has been little analysis of its local and transnational impact. This article investigates the repercussions for the communities on Manus Island, on domestic affairs in PNG, and on the relationship between PNG and Australia. Overall, it concludes that the costs arising from the money, manipu…
Reconceiving the Roles of Religious Civil Society Organizations in Transitional Justice
In transitional justice (TJ) scholarship, civil society is ordinarily conceived as a unified, homogeneous and secular entity that is simultaneously distinct from and complementary to the state. This article complicates these assumptions by examining the roles of faith-based organizations and actors in TJ processes in Timor-Leste, the Solomon Islands and Bougainville. It shows that civil society activity in these contexts is diverse and heterogene…
Hybridity in peacebuilding and development
The concept of hybridity has been used in numerous ways by scholars across a range of disciplines to generate important analytical and methodological insights. Its most recent application in the social sciences has also attracted powerful critiques that have highlighted its limitations and challenged its continuing usage. This article, which introduces the collection on Critical Hybridity in Peacebuilding and Development, examines whether the val…
From constructivist to critical engagements with peacebuilding
From a critical perspective, what might we learn from applying constructivism to peacebuilding? We analyse a common clash that arises in the context of peacebuilding: between ontological assumptions based on liberal individualism and those based on local relatedness. We find that this clash has both epistemological and methodological consequences for critical research on peacebuilding, which highlights why the shift to more reflexive understandin…
Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development
Hybridity on the Ground in Peacebuilding and Development engages with the possibilities and pitfalls of the increasingly popular notion of hybridity. The hybridity concept has been embraced by scholars and practitioners in response to the social and institutional complexities of peacebuilding and development practice. In particular, the concept appears well-suited to making
Special issue on ‘reconceiving civil society and transitional justice
This article, and the special issue it introduces, joins an emerging conversation about the role of civil society in transitional justice (TJ). Although civil society organisations play an integral role in the pursuit of TJ in conflict-affected societies, the literature lacks a comprehensive conceptualisation of the diversity and complexity of these roles. Building on an interdisciplinary workshop at the Australian National University in Septembe…
The role of ‘uncivil’ society in transitional justice
Transitional justice (TJ) scholarship and practice often pins much hope on civil society. It generally assumes that civil society organisations demonstrate ‘civility’, have broad-based memberships, support liberal democratic values and promote TJ approaches based on liberal-legal justice strategies. Yet there is nothing inherently virtuous about civil society and in conflict-affected societies it often lacks these desired properties; it can be un…
Civil Society and Transitional Justice in Asia and the Pacific
Over the last two decades, civil society has helped catalyse responses to the legacies of violent conflicts and oppressive political regimes in Asia and the Pacific. Civil society has advocated for the establishment of criminal trials and truth commissions, monitored their operations and pushed for take-up of their recommendations. It has also initiated community-based
Displaced security? The relationships, routines and rhythms of peacebuilding interveners
This article considers what treating individual international interveners engaged in peacebuilding work as referent objects can tell us about emplaced security. This is important because individual interveners are diverse, embodied agents who can impact the agency, peace and security of conflict-affected populations. It argues that applying an ontological security lens can provide a partial explanation for why interveners develop narratives and p…
Evaluating the Legacy of State-building in Timor-Leste
With the benefit of almost 20 years of hindsight, in this article we evaluate the legacy of state-building in Timor-Leste. We find that much of the academic critique of the state-building mission has proven to be largely accurate: political and economic development has indeed been challenged by the legacy of key decisions made during the early state-building process. First, the focus on centralised state institutions has led to the underdevelopme…
Political science (41 works) · Law (34 works) · Sociology (32 works) · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs (31 works) · Law (29 works) · Politics (27 works) · Peacebuilding and International Security (19 works) · Political economy (19 works) · Economics (16 works) · Geography (15 works)