ABSTRACT
In recent decades the western Pacific has been the site of considerable violent conflict and instability. The region has played host to a ten-year secessionist struggle on Bougainville in Papua New Guinea (PNG), a five-year low-level civil war in neighbouring Solomon Islands, a resurgence of localised armed conflict in parts of the PNG highlands, and a number of less serious episodes of social unrest in Vanuatu and New Caledonia. These conflicts, along with those in Indonesia on the region’s western edge and in Fiji at its eastern fringe, have given rise to depictions of the region as an ‘arc of instability’ inhabited by states at various stages of ‘failure’.
