Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Papua New Guinea Politics and government 1975-'

Bougainville is part of the North Solomons Province of Papua New Guinea and is located nearly 1,000 kilometres from Port Moresby (refer to maps on pages 3 and 4). In November 1988, a dispute at the Panguna copper mine on the island between landowner s and the owners of the mine, Bougainville Copper Limited (BCL), erupted into violence. The subsequent formation of the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and demands for secession led to the most serious political and economic problems facing Papua New Guinea (PNG) since independence was granted in 1975. In the four years since the initial trouble began, more than 1,500 people have been killed - in military conflict on the islands of Bougainville and Buka, and the mine, which until 1989 provided employment for 3,500 people, has closed.1 A blockade of Bougainville by Guinea Defence Force (PNGDF) resulted in shortages of food, fuel and the Papua New medical supplies to the island, the latter resulting in the deaths of 3,000 innocent civilians.2 Terence Wesley-Sm ith of the University of Hawaii writes, " Except for the independence struggle in Irian Jaya, no other conflict in the Pacific Islands region has produced this level of human suffering since World War 11.3 The Namaliu Government and the country's image abroad were weakened by allegations of human rights abuses and indiscipline amongst the security forces. The role of the Australian Government, largely through its training of military personnel and the supply of military hardware to the PNGDF, has also been placed under scrutiny by a Commonwealth parliamentary committee and human rights activists. The dispute has had a significant impact on the economy of the mainland. Closure of the mine resulted in the loss of approximately 40 per cent of export earnings for the country and 17 per cent of the Government's budget revenue. The blockade of Bougainville led to the loss of export earnings from cocoa (45 per cent of PNG's total cocoa production), copra (the province was the second highest producers of copra) and timber. The loss of national income from the mine and other cash crops forced the Government to announce in January 1990 a 10 per cent devaluation of the kina, cuts in government recurrent spending and a firmer line on wage increases.

My thesis addresses how Christianity can constitute itself as a creative force and a form of governance across different scales. I carried out 12 months of fieldwork between 2013 and 2015 in Papua New Guinea's National Parliament (Port Moresby). My interlocutors were bureaucrats, liberal professionals and pastors who formed a group known as the Unity Team. The Unity Team, spearheaded by the Speaker of the 9th Parliament, Hon. Theodor Zurenuoc, were responsible for controversial initiatives, such as the destruction and dismantling of traditional carvings from Parliament in 2013, which they considered ungodly and evil, and the placement of a donated KJV Bible in the chamber of Parliament in 2015. My interlocutors regard Christianity as central to eliciting modern subjects and institutions. They consider Christianity to be a universal form of discernment, contrasted to particularistic forms of knowing and relating which are thought to create corruption and low institutional performance. I show how the Unity Team regarded Christianity as more than a way of doing away with satanic forces and building a Christian self. They expected Christianity to be a frame of reference informing work ethics, infusing citizenship and, finally, productive of a public and national realm. By exploring Christianity ethnographically, I offer a contribution to Anthropological discussions concerning politics, bureaucracy, citizenship, and nation-making.

Most histories of Australian-American relations in the period immediately after the war mention, at least in passing, the curious phenomenon of Australia at tempting to bargain with the United States over the US’ rights to use a base which the Americans themselves had built on Australian mandated territory in the process of beating back the Japanese from Australian shores. Manus Island, previously shrouded in obscruity, became the focus of an extended debate both in parliament and in the press over the state of Australia's relations with the USA and whether or not Dr. Evatt's 'wheeling and dealing' on the matter had contributed to a perceived deterioration in the Australian-US relationship, considered to have been so close during the war.

The Papuan Official Collection is a unique colonial collection assembled between 1907 and 1938 by government officers of the Australian administration of the Territory of Papua. It represents the first instance in the world where a colonial government made ethnographic collecting a requisite duty of its field officers. This unusual turn of events came at the insistence of Papua's first and longest serving Lieutenant-Governor, J.H.P. Murray, who administered the colony for over three decades. The story of how Murray came to establish an official government collection, and its subsequent formation, interpretation, and display over several decades, provides a case study par excellence for examining the complex relationship between colonialism, collecting and anthropology, which emerged over the course of the twentieth century. This study explores the genesis and history of the Papuan Official Collection, and situates it within the wider rubric of Australian colonialism. It establishes Murray as one of the earliest colonial governors in the world to implement, and publically advocate for, anthropology as a tool for colonial administration. It charts the rise of colonial discourses that linked loss of culture to physical demise in Pacific populations, and documents its influence on Australian colonial policy. Its findings suggest that the protection, preservation and management of Indigenous cultural heritage should not be considered a sideline of Australian colonial policy in Papua, but rather one of its most defining features. Over the course of its lifespan the Papuan Official Collection has been displayed in four different museums providing an opportunity to examine how a fixed body of objects (the collection) moved across time and space, to be re-interpreted into different conceptual frameworks: as curios and antiquities; ethnographic artefacts; scientific specimens; artworks; and, finally, as historic objects. My institutional history of the POC cautions against the assumption that colonial collections were always used as uncontested propaganda, which metropolitan museums were content to display on behalf of the imperial mission. While the Murray administration in Papua was able to provide goods and information to the various museums which housed the Collection, each institution had its own competing agendas and the relationship was not always a smooth one.

This thesis is an examination of the role of armed sub-state actors in situations where the state is weak or failing. There is a substantial body of literature on state failure and on the role of warlords. For the most part there are considerable problems with the definitions of both concepts and also strongly negative assumptions about the consequences of state failure and the role of warlords. It is suggested in this study that warlordism can be a type of transitional leadership for traditional societies, especially those where institutional structures are weak or even non-existent. For these traditional societies a transitional leader may emerge when the traditional community is threatened, a figure that might otherwise be described as a warlord. This thesis proposes to these two hypotheses. First, this thesis contends that rather than warlords being solely the product of state failure or collapse, those armed sub-state actors so labelled as "warlords" are also the result of the disruption to traditional society caused by the expansion of state power. The second hypothesis of this research project is that the focus on the apparent institutional weaknesses of the central government, and thus the mechanisms judged necessary for the functioning of the state, particularly in the delivery of essential public goods, overlooks other more enduring localised sources of legitimacy and control within countries with otherwise weak or non-existent national governmental institutions. The case studies analysing the types of warlordism in Papua New Guinea and Afghanistan highlight how state disruption distorted traditional elite structures leading to warlordism emerging quite distinctive forms in both countries. An assessment of the conduct of warlordism in both cases studies illustrates how these warlords have taken on on part of the traditional habits of leadership in their societies. The distortions attributable to the state have altered their behaviour, though, to the extent that the inclination and ability to provide public goods is severely constrained.

This study examines the interaction between the politics of a Papua New Guinea Highlands society, the Simbu, and the colonially introduced state. It does so by analysing patterns of political competition in a study of dynamic change in four major stages, the precolonial, the colonial, decolonizing and post-colonial periods. In order to analyse this interaction, it seeks to answer the basic questions about politics - how people gain power and become politicians, how they maintain power once they have it, and whether the answers to these questions have differed in these time periods. In particular, it examines the extent to which indigenous social structures, ideologies and political techniques are used in the new state structures, and thus the degree to which the introduced institutions have been adapted by the Simbu. The interaction between indigenous, precolonial institutions and the state and its conventions are revealed by a study of the ideologies used in the Simbu political world. In the different political arenas which existed in the different time periods quite distinct talents have been displayed and appeals made. The Simbu ideologies of the solidarity of clans which have strong, hereditary leaders are used selectively according to the context. The aggressive battlefield leader of precolonial times was not appropriate in the enforced peace of the colonial era, but was revived in the insecure period of decolonization. Ideologies of the manipulation of wealth being the basis for prestige, power and influence were expanded upon in the colonial context, and have been further adapted in the post-colonial context to justify the use of massive financial and other resources in attempting to build personalised followings on a large scale. The ideology of the leader as a man of knowledge is also claimed by some. All these claims have at different times had some appeal and contributed to the search for bases of power, but no single model of Simbu leadership and society is applicable. The elements of this variety of political models can be found in the adaptivity of Simbu tradition. Simbu ideologies of solidarity are regularly expressed in bloc voting patterns by clans, tribes and sometimes whole language groups, and in the clan warfare which resumed in the late colonial period. The techniques and strategies of precolonial leadership, of the leader using resources from one sphere in another and gaining prestige from this interstitial role, are reinvented in many contexts in the contemporary state of PNG. These processes are demonstrated in numerous case studies of the transitional politics from precolonial Simbu to the contemporary period, with particular focus on the decade straddling the Independence of Papua New Guinea, and the creation of an elected provincial government. Political competition and voter responses are analysed in the context of three national and one provincial election, and the struggles for control of the area's coffee industry. Despite the different scale of the political arenas explored in different time periods, and the rapid increases in the political resources available, the political techniques and stategies of Simbu remained essentially the same* There are also continuities in political beliefs and the range of concepts found within Simbu's variegated political models. Despite the political changes, there has been continuity in Simbu's political culture. Simbu values have been used within the introduced state, just as resources from the state have been used within indigenous structures competition and conflicts. The process is thus one of interpenetration, with the state co-opted into Simbu political competition.

This thesis is a study of the role Bougainville women played in the peace process during and after the period of the civil war in Bougainville. The civil war developed between the Papua New Guinea Security Forces (PNG SF) and its ally, the Bougainville Resistance Force (BRF), against the Bougainville Revolutionary Army (BRA) from late 1989 to 1998. The issues which led to the civil war were wide-ranging, including economic and political problems between the people of Bougainville and the Government of Papua New Guinea, most notably involving the Panguna landowners in struggles over copper mining on their land in Central Bougainville. Conflict resolution processes involved peacemakers, negotiators and mediators from within Bougainville and Papua New Guinea, and from the international community including Australia, New Zealand, Pacific Island countries, (Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji), the European Community and the United Nations Peace Observers Mission. Assistance came from government and non-government organizations from all these sources. But what was especially striking was Bougainvillean women's own involvement in the peace process at the village community, regional, national and international levels. This thesis explores how and why this happened. First, women initiated peace activities at the village community level during the period of intense fighting between the warring factions in the early 1990s. Then, following the development of the formal peace process, as agreements were signed and implemented by Bougainvillean and Papua New Guinean Government leaders and officials, women gradually made their way into the regional, official level of the peace process. While some men used arguments about "culture" and "tradition" to attempt to marginalize women's participation in the peace process, women, on the other hand, used it to promote their peace efforts. Rejecting the argument that tradition relegated women to domesticity, as wives and mothers, women celebrated their powerful roles as "mothers of the land" and in particular their status in matrilineal traditions. In such traditions, some women (like men) had chiefly status and women in general were seen as mothers of the matrilineage, its land, valuables, ceremonies, knowledge and history. Land is intimately linked to women and their capacity to regenerate people. Men are identified as fathers of such cultural wealth and can publicly represent their matrilineage but their roles depend on women's agreement and prior authority. Women saw their role in peacemaking as one of both reviving their matrilineal status and making matriliny newly relevant in the modern context of Bougainville society. The connection and interaction between their matrilineal and modern roles, within Christianity, education and the professions were consciously and consummately blended together, so that women became powerful agents for making peace in Bougainville.