This book is the first to draw extensively on the recently released highly classified notes of the cabinet room discussions of successive Australian Governments from 1950 to the mid-1970s and details the changing attitude of the nations leaders towards the place of Papua New Guinea in Australias defence and security outlook.

The book identifies structures, norms, practices and techniques that have either fuelled or moderated conflicts. As such, it is an essential read for students and scholars of international relations, peace and conflict studies and Asia Pacific studies.

This work offers important perspectives on the violence and unrest that gripped Solomon Islands between late 1998 and mid-2003.

This volume of the Peacebuilding Compared Project examines the sources of the armed conflict and coup in the Solomon Islands before and after the turn of the millennium. The Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) has been an intensive peacekeeping operation, concentrating on building ‘core pillars’ of the modern state.

Following a bloody civil war, peace consolidated slowly and sequentially in Bougainville. That sequence was of both a top-down architecture of credible commitment in a formal peace process and layer upon layer of bottom-up reconciliation. Reconciliation was based on indigenous traditions of peacemaking, on training in restorative justice principles and on innovation in womens’ peacebuilding.

Less than five kilometres from Australia's most northern islands in the Torres Strait lies the southern coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG). The people living on the PNG side of the border along the South Fly coast live in abject poverty, with a near total absence of services and infrastructure. The disparity in income, housing and health outcomes when compared with their nearby neighbours and relatives in the Torres Strait Islands, is extreme.