This book provides up-to-date surveys of critical policy issues for Papua New Guinea across a range of fields, from elections and politics, decentralisation, and crime and corruption, to PNG’s economic trajectory and household living standards, to uneven development, communication and the media.

In a previous volume, State and Society in Papua New Guinea: The First Twenty-Five Years (2001, reprinted by ANU E Press in 2004), a collection of papers by the author published between 1971 and 2001 was put together to mark Papua New Guinea’s first 25 years as an independent state. This volume presents a collection of papers written between 2001 and 2021, which update the story of political and social development in Papua New Guinea in the first two decades of the twenty-first century.

In 2016, Gordon Peake takes on a role with the government of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, navigating the challenges of trying to stand up new government systems. Away from the office he travels with former rebels, follows an anthropologist's ghost and visits landmarks from the region’s conflict. In 2019, he witnesses euphoria as the people of Bougainville vote in a referendum on their future. Out of these encounters Unsung Land, Aspiring Nation: Journeys in Bougainville examinines this potential nation-in-waiting.

This book examines the relevance of anti-corruption discourse in Papua New Guinea. Despite increased international, national and local efforts to address corruption over the past two decades, many fear that levels of corruption continue to rise largely unabated.

An insightful and candid memoir from one of Papua New Guinea's founding fathers. This compelling memoir of Julius Chan's private and political lives offers a rare insight into the building of a nation and the extraordinary challenges facing Papua New Guinea.

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.

Twenty-five years after independence, Papua New Guinea is beset by social, economic, and political problems: poverty and inequality, a young and expanding population, a stagnant economy, corruption, and rising crime. Law and Order in a Weak State charts not only the problems of crime and lawlessness in Papua New Guinea but also the possibilities for constructive, pragmatic solutions.

In 2019, Solomon Islands made international headlines when the country severed its decades-old alliance with Taiwan in exchange for a partnership with Beijing. The decision prompted international condemnation and terrified Australian security experts, who feared Australia's historical Pacific advantage would come unstuck. In Divided Isles, Edward Cavanough explains how the switch played out on the ground and its extraordinary potential consequences.

The Solomon Islands Campaign of World War II has been the subject of many published historical accounts. Most of these accounts present an ‘outsider’ perspective with limited reference to the contribution of indigenous Solomon Islanders as coastwatchers, scouts, carriers and labourers under the Royal Australian Navy and other Allied military units. Kwai retells the same history from an indigenous perspective.

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

The Manipulation of Custom is the first full and comprehensive account of the crisis that has gripped the Solomon Islands since 1998, with a critical review of the major interpretations and an investigation of the underlying causes and analyses of the post-coup period up to the arrival of RAMSI in July 2003.

Happy Isles in Crisis traces the deep historical roots of the crisis of discontent, disaffection and dissatisfaction among the sometimes disparate communities of the Solomon Islands over land and resources, over the complex entwinement of traditional culture and modern society, and over poor governance and poor economic performance.

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.

Politics and State Building in Solomon Islands examines a crisis moment in recent Solomon Islands history. Using the case of Solomon Islands, this book raises fundamental questions about the nature of 'cooperative intervention' as a vehicle for state building, asking whether it should be construed as a mainly technical endeavour or whether it is unavoidably a political undertaking with political consequences.