Coups, conflicts and crises: The new Pacific way?

Race and Class

Volumn 42, Issue 4, 2001, Pages 1-16

  Finin, Gerard A ^a   Wesley Smith, Terence ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF HAWAII   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0035531948     PISSN: 03063968     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0306396801424001     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. A useful general history is Judith A. Bennett, Wealth of the Solomons: a history of a Pacific archipelago, 1800-1978. Pacific Islands Monograph Series no. 3 (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1987).
2. It is perhaps useful to recall that the Pacific islands region saw its first coup in 1893, when the government of Hawai'i was overthrown. Convinced that a newly proposed Constitution would threaten business interests, a small group of white settlers calling themselves the 'Committee of Public Safety' forcibly took control of government buildings and deposed Queen Liliuokalani, who chose to avoid bloodshed. Representatives of the US government stationed in Hawai'i were complicit in the coup. This usurpation of the rule of law was in time accepted by the United States. The economic prosperity which followed, based primarily on agriculture, military expenditures and tourism, augured well for generations of island residents, save one group: the indigenous Hawaiians.
3. Anthony Regan, 'Causes and course of the Bougainville conflict', Journal of Pacific History (Vol. 33, no. 3, 1998), pp. 269-85.
4. These countries have promoted bilateral and multilateral aid programmes advocating economic growth at any cost and have tended to neglect sensitive issues of culture and tradition.
5. Samoa refers to the former 'Western Samoa'.
6. French Polynesia, New Caledonia, Wallis and Futuna are overseas territories of the Republic of France and Rapanui is governed by Chile.
7. See, for example, K. R. Howe, Robert C. Kiste and Brij V. Lal (eds), Tides of History: the Pacific Islands in the twentieth century (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1994).
8. Brij V. Lal, Broken Waves: a history of the Fiji Islands in the twentieth century. Pacific Islands Monograph Series no. 11 (Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1992).
9. Geoffrey M. White and Lamont Lindstrom (eds), Chiefs Today: traditional Pacific leadership and the postcolonial state (Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 231.
10. 'Wandering between two worlds', Pacific Islands Report (2 June 2000): http://pidp.ewc.hawaii.edu/PIReport/2000/June/06-02upsup2.htm
11. See, for example, A. Haroon Akram-Lodhi (ed.), Confronting Fiji Futures (Canberra, Asia Pacific Press, 2000).
12. New York Times (8 June 2000).
13. Moreover, while Rushdie admires the California success story of Americans of South Asian ancestry working in Silicon Valley (which took generations of struggle to achieve), he overlooks the ongoing marginalisation of huge numbers of North America's indigenous peoples.
14. Pacific Islands Report (9 June 2000).
15. A New Oceania: rediscovering our sea of islands (Suva, School of Social and Economic Development, University of the South Pacific, 1993), p. 4.
16. 'An analysis of the current political crisis in Fiji', Pacific Islands Report (22 May 2000): http://pidp.ewc.hawaii.edu/PIReport/2000/May/05-22-up2.htm
17. 'The Pacific Islands and the globalisation agenda', The Contemporary Pacific (Vol. 12, no. 1, spring 2000), pp. 177-92.
18. For more detailed analysis of these trends, see the special issue on 'Asia in the Pacific', The Contemporary Pacific, op. cit.