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As a catalyst of both change and complexity, Brexit prompts a re-think on the common focus in island studies on boundaries, borders and dichotomies of core–periphery that unsettle/disrupt static tropes of island insularity and dependence. Framed within the relational turn in island studies, this paper conceptualises resilience as a 'new political reality' in the broader geopolitical context of Brexit and tourism-dependent island environments. The sheer complexity of Brexit processes and outcomes necessitate a different way of thinking about resilience as a post-liberal episteme that actively responds to complex life. Research findings show, rather than being a barrier to change complexity presents new opportunities for island tourism engagement and self-organising adaptivity. The implications of which reflect the growing enrolment of tourism in international and domestic relations through an understanding of tourism as a geopolitical practice in the broader discourses of nation building and territorialization. Brexit affects the United Kingdom's 14 Overseas Territories (OTs), most of which are islands, on a number of fronts including trade, security, access, mobility, identity and tourism. Methodology using primary and secondary literature, semi-structured interviews and ethnographic case study of Pitcairn Island advance the notion 'revisionary core–periphery' to positively foreground resilience as an active force and, in turn examine resilience actions that stem from preparedness (or not) in this relationship. Britain's OTs' in negotiating the Brexit machinery show an ability to transform diplomatic practices through rapid response and engagement that counters the limiting of dependency threatened by political decisions of their parent state. This creates a discursive shift from the mantra of small island vulnerability while the Pitcairn Island case study expands the idea of tourism as an agent of resilience through economic diversity and core–periphery realignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on an exploratory study into critical success factors as they are perceived by Māori small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME) owners in the Otago/Southland regions of New Zealand. We draw on interview responses from 11 Māori business owners and four representatives of SME support services. The aim of this study is to explore Māori SME characteristics in terms of the critical success factors that help or hinder the achievement of their business aspirations. The findings indicate three main thematic concerns: Māori SME owners' perception of being Māori impacts on how they position themselves as a business; the regional business environment has particular features that impact in a particular way on Māori SMEs; and, notions of business strategy are culturally nuanced. We propose that a culturally constituted regional business support system will better enable Māori SMEs to achieve their aspirations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Islands have been described in terms of their ‘nervous duality’. This statement aptly describes Pitcairn Island, the last remaining British Overseas Territory and smallest jurisdiction in the Pacific. By its very existence as ‘colonial confetti’ Pitcairn denotes the concept of cultural realignment as it relates to relationships of power. Geographically isolated, accessible only by sea and with a population of less than fifty, Pitcairn is famous as the refuge of Bounty mutineers and Polynesians who settled the island in 1790. But Pitcairn’s more contemporary notoriety stems from ‘Operation Unique’, the United Kingdom’s investigation of sexual abuse against women and subsequent trials held on the island in 2004. The court case became a battle over the island’s way of life and a contested case of imperial domination over a tiny, vulnerable community. The trials were a critical point of (dis)juncture that threatened permanence of island place, while global media negatively branded Pitcairn as an island dystopia. The latter has prompted this article’s examination of current plans to grow tourism and attract new immigrants to Pitcairn. As a tool of analysis cultural realignment facilitates an understanding of the dynamics leading to community resilience, the restoration and re-imaging of island place/space, and the changing significances of Pitcairn’s sociopolitical and cultural landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past few decades the Pacific region has undergone much change through decolonisation and postcolonial (re)adjustment. Political change in new and existing Pacific nations is marked by efforts to reconceptualise identities, histories and futures. Descriptions of islands as fragile, small, peripheral and dependent are often taken for granted; reiterated within a discourse of 'vulnerability'. Such rhetoric sets up a perception of what constructs 'islandness' or island societies. This article uses a case study of Pitcairn Island, the last remaining British Overseas Territory in the Pacific, to argue for a theorisation of social capital as a counternarrative to such discourse. It contends that an understanding of the historical trajectories of sustainable livelihoods (SL) show that strengths emerge from livelihood strategies specifically adapted to such isolated places. This moves beyond the spatial rhetoric of colonial and postcolonial theory by showing how the materiality of place and people are fundamental parts of colonial and postcolonial formations in the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]