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Prescriptive analyses of small arms and light weapons (salw) transfer regimes have been advanced, but comparative assessment of the selling and importing of this weaponry is undeveloped. That includes examples of major arms sellers transferring this weaponry into locations embroiled in armed conflict. After surveying existing salw restraints and their shortcomings, the extent to which due diligence risk considerations shape relevant arms selling conduct is considered. Existing explanatory frameworks discussed are found incomplete. Accordingly a model is outlined addressing impediments to the due diligence risk assessments required to meet international humanitarian and human rights legal obligations. For salw sellers, they include executive dominance of sale purchase decisions; strategic imperatives; economic and commercial incentives; and capacity to conduct independent auditing of arms sales conduct. Within conflict afflicted recipient locations, they include defective public accountability; corruption; impunity; and inability to effect peaceful dispute settlement. Utilising these determinants, dyads embracing major salw sellers transferring this weaponry into locations of persisting armed conflict are considered.

Ensuring humanitarian law compliance and repression of its violations receives constant reiteration but to mixed effect. While international judicial, jurisprudential and investigatory modalities have advanced, requisite State level competencies exhibit marked variability. This paper devotes most attention to disadvantaged States – those that, for whatever reason, lack the judicial, institutional or administrative capacity to ensure humanitarian law compliance and repression of its violations. Here a profile of 46 States is selected for review, 20 of which are identified as impacted by previous or continuing forms of armed conflict. Data from the World Justice Project’s 2020 Rule of Law Index is utilised. Chosen indicators assess individual State legislative, judicial, due process, and criminal investigatory capacities as perceived and recorded by local publics and individual experts. A comparative evaluation of this data reveals differences within profiles of disadvantaged States. They are investigated to better comprehend humanitarian law compliance challenges facing such States. They include international cooperation, utilisation of amnesties, and the conduct of armed non-state actors. The paper’s central thesis is that humanitarian law compliance, and repression of its violations, remains inadequate without remediation of the capacity impediments evident in disadvantaged States.

Growing in range and urgency, humanitarian needs now pose increasingly acute questions for national security policy formulation. Whether over forced migration, food scarcity or nefarious electronic penetration, state security preferences face uneasy accommodations with individual needs be it for child survival, basic sustenance or rights to privacy. This paper deliberates a further field of increasingly apparent value contest: that involving the transfer, diversion and lethal use of small arms and light weapons (SALW). After outlining the scale of this phenomenon, existing regulatory mechanisms over SALW transfers are assessed. It is argued that these controls are inadequate, a deficiency that is embedded within a range of inter-linked disjunctions. They are outlined in a model that is evaluated against empirical findings. Where SALW control inadequacy is causally connected to the disjunctive model, it is argued, current levels of SALW-induced casualties are unlikely to abate. The paper concludes ...

Compared to nuclear weapons, chemical and biological weapons or advanced conventional weapons systems, such as missiles, small arms and light weapons (SALW) and the ammunition required to render them lethal, have received less attention from arms control analysts. Accordingly the focus of this commentary is upon two particular inadequacies identified within the existing SALW restraint repertoire. They include, first, a failure to have SALW ammunition designated as an objective deserving explicit restraint designation and, secondly, persisting and largely unresolved state differences over controlling supplies of this weaponry to armed non-state actors. Both concerns illustrate how a use of consensus procedures within relevant rule formulation has favoured the interests of major SALW suppliers. The two deficiencies identified are considered destabilising given their continued capacity to degrade restraints designed to restrict deployments of this long-lasting weaponry—particularly within locations exhibiting limited forms of state capacity. The scope for existing legal mechanisms to remedy these deficiencies is examined, as is their potential to induce enhanced compliance and implementation.

This title is a fully revised, expanded and updated collection to that first published in 2009. The 27 country studies provided now importantly include West Papua and Timor Leste, while of the 16 c...

Colin James is one of New Zealand’s most experienced and respected journalists. This publication joins others where he has reflected upon his country’s politics, economics, social life and internat...

Analysis of recovery from internal conflict has neglected difficult, but evident, problems of regime resistance to refurbishment of state institutions. How widespread is such resistance, what are its causes and how might it be remedied? Frequently the problem is attributed to ‘lack of political will’ but that generality raises more questions than answers. This article investigates manifestations of regime resistance to institutional refurbishment, how they buttress the pursuit of private interest to the detriment of collective need, and the difficult challenges confronting reform processes whether driven by internal political demand or forms of external assistance. The thesis advanced is that institutional refurbishment within states recovering from internal conflict is critically dependent on intermediate relationships that evolve between ruling authorities and their publics. Here the organization and management of public grievances is critical.

Giff Johnson is a long-established journalist based in the Marshall Islands and has an authoritative record of reporting on Micronesia. This self-published collection comprises a series of blogs pr...

Jon Fraenkel and Stewart Firth (eds), From Election to Coup in Fiji: the 2006 campaign and its aftermath. Edited by Jon Fraenkel and Stewart Firth. Canberra, ANU E Press and Asia Pacific Press, 200...

The analytics and practice of internal security sector reform following conflict remain unsettled and controversial. This has witnessed unresolved debate over the contending demands of state and hu...

Accurate judgement about the conduct and analysis of foreign relations requires recognition of a persisting, but altering dualism evident between the collaborative interest and sovereign preferences. Scope for bridging this divide is discussed in relation to principles of reciprocity, deliberation and justification. However such opportunities are challenged and undermined by current United States policy towards multilateralism, the three instances discussed including American policy towards nuclear non-proliferation, the International Criminal Court, and development assistance. The paper then addresses New Zealand's support for multilateralism, how contrasting Prime Ministers have articulated that interest, and the reduced likelihood of New Zealand making poor foreign relations judgement calls by sustaining it.

(1994). The United Nations and Asia‐Pacific: An overview. The Pacific Review: Vol. 7, No. 3, pp. 245-260.

(1993). A model of global democracy? Interdisciplinary Peace Research: Vol. 5, No. 1, pp. 89-100.

(1999). Book Review: Jim Rolfe (ed.), Unresolved Futures: Comprehensive Security in the Asia-Pacific (Wellington: Centre for Strategic Studies, 1995), pp. xiv, 120, $15.00. Political Science: Vol. 50, Local Government in New Zealand, pp. 293-295.

The 37th Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) witnessed some painful political inflammation in 2006. Its October annual heads of government meeting, held in Fiji, saw Australian prime minister John Howard face a Melanesian wall of resentment. This was instigated by a row that erupted over former Solomon Islands attorney general Julian Moti, an Australian lawyer facing extradition over child sex charges, who was sheltered by Solomon Island prime minister Manasseh Sogavare and his Papua New Guinea counterpart, Sir Michael Somare. With Australian impatience and willingness to assert aid conditionality, the temperature rose sharply. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer claimed that taxpayers deserved a far better return for what had been invested in the region.

Interpreting Corruption: culture and politics in the Pacific Islands. By Peter Larmour. Honolulu, University of Hawai‘i Press, 2012. xxiii + 188 pp., notes, bibliog., index. ISBN978-0-8248-3514-9, ...

The conflict on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea was easily the worst tragedy to befall the South West Pacific since World War II. Between ten and fifteen thousand lives were lost, many others traumatised and uprooted, and the territory's social and economic structure devastated. A peace process under way since 1997 has made tangible progress, but many years of physical repair, social reconstruction, and psychological healing are needed before Bougainville can consign its tragedies to the past. After outlining the conflict's causes, the paper will address the reasons for its prolonged stalemate and resistance to settlement. The peace process is evaluated, with the identities and functions of the non-state actors most immediately involved explained. Bougainville's distinctive ethnic configuration within a Melanesian setting, where lines of state responsibility do not accord with social identities, is addressed. Given the legitimacy and sovereignty considerations raised by non-state actor involvement within internal conflict settlement processes, a delicate balance of constraints and possibilities faced New Zealand's third party mediation role. That role is evaluated in a setting where the individual and group aspirations of the non-state actors most directly involved facilitated, yet also obstructed moves towards a negotiated settlement and its planned implementation.

As regional intergovernmental organizations grow, they acquire the confidence and stature needed to assume broader functions of complementarity and partnership. A key goal is to improve collaboration when managing independent but related activities.1 Interaction with the UN can facilitate institutional development of regional bodies, enhance rule creation and its supervision, broaden scope to discharge humanitarian functions, and strengthen political cooperation. Notwithstanding disputes over responsibilities or divergent expectations of advantage, UN Charter Chapter VIII provisions retain pertinence in calling for ‘efforts to settle local disputes regionally before referring them to the Security Council, and also for the United Nations to encourage the growth and help build the capacities of regional bodies’.2

What is the UN’s role in development? Given persisting resource constraints, how are its capabilities most usefully deployed? Should it continue providing ‘hands-on’ delivery of technical or programbased assistance, or is it better suited as a source of policy initiative — a benchmark provider that promotes development standards criteria? Have the UN’s agencies evolved tested philosophies of development praxis, or are they constantly re-adapting to promote what is most likely to extract resources from discretionary funding sources? These are unresolved questions among development practitioners and within UN circles, where staff defending budgets, careers, or organizational loyalties are not disinterested participants. Fuelling the debate have been expanded NGO activity and philosophies of development challenging established systems of multilateral assistance. This scrutiny questions whether UN development processes can simultaneously serve the development needs of governments and keep faith with grassroots aspirations. Another difficulty commonly raised concerns the nature, extent, and future of UN collaboration with the Bretton Woods institutions.1 Some critics question whether the UN should be in the business of technical assistance at all.2

The UN has been widely engaged in the issue of the advancement of women, although this has resulted more from the activities of the latter than those of the organization. This is not surprising since international political action highlighting the grievances of women has jarred systems of control integral to state authority. Articulating these grievances has also unsettled existing male-dominated diplomatic discourse within and beyond the UN. This response was graphically epitomized in 1995 when the Chinese government decided to locate the Non-Governmental Women’s Forum at a distance of sixty kilometers from the official Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women (FWCW). This irritated NGO delegations as much for its diversion of news media attention from the substantive questions they had arrived to discuss as for the inconvenience caused.1

On June 21 1997, Cambodian Prime Ministers Prince Ranariddh and Hun Sen signed a request to the UN for help in establishing a tribunal to try Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot for the crime of genocide.1 Their cooperation was short-lived: within weeks, forces loyal to Prince Ranariddh were crushed by Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party units in a coup that saw the country teetering on the brink of civil war. Despite the preceding decade’s major international commitment to Cambodia’s rehabilitation, and notwithstanding increased social reconstruction, foreign investment, and prospects for ASEAN membership, how much had changed since the 1993 UNsupervised elections? That remains unanswered here, but comprehending the Cambodia of 1997 requires a retracing of the UN’s record in that country.

Events such as internal wars, the collapse of state functions, and dire economic privations have driven increasing numbers from home surroundings and across borders. Regardless of origin, these problems have been magnified in scale, complexity and controversy. Refugee issues are far-reaching on account of the numbers forced to flee and consequential dislocations sustained to family connections, human rights, entitlements of children, and those made vulnerable through age, infirmity, trauma of conflict, or catastrophic dislocation. Factors causing flight are often diverse, but prominently include gross persecution inflamed by loss of land, poverty, denied relief, and severe post-conflict social dislocation. Rarely do such forces work alone when uprooting people and forcing them to flee beyond borders. This dynamic is also related to the international system: the refugee phenomenon has been described as ‘one of the most tangible manifestations of the aftermath of the Cold War’.1

Southeast Asia and the South Pacific are regions where environmental problems are increasing. The national resource management capacities of governments are variously failing to control a synergy of environmental deterioration comprising declining stocks of nature’s capital, demographic growth, rural mobility and urban aggregation. Southeast Asia’s economic growth is less impressive when scrutinized by accounting methodologies that internalize costs of resource abuse and environmental despoliation.1 Deterioration of total environmental quality has harmed health, reduced output in resource-based sectors, and eroded biodiversity.2 Specific afflictions include land degradation; shrinking groundwater levels; pesticide, water, and soil contamination; depletion of marine fish stocks; loss of natural habitat; and urban air and water pollution from industrial and residential wastes. Politically, environmental problems cast doubts on the capacity of Southeast Asia’s governmental systems to accommodate participatory demands under conditions of rapid change.3 Their inadequacy was even more starkly underlined in 1997 through abject failure to restrict Indonesian forest burn-offs that polluted the region’s air quality for months.