Faculty of Humanities, University of Johannesburg. She has previously held teaching and research positions at the University of New England, the Australian National University, the University of East Anglia, and the University of Birmingham as well as other visiting positions. She is a past president of the Australian Political Studies Association, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia, and the current President of the Pacific Islands Political Studies Association. Her publications span the fields of comparative and international politics, normative theory and Pacific Studies on issues ranging from nationalism and ethnic politics to the theorization of democracy and human rights in cross-cultural settings. Her books include Culture and Context in World Politics (2006), Theories of International Relations: Contending Approaches to World Politics (2015), and International Relations (4th edn, 2023).
Lawson applied the “Page 99 Test” to her most recent book, Regional Politics in Oceania: From Colonialism and Cold War to the Pacific Century, and reported the following:
I was quite disappointed when I opened page 99 of my book and found part of a detailed discussion of the politics surrounding the establishment and early years of Oceania’s first substantive regional organization – the South Pacific Commission – in the early post-war period. It was certainly not a page that would strike a reader, casual or expert or something in between, with anything approaching fascination. Even so, it is an essential part of a longer account of the difficulties facing the region’s major colonial powers of the time – the UK, the USA, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand – in reconciling their different interests in coming together to create what has turned out to be an extremely important organization (since re-named the Pacific Community) that lies at the heart of coordinated service delivery and technical assistance for the people of the Pacific Islands.Learn more about Regional Politics in Oceania at the Cambridge University Press website.
Page 99 provides observations on French attitudes that were very much at variance with those of most of the other colonizing powers. France was to pursue strategies that strongly resisted decolonization while the UK, Australia and New Zealand became much more attuned to the ‘wind of change’ that started blowing from the 1960s onward. Although undoubtedly paternalistic, the latter three had, from the beginning, supported Indigenous participation and greater agency in political affairs. The US position, however, was closer to that of the French – one reason among others why much of the Micronesian sub-region was the slowest to gain at least some measure of independence.
One important theme raised by page 99, and well-illustrated by the fuller account, is that the colonizing powers were not all lined up on one side of a colonizer/colonized divide, all following the same imperial script. Nor were the colonized territories at one in resistance to colonialism. They, too, had different standpoints and interests and, difficult as it may be to conceive now, some even resisted decolonization.
Page 99, however, hints at only one aspect of a longer, and much broader, account of the world’s largest geographical region – often now referred to as the ‘Blue continent’. In addition to canvassing aspects of regionalism from a comparative perspective, the book charts the story of the region from the earliest Indigenous settlements, over thousands of years, through to the period of European exploration from the late sixteenth century and then to the formal colonization of most island groups by the late nineteenth century. Of special interest is the division of the broad region into the sub-regions of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, a division that has its origins in European racial thinking but which Indigenous islanders have made their own. In addition to investigating key aspects of Indigenous social and political organization within these sub-regions, the book also delves into the politics of subregional organization and the Melanesia/Polynesia divide in particular.
In turn, these accounts contribute insights into a politics of identity as played out between the sub-regions as well as between the Pacific Island Countries on the one hand, and Australia and New Zealand on the other. The latter remain members of both the Pacific Community (as do the USA and France) as well as of the region’s premier political organization, the Pacific Islands Forum, founded in 1971 primarily to provide island leaders with a venue for political discussions which the French (and to a lesser extent the USA) would not allow in the older organization.
In the early independence period, a broad discourse developed under the rubric of a ‘Pacific Way’ also came to suggest a common identity shared by all Pacific Islanders but also implied that they ‘did things differently’ (at least vis-à-vis Western ways) when it came to political practices at local, national and regional levels. This has been an important theme in discussions about culture and democracy in the region. The emergence of a ‘Melanesian Way’, however, demonstrated tensions and contradictions underlying the catch-all ‘Pacific Way’ which tended to privilege Polynesian identity and did not resonate widely in Micronesia either.
There are also more recent issues concerning security, political economy and geopolitics all of which raise concerns about neo-colonialism in the region. This involves not only ‘traditional’ colonial powers, but also newer actors – China in particular. Indonesia’s colonization of West Papua and the outcomes for Indigenous Melanesians there also casts a very different light on some of the book’s key themes.
Above all, the book is designed to provide not just a detailed account of the history and politics of the broad region (which draws as well on important anthropological work), but to provide a critical perspective on many of the assumptions embodied in a range of works that tend to see issues of colonialism and hegemony, identity and agency, in two-dimensional terms.
--Marshal Zeringue
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