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The new theoretical literature on security in developing countries can contribute to the understanding of Papua New Guinea's overall security predicament. This study uses such ideas to reconceptualise the country's security in a more comprehensive way. Since the late 1980s, it has become widely recognised that conventional security analysis, which emphasises the military defence of states against foreign attack, cannot address the most pressing and violent challenges faced in Papua New Guinea. The term "security" is now applied to all manner of problems and goals, in official policy, academic commentary, and public debate. However, such accounts have tended to lack a unifying approach, and provide little guidance as to how the country's security predicament might be re-assessed as a whole. Two unanswered questions are pivotal. Firstly, it is uncertain whether official emphases of new security threats to the state or scholarly accents on security interests beside those of the state offer the superior basis for re-analysis. Secondly, the scholarly accounts are presented in terms of an oversimplified dichotomy of state and societal security, and it remains to be shown what the components and particular security imperatives of each might be. The thesis turns to the specialist theoretical literature for tools to explore these questions. That literature readily explains the general circumstances —especially the structural challenges— faced by developing countries, but lacks a satisfactory analytic core focus for the practical investigation of actual security situations at the more immediate level. This focus is needed to help determine which of a very wide range of potentially relevant problems, goals, actors, and coping strategies should be considered, and how they ought to be explained. The thesis proposes a simple analytical framework to provide such a focus. This emphasises a consistent "search for security", based on the pursuit of a distinct core value, by each of five key categories of security referents or ...