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This essay reflects on developments in the field since the 1995 publication of "Rethinking Pacific Islands Studies" first explored a number of intellectual or academic foundations of such programs. It suggests that the pragmatic rationale for Pacific studies, which often has more to do with influence than understanding, and the laboratory rationale, which values Pacific Islanders primarily as objects of study, are both alive and well twenty years on, albeit with more attention among practitioners to issues of positionality, research ethics, and the politics of knowledge. The essay discusses the challenges of realizing the empowerment rationale advocated in the original article but argues that there has been some progress in giving primacy to indigenous perspectives, interests, and epistemologies in Pacific studies scholarship. The essay concludes with a discussion of how the empowerment rationale has informed curriculum and program development at the Center for Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawai'i–Mānoa over the past two decades.

This paper identifies a broad context for assessing China's increased interest in the Pacific Islands, and examines some of the major implications for regional security, regional politics, western influence, and self determination in the region. It argues that Beijing's policy towards the Pacific is not driven by strategic competition with the United States, as some have maintained. Nor is it reducible to a specific set of interests centered on natural resources and, especially, competition with Taiwan. Although these factors are important, China's activities in the region are best understood as part of a much larger outreach to the developing world that is likely to endure and intensify. The paper suggests that China's rise is generally welcomed by island leaders, and makes the case that it offers island states economic and political opportunities not available under established structures of power and influence. (Pac Aff/GIGA)

The interplay between national self-determination, the colonial legacy, the concept of sovereignty and the nature of state formation is what is at issue in any understanding of political development in the Pacific Islands. These complex territorial entities, scattered over thousands of square miles of ocean, embrace a vast range of cultural, geographical and linguistic diversity. Indigenous social and political organisation has been overlaid by arbitrary colonial divisions, and a model of western-style nation state formation promulgated by UN agencies. In the event, many of the fundamental economic and political problems of these societies have never been properly addressed-a situation exacerbated by the growing recourse to interventionism against 'failed' states by the most powerful. Any starting point for true self-determination in Oceania has to be found in indigenous practices of self-government.

The paper explores how the Internet can be used to enhance the quality
of teaching and learning in Pacific Islands studies. It does so with
reference to an experimental web-based interactive module that linked
classes at University of Hawai'i and Canterbury University in fall 2000 as
part of the Ford-funded project, Moving Cultures: Remaking Asia-Pacific
Studies. The paper argues that such interactive pedagogies can be used
to redress some of the power imbalances apparent in the field of study
and help accelerate an ongoing process of decolonization.