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"Over the last two decades, civil society has helped catalyse responses to the legacies of violent conflicts and oppressive political regimes in Asia and the Pacific. Civil society has advocated for the establishment of criminal trials and truth commissions, monitored their operations and pushed for take-up of their recommendations. It has also initiated community-based transitional justice responses. Yet, there has been little in-depth examination of the breadth and diversity of these roles. This book addresses this gap by analysing the heterogeneity of civil society transitional justice activity in Asia and the Pacific.

Based upon empirically grounded case studies of Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Cambodia, Myanmar, Bougainville, Solomon Islands and Fiji, this book illustrates that civil society actors can have different – and sometimes competing – priorities, resources and approaches to transitional justice. Their work is also underpinned by diverse understandings of 'justice'. By reflecting on the richness of this activity, this book advances contemporary debates about transitional justice and civil society. It will also be a valuable resource for scholars and practitioners working on Asia and the Pacific."

The developing literature on strategic narratives has analysed their attempted use by great powers, particularly China, to influence less materially powerful states. While there has been some consideration of how less materially powerful states can exercise their agency to, in response, construct narratives about their relationship to Chinese power, there has been far less analysis of less materially powerful states that have created and deployed their own strategic narratives. In this article we analyse the Blue Pacific narrative adopted and deployed, via rhetorical action, by Pacific Island countries to seek to influence their more materially powerful partners. We analyse the discourse and policies of partner states and argue that they have accepted, and at times, been entrapped, by that rhetorical action. However, we also find that partner states have appropriated the Blue Pacific narrative in their own attempts to influence Pacific Island countries. Nevertheless, we conclude by arguing that the Blue Pacific narrative demonstrates how less materially powerful states can leverage geopolitical competition and use rhetorical action so that their strategic narratives can influence more materially powerful partners to advance their interests and priorities.(Pac Rev / GIGA)

In recent years, the study and practice of political reconciliation has experienced a turn to hybridity. This turn has been defined by the increased rate at which liberal international and local peacebuilding practices, and their underlying ideas, have become merged, integrated or co-located in time and space. While hybrid approaches to reconciliation have been praised as an effective means of engaging local populations in peacebuilding operations, little attention has been paid to examining whether or not they also bring unintended negative consequences. Drawing on the cases of Timor Leste, Solomon Islands and Bougainville, this article examines the potentially dark side of hybridity. It demonstrates that, in each of these cases, hybrid approaches to political reconciliation have brought both positive and negative consequences. On the positive side of the equation, hybridity has seen imported international approaches to reconciliation adapted to meet local demands and ensure resonance with local populations. On the negative side, however, the misappropriation and instrumentalisation of local practices within hybrid approaches has served to damage their legitimacy and to jeopardise their contributions to reconciliation. The article thus concludes that the existence and extent of this dark side necessitates a re-evaluation of how hybrid approaches to political reconciliation are planned and implemented. ; This work was supported by an Australian Research Council Grant DP140102388.

While the 'emotion turn' has emerged as an influential analytical lens in International Relations (IR), there is not yet a well-developed understanding of the role that emotions play in facilitating or inhibiting peace. This special issue of Cooperation and Conflict engages with the analytical potential of emotions and the promise this perspective holds for innovative analyses of peace processes and peacebuilding. To demonstrate the political significance of emotions to peace, the contributors explore how emotions shape the bounds and boundaries of actors and alliances committed to fostering peaceful societies. This introductory article offers possible avenues to leverage the analytical potential of IR's emotions agenda to engage with peace and peacebuilding. First, we discuss how the emotions agenda contributes to the conversation about what peace is and should look like. Second, we argue that emotions can help us to articulate peace as an embodied knowledge of complex socio-political relations and power dynamics. To visualize 'peace' without the permanent contrast of violence, we mobilize this perspective to illuminate actors' practices and the constraints they face in the pursuit of a peaceful political order. Third, we discuss what an emotions agenda for peace might entail for critical and constructive peacebuilding studies.

Abstract
In the 2018 Boe Declaration, Pacific Islands Forum leaders recognized that the region is facing 'an increasingly complex regional security environment' and committed to 'strengthening the existing regional security architecture'. Given uncertainty about the existence and nature of this architecture, we address the question: is there a security architecture in the region, or does security cooperation take a different shape? We find that security cooperation in the Pacific Islands does not constitute a security architecture, as there is no 'overarching, coherent and comprehensive security structure for a geographically-defined area'. We also find that the region is neither a security complex nor a community, due to the extensive involvement of metropolitan powers and external partners. Instead, we argue that security cooperation in the Pacific Islands is best described as a patchwork of bilateral, minilateral, and multilateral, formal and informal agencies, agreements, and arrangements, across local, national, regional, and international levels