Suchergebnisse

At the end of 2019 in Papua New Guinea's Autonomous Region of Bougainville, a referendum was held on the region's future political status, in which almost 98 per cent voted for independence. Bougainville will now undergo a transition process, during which the issue of the Panguna mine is bound to resurface. The mine was at the core of a ten‐year war in the 1990s, ceasing operations because of it, and has remained closed ever since. Peace on Bougainville can only be sustained if the Panguna problem is resolved, and on Bougainville, the former mine owner Rio Tinto is widely seen as having an obligation to contribute to a solution, particularly in regard to the clean‐up of environmental degradation caused by the mine. This article brings historical depth to the current debates, exploring Rio Tinto's involvement in the causation and escalation of the war, and the human rights violations and war crimes committed in its course. Rio Tinto's post‐war attitude is briefly discussed and some generalising conclusions drawn regarding corporate accountability and the inclusion of external business actors in local traditional reconciliation processes.

After a decade-long large-scale violent conflict, the Pacific island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea has gone through another decade of post-conflict peacebuilding and at present is confronted with the task of state formation. Peacebuilding has been a success story so far, and the prospects of state formation look promising. The maintenance of order, security and justice in post-conflict Bougainville is based on legal pluralism, with strong customary law and strong customary non-state policing. The violent conflict on Bougainville was a hybrid social-political exchange, with the causes and motivating factors stemming from both the sphere of statecentred politics ('war of secession') and the local societal realm in which non-state customary issues (land conflicts, pay back etc.) played a major role. This article explores the specific features of post-conflict peacebuilding on Bougainville that flow from this context, focussing on the local capacities, but also acknowledging the contribution of international peacekeeping, particularly through the United Nations and a regional Peace Monitoring Group. Based on the Bougainville experience, the article develops a critique of the conventional Western peacebuilding-asstatebuilding approach to fragile post-conflict situations, and it critiques the accompanying focus of external actors on capacity-building of state institutions for maintaining order and internal peace. It makes a case for an alternative approach which acknowledges the hybridity of political order and the co-existence and interplay of state and non-state providers of security and justice. Positive mutual accommodation of state and non-state customary institutions are presented as a more promising way to sustainable internal peace and order than the attempted imposition of the Western Weberian model of the state.