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This book explains how leaders in the Caribbean and Pacific regions balance the autonomy-viability dilemma of postcolonial statehood by practising statehood à la carte. Jack Corbett shows that this approach is a pragmatic response to the contradictions inherent to coloniality.

1. The post-war period and the Whitlam government -- 2. The Fraser government -- 3. The Hawke-Keating governments -- 4. The Howard government -- 5. The Rudd-Gillard governments -- 6. The Abbott-Turnbull governments -- 7. The national story and policy legitimacy -- 8. Professionalisation and technical legitimacy -- 9. Managing risk and administrative legitimacy.

Drawing on more than 110 interviews and other published sources, including autobiographies and biographies, Being Political provides a collective portrait of the Pacific region's political elite. This is an insider account of political life in the Pacific as seen through the eyes of those who have done the job.

What makes a state, a state? This definitional question has generated a lot of debate among the SST community. By and large, we have tended to endorse subjective understandings and follow maxims like 'we know a small state when we see one', while at the same time employing practical cut-offs for the purpose of comparison (e.g. 1 million population). Such cut-offs have enabled researchers to distinguish between their cases and the work of scholars on 'large' states and territories. Micronations and the search for sovereignty forces us to look the other way: is there something smaller than a small state? And by smaller I do not mean microstates, a term often employed to differentiate countries with populations under 100,000, or even their semi-autonomous jurisdictions (e.g. Tobago, Barbuda, or Nevis in the Caribbean). [excerpt] ; N/A

Greg Fry has dedicated a career at both the Australian National University and at the University of the South Pacific to studying Pacific regionalism and so there is nobody better qualified to write a book on the topic. Framing the islands: Power and diplomatic agency in Pacific regionalism is a wide ranging but empirically rich study of the ways that different sets of actors, from colonial era officials and independence leaders to civil society organisations and present-day politicians, have thought about the region and sought to institutionalise their vision of it. The main question that drives the book is: where does power lie? The answer is: in the contingent interactions between global trends, larger regional states, and island leaders. The latter have primarily viewed regionalism as a 'society of states' through which to pursue political agendas, including on environmental issues and decolonisation, and pool specific functional capacities (e.g. higher education or shipping). In contrast, larger states have favored security and economic liberalisation. The contest between these framings can explain varying outcomes over the last century. [excerpt] ; N/A

AbstractSmall communities should have the most to gain from integration, but the average size of the state is shrinking as island nationalism creates new, and very small, states out of former colonies, and federalised or autonomous territories. "Islandness," as a proxy for territory, is employed as a resource to justify secession, but mainstream studies subordinate this factor in accounts that privilege ethnic, religious, linguistic, or economic drivers of identity. This article adds to a small body of work that foregrounds territory. Drawing on an in‐depth case study of Barbuda's (population 1,600) attempt to secede from Antigua demonstrates how nationalists employ different meanings of territory—legal, cultural, and political—to make the case for secession in the absence of factors commonly theorised to drive identify formation. Barbudan secessionism therefore problematises mainstream theory. It concludes by arguing that paying greater attention to how territory acts as a resource in the nationalist imaginary allows us to re‐examine long‐standing studies and cases in new and penetrating light.

Regionalists face a fundamental dilemma: smaller groupings are more likely to share common interests, but have less capacity to influence external affairs. Larger groupings have greater capacity and influence, but struggle to align diverse interests. The implications of this dilemma are evident in the Caribbean where the most homogenous group of islands with the greatest imperative to cooperate, the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), have achieved the deepest integration. In contrast, the broader membership of CARICOM and ACS have had to work much harder to achieve consensus on a smaller number of issues. ; N/A

Democracy in the United States and Europe is said to be at the crossroads. I review five recent books that seek to diagnose and cure this 'crisis'. Explanations range from institutional dysfunction and elite maleficence to technological change and rising economic inequality. Remedies include everything from institutional engineering to moral persuasion. Collectively, the books raise two important questions: is this really a crisis and if it is, can democratisation theory, the branch of political science dedicated to explaining why regimes rise and fall, tell us why? I conclude that if we are to explain the deconsolidation of well-established democracies in which all of the usual pre-conditions had been met, then we must first question the linear narrative about democracy being a naturally legitimate form of regime.

Why would China and Japan risk large scale military conflict over a few insignificant and uninhabited rocks? These little 'islands' should, as Baldacchino's argues, mean nothing to these two great powers. But even the most superficial Google search quickly reveals that disagreement about who owns the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, and the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs) and fishing grounds that extend from their coastlines, could mean everything. Explaining this, and considering what might be done about it, is the central aim of this book. ; N/A

It is commonly asserted that, when it comes to democratic politics, 'small is beautiful'. This assumption harks back to antiquity and is employed by advocates of participatory and deliberative democracy to justify innovations that 'scale-down' decision-making in large states. Despite their obvious relevance, this literature fails to account for the democratic experience of the world's smallest states. In this article, I bring small states in to this discussion by examining recent democratic innovations in Tuvalu. Rather than 'scalingdown', in this instance Tuvalu is attempting to 'scale-up' its democratic institutions due tothe challenges posed by its small size. The lesson for advocates of decentralisation in large states and the orthodox view that 'small is beautiful' is a cautionary one: size matters but not necessarily in the manner democratic theory predicts or in ways that fulfil normative desires. ; peer-reviewed