Policing in the Pacific Islands
Description
This open access book brings together insights into Pacific policing, conceptualising policing broadly as order maintenance involving the actions of multiple local, regional and international actors with sometimes competing and conflicting agendas. A complex and multifaceted endeavour, scholarship on this topic is relatively scarce and widely dispersed across diverse sources. It examines how Pacific policing is shaped by changing state-society relations in different national contexts and ongoing processes of globalisation. Particular attention is given to the plural character of Pacific policing, profound challenges of gender equity, changing dynamics of crime, and the prominence of transnational policing in resource and capacity constrained domestic environments. The authors draw on examples from across the Pacific islands to provide a nuanced and contextualised account of policing in this socially diverse and rapidly transforming region.
Reviews / Votes
"This book is extremely well timed. As the Blue Pacific engages with longstanding and emerging security challenges, law enforcement officials will be called upon to play a range of important roles to safeguard the lives and livelihoods of their communities. The authors present a wealth of knowledge resources to inform policy and practice in our region".-Dr Tess Newton Cain , Project Lead, Pacific Hub, Griffith Asia Institute, Australia
" Policing in the Pacific Islands provides an invaluable introduction to policing in the Pacific. The book's clear structure and accessible style of writing delivers useful empirical data and discussions of a more conceptual nature in a concise and compelling manner. The text illuminates key issues met in policing in and across the Pacific Islands, clearly demonstrating how policing is a highly contextual phenomenon, one that can be performed by a range of actors, whilst also underscoring the idea that the practice of policing signals something about the nature of the state and its legitimacy within society. This co-authored contribution ranges over a wide selection of topics as yet under-researched in the region - from women in policing, to private and hybrid policing through to international policing - thus providing a very welcome addition to both the policing and the Pacific security and governance literature".
-Professor Bethan K. Greener , Politics and International Relations Programme, Massey University, New Zealand
"The book provides a brilliant, cutting-edge and informative exploration of policing in a changing and increasingly challenging Pacific context. The content is interdisciplinary, cross-cultural and based on research rigour and captures the transforming landscape of policing and the myriad of issues and opportunities faced by Pacific communities. I highly recommend it for those in the broader disciplinary areas of politics, policing, security, criminology, policy making, social stability as well as the public generally".
-Professor Steven Ratuva , Director, Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, University of Canterbury, New Zealand
"This remarkable book, written jointly by five experts on policing in the Pacific Islands, brings together the results of recent research in a compact volume. The writers demonstrate close knowledge of the elements that make Pacific policing unique. Among these elements are: the strength of traditional forms of justice and order exercised by locally recognised, village-based authorities; foreign pressures from aid agencies and international organisations that seek to re-define crime according to the latest global criteria; and the transgenerational transmission of violence against women by social forces in many Pacific countries. A whole chapter is devoted to women and policing in the context of growing Pacific recognition of gender inequality. This short and highly readable book will become the standard authority on Pacific policing."
-Professor Stewart Firth , formerly Professor of Politics at the University of the South Pacific, currently visiting Fellow at the Department of Pacific Affairs, Australian National University, Australia
More details
Persons
Danielle Watson is Senior Lecturer and Research Training Coordinator in the School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Australia.
Loene Howes
is Senior Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Tasmania, Australia.
Sinclair Dinnen
is Senior Fellow in the Department of Pacific Affairs at the Australian National University, Australia.
Melissa Bull
is Interdisciplinary Scholar and Director of Queensland University of Technology Centre for Justice, Australia.
Sara N. Amin
is Senior Lecturer and the Discipline Coordinator of Sociology at the University of the South Pacific, Fiji.
Content
Chapter 1. Introduction to policing in the Pacific.- Chapter 2. Context-specific issues and challenges of policing in the Pacific.- Chapter 3. Trends in and social dynamics of crime in the Pacific.- Chapter 4. Plural policing in the Pacific.- Chapter 5. The international policing agenda in the Pacific.- Chapter 6. Women and the institution of policing in the Pacific.- Chapter 7. Conclusion.