Regionalism, Security and Cooperation in Oceania.

AuthorAlley, Roderic
PositionBook review

Regionalism, Security and Cooperation in Oceania

Editors: Rouben Azizian and Carleton Cramer

Published by: Asia--Pacific Center for Security Studies, Honolulu, 2015, 172pp.

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This collection comprises presentations delivered by government officials, non-governmental representatives and academics to a 2014 security conference held in Vanuatu. In an opening chapter giving a cogent tour d'horizon, Richard Herr identifies a recurring dilemma: the continuing divergence evident between othodox state protection formulations and those focusing on non-traditional, so-called 'human' security demands. Difficulties in accommodating this divergence, Herr rightly claims, has refracted differently across a range of Oceania's relationships --not least at regional, institutional levels.

It has resulted in ambivalence as to whether Oceania can or should achieve a durable consensus as to what it seeks to protect, by whom and through what measures. In some form or other, that difficulty repeats throughout this collection's presentations, which broadly comprise two categories. The first deals with those actors projecting security influence into the Pacific--China, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. The second considers more localised reactions, adjustments or retaliations towards these influences, be that over maritime resource management, climate change or reconfigured regional institutional arrangements.

Over China, Michael Powles and Jian Zhang offer complementary but differing appraisals, the former seeing Beijing's highest priority as one of attaining major power status across the wider Asia-Pacific region; the latter concentrating on the growing diversity of opportunities now available through constructive engagement. Both regard relations with China as manageable notwithstanding some Chinese private sector criminality and unaccountable resource extraction.

Regarding the United States, Eric Shibuya is blunt: while Washington's lack of interest in Pacific Islands countries is not new, it is now increasingly a mistake. A pace back from Washington's complex compact arrangements in Micronesia, Shibuya wants greater American cultural understanding of, and better rather than more quality engagement in, Oceania.

Jenny Hayward Jones unreservedly asserts that Australia has been the dominant power in the Pacific Islands region for at least three decades. Yet for her Canberra could do more to help the region by assisting with...

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