Featured Title
Framing the Islands
Power and Diplomatic Agency in Pacific Regionalism
By Greg Fry
ISBN 9781760463144 (Print)
$55.00 (GST inclusive)
ISBN 9781760463151 (Online)
Published October 2019
Since its origins in late–eighteenth-century European thought, the idea of placing a regional frame around the Pacific islands has never been just an exercise in geographical mapping. This imagining of the Pacific has always been a political exercise. Contending regional projects and visions have been part of a political struggle concerning how Pacific islanders should live their lives.
Framing the Islands tells the story of power and diplomatic agency in Pacific regionalism against the backdrop of changing world order since the colonial period and of changing politics within the post-colonial states of the Pacific. The book argues that Pacific regionalism has been politically significant for Pacific island states and societies. It demonstrates the power associated with the regional arena as a valued site for the negotiation of global ideas and processes around regional development, resource management, security, cultural identity, political agency and climate change.
Author, Greg Fry, also demonstrates the political significance associated with the role of Pacific regionalism as a diplomatic bloc in global affairs, and as a producer of powerful policy norms attached to funded programs. He challenges the expectation that Pacific regionalism largely serves hegemonic powers and that small islands states have little diplomatic agency in these contests.
|
