Plural policing has become a key focus in critical policing and security scholarship, with growing acknowledgement that policing practices involve multiple actors and diverse institutional forms. While much of the recent interest in plural policing has been prompted by the global growth of private security, plural policing in the Pacific Islands has long been evident in the co-existence of state-based police organisations operating nationally, and traditional or customary policing forms operating at local levels in most of these countries and territories. This chapter examines the plural character of Pacific policing in the context of historical and more recent processes of pluralisation, including the expanding domains of private and transnational policing, highlighting the deepening entanglement and interdependency between these various policing forms. The geographic focus is on the independent Melanesian countries, the region’s most populous, socially diverse, and challenging policing environments.
Introduction
While policing is still equated with the work of public police organisations, scholars increasingly acknowledge its plural character in practice. Plural policing denotes the provision of policing services by multiple actors and diverse institutional arrangements, rather than being the monopoly of a single provider. Recent interest in the plural nature of policing has been prompted by the expansion of private security, with a proliferation of commercial entities offering many similar services to the public police. Economic liberalisation has been a key driver of this growth across the globe (Ellison & Pino, 2012). Scholars have also noted the corporatisation of public police organisations (Loader, 1999), the increase in other government regulatory and investigatory agencies involved in policing (Jones & Newburn, 2006), and the rise in citizen- and community-led policing initiatives (Bayley & Shearing, 2001).
Growing scholarly interest in plural policing has been accompanied by a shift in focus from the police as a discrete institutional form to policing as a social process directed at maintaining a given social order (Diphoorn, 2016). This broader conceptualisation of policing goes beyond a narrow focus on the work of the public police and, instead, encompasses a wide range of actors and practices. For Jones and Newburn, policing comprises any ‘organised forms of order maintenance, peacekeeping, rule or law enforcement, crime investigation and prevention and other forms of investigation and associated information-brokering undertaken by individuals or organisations’ (1998, pp. 18–19). Baker includes ‘[a]ny organised activity, whether by the state or civil groups, that seeks to ensure the maintenance of communal order, security and peace through elements of prevention, deterrence, investigation of breaches, resolution and punishment’ (2008, p. 22). A plural policing lens unsettles longstanding assumptions about the centrality of governments (and states) in the authorising and exercise of power. As Loader has put it, ‘[w]hat we might call a shift from police to policing has seen the sovereign state – hitherto considered focal to both provision and accountability in this field – reconfigured as but one node of a broader, more diverse “network of power”’ (2000, p. 323, emphasis in original). In addition to what public police organisations do, policing extends ‘to private policing forms secured through government; to transnational police arrangements taking place above government; to markets in policing and security services unfolding beyond government; and to policing activities engaged in by citizens below government’ (2000, p. 324, emphasis in original).
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Plural policing is particularly useful for considering policing provision in the complex and fragmented social settings found in many post-colonial and conflict-affected parts of the world. The workings of the public police in such places often bear little resemblance to the ideals of democratic and service-oriented policing that inform depictions of modern police organisations. On the contrary, popular perceptions of the police might be shaped by well-founded beliefs about the latter’s politically compromised or corrupt character. These perceptions might attest to practical difficulties in accessing scarce public police resources in areas of limited statehood, or lack of confidence in the technical capabilities of the police, or, in some places, they might signify fear and distrust of an organisation with a reputation for brutality and human rights abuses. They might also reflect the existence of an extensive array of alternative (non-state) providers whose services can be drawn upon for different policing needs. Baker provides a flavour of non-state policing actors in sub-Saharan Africa, such as ‘customary leaders, religious organisations, ethnic associations, youth groups, work-based associations, community police forums, conflict resolution nongovernmental organisations (NGOs), the lowest or informal levels of local government, and entrepreneurs’ (2010, p. 10).
Plural policing scholars have sought to highlight and investigate the interactions between different policing actors operating within broader policing or security webs (Albrecht & Kyed, 2015). Terms such as ‘security networks’ (Dupont, 2004), ‘nodal governance’ (Wood & Shearing, 2007), and ‘security assemblages’ (Abrahamsen & Williams, 2011) have been used to describe these fluid configurations and the interplay between their constituent parts. Relational frameworks enable a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic and fragmented character of policing provision found in many such settings. With their emphasis on the intersections and overlap between providers, they also steer us away from familiar but unhelpful binaries between public/private and state/non-state domains.
These frameworks help us explore the messy realities of policing provision in the contemporary Pacific, where public police organisations typically co-exist and intermingle with Indigenous forms of self-regulation that preceded the imposition of colonial states and continue to influence everyday order-making. This is especially so in the Melanesian sub-region, well known for the diversity and versatility of its local social orders and the relative fragility of its state institutions (Hirsch & Rollason, 2019). While interactions between state and local socio-legal orders have long preoccupied scholars of legal pluralism (Scaglion, 2004), the social foundations of policing practice in the Pacific have attracted less attention, with some notable exceptions (see e.g., Forsyth, 2021).
This chapter examines the plural character of policing and security in the contemporary Pacific, including the factors that have animated historical and ongoing processes of pluralisation, as well as the deepening entanglement between different policing providers resulting from these processes. Given extensive variations across the region, illustrations will be drawn primarily from the independent Melanesian states, notably Papua New Guinea (PNG), Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. These countries are where most of the region’s population live and are well known for their internal diversity and the fragility of their government sectors. Relative to their neighbours, they have also experienced the most serious problems of crime, violence, and insecurity that have, in turn, prompted a range of policing responses at national, transnational, and local levels. The first part of the chapter provides a short review of the distinct trajectory of policing pluralisation in the Melanesian Pacific—an important dimension of the larger story of colonisation, state-building, and globalisation in this region. Following a broad historical chronology, this part is arranged around two key junctures: first, colonisation; and second, decolonisation and modern state-building. The second part of the chapter provides a sketch of plural policing in post-colonial Melanesia, including the growing challenges facing fragile public police organisations. This entails an examination of four intersecting layers or scales of policing provision, namely public policing (policing through the state), transnational policing (policing above the state), private policing (policing beyond the state), and locally driven policing (policing beneath the state). The chapter concludes with some broad observations.
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Colonial Administration and the Pluralisation of Policing in Melanesia
The history of the public police is closely entwined with that of European colonialism, as indicated in Chapter 2. Scholars have documented the relationship between early police development in metropolitan and colonial settings, showing how the need to maintain order in colonial territories influenced the establishment and development of public police organisations back in the metropolitan centres (Sinclair & Williams, 2007). Colonisation was a major source of legal and policing pluralisation as imperial powers introduced colonial law and police into territories already possessing diverse local forms of social order and regulation (Tamanaha, 2012). The origin of the public police as a key instrument of external domination has also had a significant influence on their subsequent development in many parts of the post-colonial world (Comaroff & Comaroff, 2006).
Official colonisation in the Southwest Pacific commenced, for the most part, in the second half of the nineteenth century, as European powers competed with each other to extend their presence across much of the region. In the Melanesian territories, the first police organisations were integral parts of small and underresourced colonial administrations on the periphery of the empire. The initial members of the ‘native police’ in these newly created colonial entities often came from more settled neighbouring colonies. For example, Fijians and Fijian-based Solomon Islanders provided the original recruits in the armed constabulary in British New Guinea (Dutton, 1985, p. 63). Fijians were also the first policemen in the British Protectorate of Solomon Islands (Bennett, 2002). Vanuatu was a colonial oddity with separate British and French police divisions, each dealing with their own citizens under English or French law, and both dealing with locals under a separate ‘native code’. A senior British official described Australia’s administration in the much larger territories of Papua and New Guinea as a ‘benevolent type of police rule’ (Lord Hailey as cited in Mair, 1948, p. 45). The police were a critical instrument for extending and consolidating government influence in both territories—a slow and uneven process that had barely been completed in some areas by the time of PNG’s independence in 1975.
Rather than being a neutral law enforcement agency operating independently of government, colonial police were active agents of pacification and ‘native administration’. European field staff typically commanded small units of armed ‘native constabularies’, spending much of their time patrolling on foot or by boat to visit widely dispersed local populations. Early policing work included suppressing resistance to colonial incursion, ending fighting and raiding between local groups, safeguarding Europeans, adjudicating infringements of ‘native regulations’, and collecting the head taxes that were introduced in most territories to compel a labour force for European-owned plantations. Initial encounters with Indigenous populations were often violent, entailing extensive resort to punitive expeditions against recalcitrant local groups (Ballard & Douglas, 2017).
In Solomon Islands, most of the areas where European commercial activities took place had been secured by the 1920s (Bennett, 1987, p. 112) and by 1922 the armed constabulary had a strength of 153 men (Boutilier, 1984, p. 45). PNG’s size and extraordinarily challenging topography resulted in a distinct style of frontier policing. Patrols of armed police led by Australian patrol officers, known as kiaps, provided the most visible face of colonial government. By 1930 there were around 1000 Indigenous police (Kituai, 1988). Government by patrol was low intensity, involving visits whose regularity depended on local geography and distance from administrative centres. The kiap would inspect villages, collect head taxes, complete the census forms, and hear minor cases relating to breaches of ‘native regulations’ (Dinnen & Braithwaite, 2009). The primary concern of colonial policing was with maintaining some semblance of order rather than preventing and investigating crime. Unless perceived as direct threats to colonial authority or the security of Europeans, most local disputes and infractions were left to community leaders and other local mechanisms for resolution. Policing practice was different in the small European-dominated urban enclaves and was provided by a handful of police with a focus on crime control, as with their counterparts in towns across colonial Australia.
The modest resources available to colonial authorities tasked with policing widely dispersed local populations led to the adoption of various forms of indirect rule. These accentuated pluralisation by introducing a variety of other policing actors alongside colonial police forces. They included the appointment of village-based officials—village constables in Papua and luluais (local leaders appointed to represent the administration at village level) and tultuls (their interpreters) in New Guinea—to liaise with the visiting kiap and contribute to order maintenance and dispute resolution during his absence. In Solomon Islands, district headmen, village headmen, and village constables were appointed and worked under the supervision of European district officials, although the regularity of such supervision varied from place to place (Dinnen & Allen, 2016). In practice, the effectiveness of these local police actors largely depended on their standing in their own societies.
Colonial authority and policing in Melanesia, as in most parts of the colonial world, were not simply imposed on passive subject populations but were actively mediated through the agency of local actors, including ‘native police’ (Kituai, 1998). Although inevitably impacted by colonialism, Indigenous forms of policing and regulation were not displaced by these larger transformations. Given the limited reach of the colonial state and its shallow penetration of local societies, most people continued to rely on customary mechanisms for their everyday policing and security needs. These mechanisms adapted over time through their interactions with the newer policing forms introduced by colonialism. While colonial order could always draw on superior firepower when needed, it also depended on high levels of local acquiescence. An important factor behind the relative success of kiap-style policing in rural PNG and Solomon Islands was the negotiated character of its engagements with local leadership and policing forms (Dinnen & Braithwaite, 2009). Thus, while colonial and Indigenous forms of policing could and did come into conflict, at other times they could complement and even strengthen each other (Gordon, 1983).
Decolonisation and the Centralisation of Policing
As political independence approached, police forces across the colonial world were restructured and modernised, often acquiring centralised command systems and specialist units, as well as increasing in size (Anderson & Killingray, 1992, p. ix). In the Melanesian territories, decolonisation entailed an intense and prolonged period of state-building as colonial administrative systems were dismantled and incrementally replaced by the institutional framework of modern statehood, particularly in the two decades prior to independence. These institutional transformations were premised on the doctrines of the separation of powers and rule of law. They included major police reform aimed at establishing a professional and politically neutral law enforcement organisation. Rather than serving the political and economic interests of the colonial order, the police were now to serve the needs of an independent citizenry. This has proved to be a challenging transition to realise, with legacies of colonial policing remaining, including a proclivity for ‘rough justice’, the underfunded and uneven distribution of police resources, and the continuing reliance on informal (non-state) policing and justice practices by a substantial portion of the local population.
Police reform started in Solomon Islands in the 1950s, when the newly renamed Royal Solomon Islands Police (RSIP) began to be ‘trained as a civilian force to help and protect rather than to repress’ (RSIP, 1981, p. 5). British police officers were recruited to oversee the professionalisation of the RSIP. New infrastructure was established, including a new police headquarters and training school in the capital, Honiara. A specialised field force was created to reinforce district police and serve as a riot squad in public order situations. In Vanuatu, the French and British divisions of the police were officially integrated before independence but continued to operate separately in the context of disagreement between the two colonial powers over the timing of independence and the outbreak of the short-lived Santo rebellion.
From a plural policing perspective, decolonisation represented a concerted push to centralise and consolidate policing power into a single institutional form. This involved moving away from the plural policing auspices of indirect rule involving village-based policing actors, such as village constables, serving as intermediaries between state-based and local (non-state) social orders. It also heralded the demise of kiap-style policing in PNG. The multi-functional character of the kiap—combining roles of police officer, magistrate, and gaoler—was viewed as incompatible with the separation of powers. In 1961 the PNG police were separated from the old Department of Native Affairs and became a standalone agency with a high degree of operational autonomy. Mobile squads were established to manage public order and inter-group conflict, while new urban police stations were built (Gordon & Meggitt, 1985). Institutional modernisation was an uneven and incremental process. Although the aspiration was for a centralised and uniform system of public policing, accomplishing it in practice has proved to be more difficult than anticipated.
Contemporary Dimensions of Plural Policing: Public Policing (Policing Through the State)
The most serious issues of crime and disorder have been experienced in the independent Melanesian states of PNG, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu—in part a reflection of their larger size, the fragility of their state institutions and a range of complex development challenges. More fundamental questions have also been raised periodically around the fitness for purpose of the models of state policing and justice inherited at independence. These factors have contributed to a growing crisis of public policing in post-colonial Melanesia. The evolution and character of this crisis in policing through the state is outlined in the following two sections.
Papua New Guinea
Decolonisation in PNG was accompanied by a variety of emergent social order problems. Some related to the accentuation of longstanding antagonisms between local groups that had been suppressed, albeit temporarily, for much of the colonial period, while others arose from stresses of more recent origin. The most serious included micro-nationalist movements in some of the more developed regions, notably Bougainville and East New Britain (May, 1982), the revival of inter-group conflict in parts of the Highlands (so-called ‘tribal fighting’), and a growing moral panic around rising levels of urban crime.
For some observers, the resumption of inter-group conflict was attributed to the withdrawal of state from rural areas following the dismantling of the old colonial system of district administration in which kiap-style policing played a key role (Oram, 1973). This was combined with what many locals viewed as the weakness of the modern justice system as a way of settling disputes and preventing conflict (Strathern, 1972). Older forms of violent self-help such as tribal fighting reappeared, while in recent years increasing use of high-powered weapons and military-style tactics have contributed to rising casualties, as well as to widespread destruction of property and displacement of local populations (Hallak, 2019).
Anxieties around crime and personal safety accompanied the rapid growth of the national capital, Port Moresby, in the 1960s and 1970s. With the lifting of colonial restrictions over the movement of local people, young migrants flocked to town in search of better opportunities, and levels of recorded crime increased (Biles, 1976). Local crime outbreaks were typically followed by suppressive policing measures, often involving heavy-handed raids of the informal settlements that were viewed as incubators of the city’s notorious raskol gangs (Dinnen, 2001). Pervasive insecurity among town residents is today manifested in fortifications, razor wire, and the ubiquitous presence of private security across the urban landscape. The incidence of family and sexual violence also appears to be endemic. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), PNG is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for women (HRW, 2017). At the same time, relatively few crimes are ever reported to, or recorded by, the police, resulting in an absence of reliable crime data. Although media reports, surveys and anecdotal evidence indicate that victimisation rates are high by global standards, other data suggests some stabilisation in the incidence of violent crime (Lakhani & Wilman, 2014b).
PNG’s policing environment would test the most capable and proficient of police organisations, let alone one that has become progressively more dysfunctional over the years. The size of the Royal Papua New Guinea Constabulary (RPNGC) has failed to keep apace with population growth and the organisation continues to have a limited presence and reach in many areas. At PNG’s independence in 1975, police responsibility was estimated to cover only 10% of the country’s total land area and 40% of its population (Dorney, 2000, p. 304), and the organisation at that time was largely staffed by inexperienced and untrained personnel. Since then, the size of the RPNGC has increased by only around 30% while the population has more than tripled and the scale of PNG’s law-and-order problems has continued to grow. Estimates put the size of the force at around 7383 personnel in 2020, while the national population is now about 9 million people (Deloitte, 2020, p. 19). The current police-to-population ratio of 1:1145 is significantly lower than the United Nations recommended ratio of 1:450, and with RPNGC resources concentrated in the urban centres, accessing police remains a challenge for many citizens, 87% of whom live in rural areas (Bourke & Allen, 2021). Police numbers have been supplemented by the deployment of defence force and correctional service personnel during special policing operations, and also by auxiliary and reserve police drawn from the wider community. However, serious abuses by these often poorly supervised volunteer police have led to their regular disbandment by police authorities in the face of public pressure (Post-Courier, 2020).
Government pledges to increase the size of the force are unlikely to be realised any time soon given severe fiscal constraints accentuated by economic fallout from the COVID-19 crisis. According to a 2020 report, the RPNGC faces a recurrent funding gap of K126 million per annum and would need a one-off injection of around K3.9 billion to enable it to deliver its service mandate (Deloitte, 2020, p. 5). Lack of funds to buy fuel for vehicles is a common reason provided for failure to respond to requests for assistance. Flat-lined budgets fund salaries but leave little to cover operational expenses. This leads to rent-seeking behaviour on the part of some police, including demands for payment for attendance and the imposition of unlawful on-the-spot fines at roadblocks. It also renders the police susceptible to reliance on wealthy patrons, including political and business actors, with the accompanying risks this poses to professional integrity.
Over the years, the travails of the RPNGC (and the larger justice system) have provoked two broad sets of critiques. The more common is a technical one focused on organisational deficiencies, such as training, management systems, budgeting, operational skills, leadership, and professionalism. This has been the dominant framing of successive donor-funded institutional-strengthening and capacity-building programs since the late 1980s. The other critique raises more fundamental issues around the ‘fit’ of existing police and justice models in the local context—ones that cannot be adequately addressed by reliance on technical or administrative solutions and tweaked delivery modalities (Peake & Dinnen, 2014). The clearest articulation of this more radical critique was made in the 1984 Clifford Report, a comprehensive review of the national law and justice system and a compelling indictment of its limited traction in PNG’s diverse and plural social settings (Clifford et al., 1984). At its core was the perceived overreliance on a fragile formal (state) system and the weak linkages between that system and the community-based mechanisms that most citizens relied upon for their daily justice and security needs. In the words of the report:
[T]he possibility that existing services may be defective or inefficient – not because they are starved of resources but because they are either irrelevant to the situation in Papua New Guinea or refusing to work with communities – does not seem to have detained people long. (Clifford et al., 1984, p. 125)
Despite the prescience of its insights, the Clifford Report was quickly overtaken by more pressing political concerns about responding to law-and-order problems in Port Moresby and other urban centres. Reliance on reactive and militarised policing responses became the familiar pattern of crisis management adopted by successive governments in the 1980s and 1990s. The more radical implications of the report, premised on its recognition of the plural reality of policing (and justice) provision in PNG, were seemingly not palatable to members of the legal, judicial, and policing establishment. They were also largely ignored by donors at the time, who remained focused on propping up the country’s formal police and justice organisations.
Solomon Islands and Vanuatu
While neither country has experienced crime or public order problems on the scale and intensity of PNG, many of the same plural policing issues arise in neighbouring Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Both countries are considerably smaller in terms of population and land mass, but share similar colonial histories and many of the same social and demographic characteristics as PNG. The latter include internal diversity and fragmentation, predominantly rural-based populations dependent on subsistence agriculture and cash-cropping, and a small formal government sector whose reach is circumscribed by geography and fiscal constraints. As is the case in PNG, most Ni-Vanuatu and Solomon Islanders identify not so much as individual citizens of a state or nation, but as relational members of collectivities such as clans, extended families, cultural and linguistic groups, islands, or regions. Both countries are archipelagos with small populations scattered across numerous islands, presenting major challenges for centralised administrative systems and the delivery of essential services, as noted in Chapter 2.
Solomon Islands had an estimated population of 640,000 in 2019 (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade [DFAT], 2021a), with around 1400 employees in the Royal Solomon Islands Police Force (RSIPF, 2018), while Vanuatu, with a population of approximately 300,000 (DFAT, 2021b), had about 500 personnel in the Vanuatu Police Force (VPF) in 2021 (Radio New Zealand, 2021). In addition to the VPF, there is a separate paramilitary Vanuatu Mobile Force (VMF). Relations between these two branches of the police have been characterised by intense rivalry over the years (McLeod & Morgan, 2007), with the VMF implicated in several periods of political instability (Rio, 2011). Police resources tend to be concentrated in the national capital and several provincial centres, with a smattering of smaller police posts in rural areas. Most people rely on local mechanisms and informal approaches to manage disputes and routine security needs, often involving extended families and community leaders or chiefs. Police visits to the remote rural areas may be rare and largely confined to responding to the most serious crimes (such as homicide) and making occasional patrols to undertake awareness raising or gather information. The police and the national justice system operate predominantly in Vanuatu’s two main islands of Efate and Santo, leaving only a small number of police and magistrates dispersed across other islands, many of which have no permanent police or state justice presence (Forsyth, 2009). In such places, resort to local non-state mechanisms is often the only available option for addressing everyday justice or security needs.
As in Vanuatu, the bulk of everyday disputes and security issues in Solomon Islands continue to be managed informally in most rural, and many urban, communities, with little resort to the RSIPF. The prevalence and variety of these local approaches—policing and justice provision beneath the state—was documented in research undertaken across five island provinces on behalf of the Solomon Islands Ministry of Justice and Legal Affairs (Allen et al., 2013). Research into perceptions of access to justice in 2019 confirms the continuing importance of non-state policing and justice approaches for many Solomon Islanders, although also noting a growing demand among women and young people for better access to the RSIPF (Sloan et al., 2021). Like the RPNGC and the VPF, the RSIPF has long faced chronic resource shortages, including severe understaffing of rural posts, limiting its ability to extend its reach across the country (Gouy & Harding, 2011).
Solomon Islands’ ethnic tensions (1998–2003) (see Chapter 5) led to the breakdown of government authority. Divided loyalties within the RSIPF resulted in the effective collapse of the organisation, with some of its members implicated in serious crimes of violence and intimidation (Amnesty International, 2000). The tensions left a profound legacy of lack of public trust and confidence in the RSIPF. While the factors behind the crisis were complex (Allen, 2013), it is worth noting that the initial outbreak of violence on Guadalcanal coincided with the abolition of area councils. These councils were a legacy of indirect rule under the British. Their abolition in the late 1990s also signalled the demise of area constables—officials who were empowered to assist in the enforcement of by-laws and local court decisions. These officials had acted as critical intermediaries between the most local levels of governance and regulation and the state justice system, including referring serious matters to the police and court hierarchy. As locally based officials working closely with community leaders, they practised a form of hybrid policing that combined the authority of both local kastom and state law. The abrupt removal of this layer of government contributed to what some rural Solomon Islanders experienced as a withdrawal of state (Dinnen & Allen, 2013). This, in turn, had implications for the management of disputes and security in rural areas. According to one observer, the demise ‘of the local policing and justice systems removed restraints on anti-social behaviour that were formerly available’ (Scales, 2003, p. 9). In short, these changes meant that disputes and grievances that might once have been successfully managed locally were, instead, allowed to fester and escalate.
Transnational Policing (Policing Above the State)
The challenges facing Pacific Island police organisations have prompted substantial levels of policing assistance from international development partners. Australia, the region’s largest bilateral donor and, along with New Zealand, the dominant metropolitan power, has been the main provider of this kind of assistance to the independent Melanesian states. Building effective police and justice capabilities has long been viewed by international development and security actors as a prerequisite for long-term stability and economic prosperity in developing countries.1 Police-building also became a prominent feature in the spate of liberal peace interventions in conflict-affected countries in the early years of the new millennium, as in the case of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) (Allen & Dinnen, 2010; Barbara, 2008). International or transnational policing, which is examined in greater detail in Chapter 5, is an increasingly important additional layer of policing in the Pacific Islands and one that, drawing on Loader’s (2000) formulation (see ‘Introduction’, above), takes place above the state.
As well as capacity-building programs with Pacific police organisations undertaken on a bilateral basis, these transnational policing engagements have included regional initiatives supporting a range of police development activities across the region, such as the Pacific Police Development Program. This kind of policing has sometimes involved the deployment of external police acting in an executive policing capacity, as with RAMSI in Solomon Islands and the short-lived Enhanced Cooperation Program (ECP) in PNG (see Chapter 5). One of the most significant areas of expansion in recent years has been in response to perceptions of growing transnational threats posed by organised crime, terrorism and resource-poaching to small states with porous borders and constrained enforcement capabilities (Watson et al., 2021). This has led to the development of a complex regional security architecture in which Australian and New Zealand agencies, including the Australian Federal Police and the New Zealand Police, play a leading role (Wallis et al., 2021). The architecture and role of transnational policing actors continue to evolve in the broader geostrategic context of intensifying great power competition between the United States of America and China that is playing out across the region (Fry, 2019, pp. 250–253).
International policing assistance has provided external actors with considerable influence in the shaping of police development in Pacific Island countries and territories where, as we have seen, domestic governments have limited resources and, in some cases, little interest in police reform. What is perhaps more surprising is the continued promotion of elaborate capacity-building programs when the tangible outcomes from such endeavours appear to be so modest (Peake & Dinnen, 2014). A review of Australian law and justice assistance in 2012 identified a number of possible reasons for the patchy results from capacity-building that might equally apply in the case of police-building engagements (AusAID, 2012). In the first place, lack of capacity is not always the most binding constraint on institutional performance. Other more immediate factors include the dense network of informal institutions and practices that often overlay the police and the formal justice system in pluralistic social settings such as Melanesia. Second, capacity-building programs are often overambitious in scope and there may be extremely limited ability to implement them in these fragile settings. Finally, capacity-building approaches often work towards best international practice and imported models, which are often a poor fit in the local environment.
The issue of institutional transfer and ‘fit’, discussed earlier in relation to the RPNGC, is also salient when considering this domain of policing practice. International policing assistance has ultimately served to reinforce a state-centric view of policing through its focus on a single institutional form. This orientation reflects what some critical policing scholars view as the international community’s ‘ideological commitment to state-building’ (Baker, 2010, p. 587). However, focusing narrowly on public police organisations ignores the plural reality of policing for most citizens in the Melanesian countries and the many ways in which they manage their everyday dispute resolution and security needs (Dinnen & McLeod, 2009). It also neglects the increasingly prominent role of private policing actors, which is discussed in the following section.
Private Policing (Policing Beyond the State)
While consistent with global trends, the expansion of private security in the Pacific Islands has attracted relatively little attention from scholars, domestic policymakers, or international donors. Occurring largely beyond the state, industry growth has been most dramatic in PNG, reflecting several intersecting currents (Dinnen, 2020). These include high levels of insecurity and the manifest shortcomings of that country’s public police organisation, the RPNGC. Rising investment in private security companies and services in recent years has occurred against the backdrop of a mining and gas boom that saw robust growth in the national economy and increased demand from corporate clients for more effective security services. Other specific factors include Australia’s controversial offshore processing centre for asylum seekers on Manus Island, which has provided lucrative contracts for a succession of local and international security companies, while PNG’s hosting of the Asia–Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in 2018 provided another, albeit temporary, boost for the industry.
The corporate and business sector has been a major driver of industry growth, both as consumers and suppliers of private security services. Law-and-order issues have consistently been identified as among the top constraints to doing business in PNG. World Bank research in 2014 indicated that concerns with crime and violence among the PNG business community was more than four times the regional average in East Asia and the Pacific, and was comparable with countries such as El Salvador, Venezuela, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Lakhani & Wilman, 2014a). The same research showed that business investment in security personnel and infrastructure was significantly higher in PNG than the average for each of the East Asia and Pacific, sub-Saharan, and Latin American regions.
Private security services are now routinely used by a wide range of clients including government departments, schools, and universities, hospitals, banks, hotels, shopping centres, embassies, and NGOs, as well as by some households and individuals. Companies vary in terms of size, the services offered, and the geographic spread of their operations. They range from small-scale local companies with one car and a few employees through to major multinational companies, such as G4S, with global reach. Most are based in the main towns, but some also operate in rural areas where large resource projects are located. As well as static protection, services include escorting mobile assets, close personal protection, security training and assessments, emergency evacuations, rapid response capabilities, and, increasingly, the supply, installation, and monitoring of sophisticated electronic surveillance and satellite tracking systems.
Evidence of the rapid growth of the industry in PNG is found in the figures provided by the industry regulator, the Security Industries Authority (SIA), which issues licences to security companies and permits to their personnel. The number of licensed security companies grew from 174 in 2006 to 566 in 2018 (see Fig. 4.1), while the number of security guards with permits increased from 12,396 in 2006 to 30,279 in 2018. According to senior SIA officials, the significant increase in licensed security companies between 2013 and 2014 resulted in part from the authority’s own efforts to track down unlicensed companies.2 The SIA figures are, however, extremely conservative and do not include what is widely believed to be a very substantial number of unlicensed companies and personnel operating in different parts of the country. Even if we confine ourselves to the official data, the number of guards with permits is still well over three times that of serving police officers and exceeds the combined strength of PNG’s three disciplined services (the police, defence force, and correctional service). By any account, the private security industry is both a significant employer and a major provider of security services in PNG.
Although PNG’s private and public security sectors are still commonly viewed as discrete players in the security and policing landscape, there is considerable overlap and interdependency between them in practice. Larger companies are involved in many of the same kinds of policing activities as their RPNGC colleagues, including crime prevention, investigations, and responding to incidents. Strong informal networks exist between the two, with many security companies started and staffed by ex-police officers. Some private security personnel also serve as reserve police officers. Building and sustaining these links is understood as mutually beneficial. For security company operatives, maintaining good relationships with the police is important to their business practice. For example, it enables them to call on police assistance in the case of violent incidents or to conduct background checks on potential employees. Private operators can also be an important source of material support to cash-strapped public police. For example, some companies provide the police with food, help buy uniforms, supply fuel and maintenance for police vehicles, and, sometimes, pay allowances when working together. Informal networks facilitate critical intelligence sharing. Superior resources available to high-end private operators include communications, surveillance, and tracking systems that are simply unavailable to the police. Support to the police is not simply an act of philanthropy—it is an important way of sustaining reciprocal relationships and the benefits that these provide to all parties.
Concerns have been raised about the potentially adverse implications of the growing industry for public security. For example, PNG’s National Security Policy warns of the proliferation of foreign-owned companies engaging ‘in areas designed for PNG state agencies’ and undermining ‘the state’s ability and authority to deliver public safety and security’ (Government of Papua New Guinea, 2013, p. 37). While these and other concerns about the private security sector may be valid, the rapid growth of the industry in PNG appears to be as much a response to the state’s inability to ‘deliver public safety and security’ as a cause of it. Extensive interaction between public and private security providers indicates how, in some respects, private security is helping to augment the country’s fragile public policing services, thereby contributing to public security rather than undermining it. In a similar vein, one can surmise that if private security were to suddenly disappear, PNG’s security situation would be even worse than it already is. Just as it is important to acknowledge that there has been a privatisation of the public, it is also important to recognise that there has been a publicisation of the private (Freeman, 2003). Rather than being a temporary gap-filler until such time as the RPNGC is capable of fulfilling the policing needs of all citizens, evidence suggests that private security is here to stay and, moreover, that the delineation between public and private is becoming increasingly indistinct in PNG, as it has in many other parts of the world.
Locally Driven Policing (Policing Beneath the State)
Recalling Loader’s (2000) conception of policing as a ‘network of power’ (see ‘Introduction’, above), we see public and private policing in the Pacific Islands occurring through and beyond the state, as well as transnational policing happening above the state. However, the most common form of policing experienced by most Pacific Islanders historically has been policing beneath the state. This remains the case in many places today—especially in the Melanesian countries, given the constrained capacities and reach of public police organisations and the resilience of local policing approaches.
The diversity of local policing forms makes it difficult to generalise, as does their limited visibility from the vantage point of government agencies and donors based in distant national capitals. In some countries, such as Vanuatu, local policing continues to revolve around appeals to traditional authority or kastom, with chiefs and other local leaders performing key policing roles within and between different communities (Forsyth, 2009). Elsewhere, there is considerable variation in the strengths of kastom. Although the dynamism of local social orders has made it remarkably adaptable, its authority has eroded in many places in light of ongoing globalisation.
Local policing and justice practices often have a distinctly hybrid character, involving a variety of institutional arrangements drawing on different sources of authority and legitimacy. For example, research in rural areas of Solomon Islands shows how villagers navigate between three broad and overlapping systems of rules based on different sources of authority—namely, state, kastom, and church (Allen et al., 2013). Each was viewed as having a core sphere of operation. Thus, the state system, associated with the enforcement powers of state police, was seen as the best way of dealing with serious crimes and disputes. Kastom, associated with the exercise of traditional authority by local chiefs, was preferred in the case of socially embedded disputes, such as those over land where genealogical knowledge was crucial to resolution. Church-based approaches were preferred in the case of marital and family disputes, especially by women.
This Solomon Islands research also highlighted the increasing stresses on these local approaches in many rural areas (Allen et al., 2013). New forms of contestation have emerged—for example, around commercial logging projects—which local approaches struggle to manage. Despite this growing fragility—or, perhaps, because of it—there was also evidence of extensive local experimentation as community leaders sought to adjust and strengthen their coping strategies. This often involved attempts to revitalise community governance structures, including through elaborate committee systems and, in some cases, through resort to unofficial ‘community laws’ targeting anti-social behaviour such as substance abuse, fighting, and swearing. Community law making as a response to security problems in areas of limited statehood has been noted throughout Melanesia, including in Vanuatu, Solomon Islands, and PNG (Forsyth, 2014).
Contrary to what tends to be perceived as the insular and circumscribed character of customary forms of regulation, these local initiatives are often actively seeking out connections and engagement with external actors and agencies. Rather than representing a rejection or turning away from the state, they usually entail significant efforts to strengthen linkages with relevant parts of the state, including the police or courts. Locally driven attempts to forge greater engagement with the state are frequently combined with a desire to retain high levels of local autonomy. Rather than being contradictory, the dual wishes for improved state engagement and for local autonomy are quite compatible. They represent local attempts to imbricate the local with the state and vice versa, with the ultimate aim of enhancing the authority and legitimacy of each in places where both have become extremely fragile (Dinnen & Allen, 2016). Similar observations have been made in different parts Melanesia (Higgins, 2020; Schwoerer, 2018).
Related activities appear to be going on in many urban contexts. For example, in PNG’s sprawling urban settlements, komitis (committees) and local leadership networks play a crucial role in forging and sustaining linkages with external actors, such as police officers, magistrates, private security companies, or NGOs. According to a 2018 study, the potential value of these komitis lies in their convening power, which enables them to ‘combine the authority of leaders and ethnic groups inside the blok3 and also draw in individual with connections to the state, police, or others whose power and respect is derived from a range of sources physically external to the settlement’ (Craig & Porter, 2018, p. 5).
In recognising extensive policing activity taking place beneath the state, it is also important to acknowledge its limitations and potential risks. Practices carried out under the auspices of tradition, kastom or other forms of local autonomy can be oppressive and discriminatory. They can conceal profound imbalances of power within communal social orders—not least in respect of gender, given the patriarchal character of traditional societies. Local policing forms often lack the most basic kind of accountability, rendering them susceptible to capture and abuse by more powerful individuals and groups. However, such inequitable outcomes are not inevitable. Some local policing can be respectful and empowering. Indeed, many of the same concerns are regularly raised in respect of the public police and provide the basis for remedial interventions.
Rather than being static relics of a bygone era, there is evidence of the inherent dynamism of these local forms of regulation and their capacity to adapt to change. Evidence of this dynamism includes shifting attitudes resulting from awareness campaigns and other forms of engagement by government, donor, and civil society actors that are aimed at challenging and transforming prevailing norms and practices. In this respect, we noted earlier (see ‘Contemporary Dimensions of Plural Policing: Public Policing (Policing Through the State)’) how women and young people are demanding better access to the RSIPF in Solomon Islands, which may well reflect growing dissatisfaction among these groups with the authority and decision-making of older men, as well as enhanced awareness of their legal rights under national or state law (Sloan et al., 2021).
Security and order-making in the Pacific Islands have always been heavily dependent on local policing and justice practices. As we have seen, small and underresourced colonial administrations were incapable on their own of maintaining order over their scattered local subjects. That they were able to do so was, in large part, due to the role of local forms of policing and order maintenance. The same applies today in many parts of post-colonial Melanesia, where these local forms continue to bear the burden of everyday policing, albeit under mounting stress in many places. Forsyth points out that, in Vanuatu:
[t]he kastom system … relieves the burden on the police to an enormous extent by dealing with a large percentage of criminal cases – minor and serious. It is clear that if the kastom system stopped operating, the VPF, stretched as it already is, could not possibly meet the law-and-order needs of the community. (2009, p. 155)
Insecurity experienced in countries such as PNG, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu would likely be considerably worse without the largely invisible layers of local policing occurring beneath the state.
Conclusion
This chapter has provided an overview of the plural character of policing and security provision in the independent Melanesian countries of the Southwest Pacific. Policing pluralism has been integrally connected to broader historical transformations including colonisation, modern state-building and, more recently, the impacts of economic liberalism animating contemporary globalisation. A relatively consistent driver of pluralisation in the Melanesian Pacific has been the fragility of centralised (state) institutions, including the public police, and their constrained reach in each country. This has been combined with the resilience of older forms of self-regulation or self-policing at local levels and their capacity to adapt to changing circumstances.
The many challenges facing Melanesian police organisations have become increasingly evident in the post-independence period—and nowhere more so than in PNG, the region’s largest and most challenging nation. Given the limitations of small, underresourced, and urban-based police organisations in these overwhelmingly rural countries, most citizens continue to rely on local forms of policing and justice provision, just as they did during colonial times. However, while the authority of kastom and traditional leadership remains strong in some places, it has broken down or been seriously eroded in many others.
Lack of accessible and capable public police, in combination with the weakening of older policing forms, has had dire consequences in the most affected areas. The worse impacts in terms of crime and conflict can be seen today in parts of PNG’s Highlands. However, growing levels of insecurity have also been a catalyst for locally driven policing experimentation in some places, much of which, as we have seen, is hybrid and networked in character. The growing prominence of transnational and private policing is another important dimension to contemporary patterns of policing pluralisation.
Adopting a plural policing perspective allows us to see the fuller spectrum of actors involved in policing and security services in the Southwest Pacific, and the diverse ways in which these individuals and entities interact across time and space as part of larger security assemblages or networks. Highlighting the networked quality of policing practice in contemporary Melanesia also serves to remind policymakers and researchers to place more attention on ways of building and enhancing productive relationships across different domains of policing provision that can ultimately improve security outcomes for all citizens. This requires a widening of our conceptualisation of policing and security beyond a single and discrete institutional form, and, instead, to see the encompassing network of power and regulation comprising multiple actors and forms.
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This section draws on empirical research into PNG’s private security industry undertaken in 2018–2019. The research, which included in-country fieldwork and interviews, was supported by a grant from the Australian Civil Military Centre (ACMC), an Australian government body that supports best practice approaches to civil–military–police engagements in conflict and disaster management activities.
