ABSTRACT

While Australia’s history of police participation in peacekeeping goes back more than 40 years to the beginnings of the United Nations (UN) peacekeeping operation in Cyprus, involvement of significant numbers of Australian policing personnel in overseas operations including peacekeeping is relatively recent. Significant participation began with the Australian-led regional intervention in the Solomon Islands in 2003 (Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI)). Since 2003, more than 1,000 Australian federal, state, and territory police officers have served in a variety of missions in addition to the Solomon Islands. These have included Papua New Guinea (PNG), Tonga, Nauru, Vanuatu, Sudan, Afghanistan, and Timor-Leste (TL). These missions have had capacity-building as well as peacekeeping functions, and in some cases the two functions have coexisted formally in the same mission (e.g., RAMSI).