ABSTRACT
This chapter examines independence movements in Melanesia and focuses on the way politics works in the three Melanesian countries that are already independent: Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. Melanesian political systems are better understood in their own terms, and in a way that incorporates the cultural setting in which they are embedded. Melanesian custom dictates the primacy of kin obligations, broadly construed, in the business of politics. The modern map of Melanesia is, to some extent, provisional, as might be expected of a region where borders owe everything to a colonial legacy and where independent states lack strong central authority. Decades of armed struggle by the West Papuan independence movement produced fierce repression of separatists in what one observer called the ‘forgotten war’. The issue of West Papua reached the UN in 2016, when leaders from several Pacific countries including Vanuatu and Solomon Islands condemned alleged human rights abuses by the Indonesians.
