ABSTRACT
The Australian-led Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) has regularly been seen as a ‘comprehensive’ or ‘integrated state-building operation’, both by its architects and by its critics.2 Within Australia, the 2003-13 mission was often
extolled as possessing a ‘unique kind of authority in the world of state-building’ and as providing a ‘model for future deployments’.3 On the ground in Solomon Islands, the early RAMSI special coordinators frequently described their task as ‘state-building’ or ‘nation-making’, terms that were often used interchangeably. The mission’s first special coordinator, Nick Warner (2003-04), told a press conference in February 2004: ‘Nation building is what we really came here to do, laying down the foundations of law and order, a foundation to begin the process to rebuild the nation’.4 That delayed timing became more compressed for Warner’s successor, James Batley (2004-06), who said in 2005 that ‘at its core, RAMSI is a state-building exercise’, a task he deemed necessary because ‘prior to RAMSI’s arrival in mid-2003, the Solomon Islands state had ceased to function in a minimally acceptable way’.5
