ABSTRACT
New Zealand's perspective on defense and security is, to a large extent, shaped by its history, geography, and emerging identity as a small country committed to multilateral peace operations and to the promotion of international norms that seek a peaceful settlement of disputes. New Zealand is a small state of 3.8 million people. New Zealand is also an island state situated on the periphery of the Asia-Pacific region. It has no close neighbors, nor any threatening ones, in its quarter of the Pacific. By the year 1000 New Zealand had been populated by a Polynesian people known as the Maori. In the early nineteenth century Europeans, largely from the United Kingdom, called Pakeha by the Maori, began to settle New Zealand. New Zealanders, Maori, Pakeha, and other islanders have a strong warrior tradition and military history. The Maori had frequent intergroup conflicts before the arrival of Europeans, though the lethality of this conflict grew greatly with the introduction of European firearms. The Musket Wars of the early nineteenth century between various Maori groups, and to a lesser extent the subsequent New Zealand Wars between Maori and Pakeha, so decimated the Maori people that it was not until 1960 that the Maori population attained its pre-Musket War level. 1 The 1840 Treaty of Waitangi continues to serve as the bedrock for relations between the two communities.
