Western Involvement In The Pacific Islands Region

Since its origins in late eighteenth-century European thought, the idea of placing a regional frame around the Pacific islands has never been just an exercise in geographical mapping. This framing has always been a political exercise. Contending regional projects and visions have been part of a political struggle concerning how Pacific islanders should live their lives. Framing the Islands tells the story of this political struggle and its impact on the regional governance of key issues for the Pacific such as regional development, resource management, security, cultural identity, political agency, climate change and nuclear involvement. It tells this story in the context of a changing world order since the colonial period and of changing politics within the post-colonial states of the Pacific. Framing the Islands argues that Pacific regionalism has been politically significant for Pacific island states and societies. It demonstrates the power associated with the regional arena as a valued site for the negotiation of global ideas and processes around development, security and climate change. It also demonstrates the political significance associated with the role of Pacific regionalism as a diplomatic bloc in global affairs, and as a producer of powerful policy norms attached to funded programs. This study also challenges the expectation that Pacific regionalism largely serves hegemonic powers and that small islands states have little diplomatic agency in these contests. Pacific islanders have successfully promoted their own powerful normative framings of Oceania in the face of the attempted hegemonic impositions from outside the region; seen, for example, in the strong commitment to the ‘Blue Pacific continent’ framing as a guiding ideology for the policy work of the Pacific Islands Forum in the face of pressures to become part of Washington’s Indo-Pacific strategy.

In the volatile post-Cold War era, the small, vulnerable states of the Pacific Islands region face several challenges to their security and sovereignty. This book focuses on these challenges, as part of an examination of security and defence issues in the region. It considers trends and issues over the last decade, and the uncertain prospects over the next. The book emphasizes political, diplomatic, and military matters, including the role of external powers, but also considers environmental, economic, and resources issues.

Covering all Pacific islands involved in World War II military operations, this book is a detailed, single source of information on virtually every geo-military aspect of the Pacific Theater. Arranged regionally and, to the extent possible, chronologically according to when islands entered the war, entries provide complete background information. Along with island names, nicknames, Allied code names, location, and wartime time zones, the entries include such topics as the island's physical characteristics, weather, health hazards, historical background, native population, natural resources, and military value. Japanese and Allied strategies and operations, military problems caused by terrain, military installations, Japanese units and key commanders, Allied units and key commanders, and brief battle descriptions are also covered along with the island's postwar status. A valuable resource for researchers, historians, military history enthusiasts, and war gamers, the book provides complete background information on the geo-military aspects of the Pacific Ocean region, its islands, and the roles they played in the war. 108 maps provide specific information. Until now, geo-military information could only be found by searching four to ten publications on each island.

The interrelationships of the United States and Japan with Micronesia, a U.S. dependency, and Papua New Guinea, a newly independent nation, are the focus of this study. The authors demonstrate that dependence does not by any means automatically terminate by virtue of a legal change in political status. To a surprising extent, Micronesia (the last UN trusteeship) and independent Papua New Guinea depend for their very survival on the United States and Japan. The authors point out that the interests of the United States and Japan in this region too often–and unnecessarily–operate in isolation from one another and in direct conflict. Cooperative U.S.-Japanese efforts are vital in this area; whatever plans are made for the region, they must be island-specific, culturally congruent, politically sensitive, and economically viable.

Ranging from the Hawaiian Archipelago to the Aleutian Islands, from Silicon Valley to Guam, Pathways to the Present is a thoroughly researched and concisely argued account of economic and environmental change in the postwar "American" Pacific. Following a brief survey of the history of the Pacific, the author takes the Hawaiian Islands as the center of American activities in the region and looks at interactions among native Hawaiian, developmental, military, and environmental issues in the archipelago after World War II. He then turns to land- and water-use problems that have intersected with more nebulous quality-of-life concerns to generate policy controversies in the Seattle region and the San Francisco Bay area, especially Silicon Valley. Economic expansion and environmentalism in Alaska are examined through the lens of changes occurring along the Aleutians. From there the study considers Hiroshima after its destruction by the atomic bomb in 1945, looking at residents’ desire to combine urban-planning concepts. The author investigates the effort to remake Hiroshima as a high-tech city in the 1990s, an attempt inspired by the perceived success of Silicon Valley, and postwar planning on Okinawa, where American influences were particularly strong. The final chapter takes into account issues raised on Guam regarding the growth of tourism and the use of the island for military purposes and links these to developments in the Philippines to the west and American Sâmoa to the south. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.