Community Peace and Safety in Post-Conflict Bougainville. Part 1: The Crisis and Its Legacies

Abstract

Bougainville’s decade-long conflict, known locally as ‘the Crisis’, officially ended with the 2001 Bougainville Peace Agreement (BPA). This established the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (AROB) and set in train a complex pathway towards possible Independence that continues to play out today. However, legacies of the Crisis continue more than two decades later. One way to understand this is to go beyond the popular framing of the Crisis as having been between armed separatists and the Papua New Guinea (PNG) state and see it as one that also involved multiple local-scale conflicts between Bougainvilleans themselves. Its legacies today include individual and collective trauma, and enduring divisions and animosities that impact the wellbeing of communities and the ability of the AROB to move forward. The sons of combatants are now starting to ask questions about settling old scores. For many orphans and widows, the search for the bones of their lost ones continues to haunt them. In the first of this two-part In Brief series, we look at some of these legacies through the lens of current social order problems in the AROB. Our argument is that what today tend to be framed as ‘law and order’ issues, such as violence and endemic drug and alcohol abuse, are often linked in complex ways to the earlier crisis. Rather than relying on punitive policing responses, as is increasingly advocated, there remains a critical role for peacebuilding if underlying issues are also to be addressed. While new priorities are emerging, we contend that peacebuilding should continue as a major focus for Bougainville’s policymakers and external donors.