Sacred king and warrior chief : the role of the military in Fiji politics

Abstract

The role of the Fiji military in politics characterized by the 1987, 2000 and 2006 coups has been interpreted through the broad lenses of ethnic tensions and civil-military relations models. This thesis argues that those coups are best understood through an analysis of the interplay between Fijian traditional politics and the predominantly indigenous Fijian military. Like the usurpation of the traditional Sacred King by the Warrior Chief in Fiji's leading pre-colonial state of Bau, the military's role in politics today is an inversion of the neo-traditional political order, and the military has now moved from a mediator role to play a more enduring function in the governance of Fiji. Given the influence of vanua politics in modern Fiji, and the importance of the neo-traditional Turaga-Bati relationship, models of coups and military-civilian relationships drawn from the literature are of variable usefulness. Finer's Opportunity and Disposition calculus, which emphasizes the coalescence of civilian and military elites in coup making, certainly applies to Fiji and is used in this thesis. On the other hand, Fiji's military professionalism must be seen as differing from Samuel Huntington's civil supremacy model. An additional consideration examined in this thesis is the influence of international peacekeeping operations on the domestic politics of the countries from which peacekeepers are drawn. In Fiji's case, it is argued; experience in peacekeeping operations has influenced the military's self image as political mediator and encouraged it to adopt a role that encompasses security. This has correspondingly led to the militarization of government by a largely ethnic Fijian military.