Insecurity, policing and marketization: Papua New Guinea's changing security landscape

Abstract

Security governance in any country entails different actors, institutions and sources of authority operating at different scales. This is very much the case in Oceania where non-state actors in the form of 'traditional' or customary leaders, as well as churches, continue to play a significant role in security provision, alongside that provided by the state and its law enforcement agencies. This pluralism in security provision has been further accentuated in recent years by marketisation and the dramatic growth of private security across the region. While research on plural policing, particularly in the Melanesian countries, has focussed on the interaction between state-provided security and that associated with local forms of 'traditional' authority, the rise of private security in Oceania and its broader implications has attracted surprisingly little attention. This chapter will examine this phenomenon in the context of Papua New Guinea, the region's most populous country by far, and one that until recently has experienced an unprecedented period of economic growth on the basis of its booming extractives sector. It will do so with particular reference to the political economy of private security in PNG, its implications for 'public security', and the likely beneficiaries and likely losers from such developments.