Archipelagos of Peace: Australian Peacekeepers in Bougainville, East Timor and Solomon Islands 1997-2006

Abstract

Since 1945 Australians have served as peacekeepers across the world in Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the Pacific. They have contributed to one of the most startling attempts at worldwide collective security in human history. That sweeping story has been well explored, but the experiences of peacekeepers themselves have remained rather elusive. And yet peacekeeping outcomes largely depend on what happens at the ground level between people. The central aim of this thesis is to pull these stories from obscurity and demonstrate that peacekeepers’ recollections, descriptions and perspectives are a central and necessary part of peacekeeping histories. That story is explored here by examining Australian peacekeepers’ oral histories of serving in Bougainville, Solomon Islands and East Timor between 1997 and approximately 2006. These are valuable case studies because all three peace operations overlapped in the same decade, all occurred under the same Prime Minister and Foreign Minister and all were elided together in strategic and political discourse. More significantly, each was also bound, in Australian imaginations, to a nebulous region called ‘the Pacific’. This unique intersection of the three operations creates opportunities to explore broader questions about Australia’s relationship with the Pacific. Though not exclusively used, peacekeepers’ narratives are central to this history. Over sixty Australians from across the country shared their stories for this work. The peacekeepers’ came from three different organisations – the Australian Defence Force, the Australian Public Service and the Australian Federal Police. Exploring what peacekeeping meant to people across these three organisations means this history tells a more varied story than would be possible by focusing solely on one group. That variety also makes it possible to further dissect the nuances and connectedness of peacekeepers’ representations of national, regional and Pacific identities. Ultimately, this is a history of peacekeeping is centred by peacekeepers’ own experiences. All History is, of course, people centred in its own way, but it does not inevitably follow that people are always the centre of the narrative. They often exist in and amongst events swirling around them, actors for sure, but not necessarily the stars. That has certainly been the case for peacekeeping histories so far. We need those stories, but we need the ones in this thesis too. Peacekeeping in the Pacific has very much been about relationships, about very human attempts to understand what it means to build peace in varied and complex contexts; and doing so while labouring under various historical and cultural inheritances that complicated and made specific peacekeepers’ struggles and experiences. This is a story that meets peacekeepers in that space while also showing that those experiences say much about being Australian, being a peacekeeper and being in the Pacific at the turn of the century. Show more