Stakeholder perspective on searches for security in Papua New Guinea

The new theoretical literature on security in developing countries can contribute to the understanding of Papua New Guinea's overall security predicament. This study uses such ideas to reconceptualise the country’s security in a more comprehensive way. Since the late 1980s, it has become widely recognised that conventional security analysis, which emphasises the military defence of states against foreign attack, cannot address the most pressing and violent challenges faced in Papua New Guinea. The term "security" is now applied to all manner of problems and goals, in official policy, academic commentary, and public debate. However, such accounts have tended to lack a unifying approach, and provide little guidance as to how the country's security predicament might be re-assessed as a whole. Two unanswered questions are pivotal. Firstly, it is uncertain whether official emphases of new security threats to the state or scholarly accents on security interests beside those of the state offer the superior basis for re-analysis. Secondly, the scholarly accounts are presented in terms of an oversimplified dichotomy of state and societal security, and it remains to be shown what the components and particular security imperatives of each might be.The thesis turns to the specialist theoretical literature for tools to explore these questions. That literature readily explains the general circumstances —especially the structural challenges— faced by developing countries, but lacks a satisfactory analytic core focus for the practical investigation of actual security situations at the more immediate level. This focus is needed to help determine which of a very wide range of potentially relevant problems, goals, actors, and coping strategies should be considered, and how they ought to be explained. The thesis proposes a simple analytical frameworkto provide such a focus. This emphasises a consistent "search for security", based on the pursuit of a distinct core value, by each of five key categories of security referents or "stakeholders".The thesis begins to test and refine the ability of this model to provide the core focus needed to address the practical questions indicated above. It does so through a survey of the principal challenges shaping Papua New Guinea’s security in the 1990s, and by examining a pair of case studies involving civil war on Bougainville and renewed highlands warfare. Initial results are quite encouraging. The model contributes to a deeper understanding of security in Papua New Guinea by helping guide the more precise disaggregation of state and societal security. This has implications for attempts to assess and improve the country's overall security situation, and may enrich the wider literature on security in developing countries, in turn