Pacific for Whom? Order Contestation in the Pacific Region

On February 24, 2025, CEGA hosted the Pacific Conference on Multi-actor Security Networks and Global Order at the East-West Center and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. In this post, CEGA’s organizing committee (Aila Matanock, Naazneen Barma, Susanna Campbell, Jonathan Chang, Courtney Fung, Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, and Sean Luna McAdams) detail emerging insights from the first of three expert conferences to discuss how geopolitical competition is manifesting itself in aid targeted towards the security sector in the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and West Africa.

The allocation of foreign assistance, including development aid and security cooperation, can have significant global political, economic, and social implications. Restructuring these relationships changes the influence, alliances, and general ties among countries. 

As part of CEGA’s initiative on Security Programs in Disordered States, we hosted the Pacific Conference on Multi-actor Security Networks and Global Order at the East-West Center and the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. This convening of leading security experts from the Pacific region explored how geopolitical competition shapes and is shaped by security arrangements. Importantly, the workshop was grounded in the premise that each country and people in the Pacific has the potential to influence regional security dynamics, and the broader geopolitical alliances that they reflect, and be influenced by them. 

Some initial themes we identified in this conference include:

1. Who is the “State” that provides security? Various actors take a leading role in providing security functions in states across the Pacific—and many of these actors strive to make themselves legible as potential partners for foreign assistance. Regionally, diverse security actors—states, international organizations, NGOs, and private companies—create different security landscapes, challenging unified approaches. Domestically, deep internal divisions, fragile governance structures, and localized conflicts result in fragmented security responses in some places, although they also allow tailoring to the particular context.

This fragmentation complicates international aid delivery, as seen in Papua New Guinea, where private security entities, local militias, and community mechanisms often supplement or substitute for state forces. In contrast, in Samoa and Fiji, well-functioning central institutions more easily leverage this fragmentation for their own ends. And in the case of Timor-Leste, long-standing organizational rivalries within military, police, and political organizations also influence security partnerships with external actors and the outcomes of those efforts. 

Domestic actors partner with international actors offering resources for the security sector, and play a crucial role in shaping how security assistance is implemented locally. For instance, Samoa’s rejection of armed policing reflects its strong customary governance values and highlights the importance of aligning international security strategies with indigenous perspectives. In the Solomon Islands, many local communities have created their own informal constitutions and local policing institutions, which work independently and without oversight from the central state, at times seeking to make themselves more legible to potentially partner with outsiders. Much of the external assistance for the security sector targets state institutions, but not all of it, and the formalization of these structures allows some outsiders to work with domestic actors beyond the state.

2. Security aid as state-making: Security aid can also reshape the building and exercise of state authority in the Pacific region by prioritizing security institutions over other administrative and development functions. In the Solomon Islands, for example, security assistance from Australia and, most recently, China illustrates how aid can lead to this substitution effect. Police stations have been built and police forces have expanded, but the government has not simultaneously expanded other needed social services, increasing dependency on informal customary governance systems. Pacific states are adept at reframing security issues – highlighting climate change, sustainable development, and even cybersecurity given the agendas of external actors providing security aid in the region – to bring in resources for some of these needed social services.

Some of these issues are pressing. For example, Samoa includes community and ecological capacity-building concerns in its national security strategy given the effect of the changing climate there. While external aid often privileges particular topics, especially security, Pacific states are able to navigate the landscape to gain resources for traditional military or policing needs and at times beyond this, but there are limits in terms of what administrative and development functions they can get supported. In general, this means that the security sector expands, while other areas stall.

3. Pacific states choose at times to take and at times to make the regional order: Pacific states, as well as more local actors, actively shape the regional security order even as they navigate complex geopolitical pressures, exemplified by their interactions with regional and major powers such as Australia, China, and the United States. Sometimes, domestic actors try to shape the broader context deliberately. Samoa’s strategic neutrality and carefully managed foreign relations exemplify deliberate order-making. At other times, domestic actors choose to take the given context within which they are, then shape their own approaches. The Solomon Islands in recent years, for example, exhibits a more malleable approach toward negotiating and contesting international security partnerships based on evolving local priorities. 

These dynamics demonstrate Pacific states’ selective engagement and strategic use of their geopolitical leverage to influence broader regional politics. All of these states have significant agency in the choice of which parts of the order to make and which parts of the order to take. Questions arise in terms of when and why they decide to operate within certain given parameters versus actively try to shape those parameters. These choices are shaped by the decisions of other actors in the region and by competing interests. They can have profound effects on local conditions, and on regional and even global influence and power.

Two more workshops will build on this initial convening: one held in Singapore in March and another to be held in Accra, Ghana in May. These discuss the dynamics of security assistance in Southeast Asia and West Africa, respectively, and how they shape regional—and ultimately global—dynamics. For researchers interested in contributing to this body of work, CEGA will open a request for proposals in Summer 2025 and hold a conference in Washington D.C. in 2026.