Book review : Resource extraction and contentious states : mining and the politics of scale in the Pacific Islands

Abstract

Matthew Allen makes an important contribution to the field of small states and territories in his case study of mining activities in sub-national territories in Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. Noting the close relationship between violence and the extraction of resources which appear to be intensified in islands, he poses the central question of his book: “is there something peculiar about islands…that make them unusually or exceptionally potent spaces for the contentious politics that attend extractive enclave economies?” (p. 6). “Islandness”, the “socio-spatial” relations to which this gives rise, extends the discussion beyond familiar explanatory frameworks of “resource curse and extractive resource”. Allen argues that the bounded space of an island, which is experienced most intensely in tiny sub-national jurisdictions, themselves constitutionally attached to multi-island states, provides a clearer picture of the internal tensions at play in colonially constituted territories and states. The central idea is that the extractive sectors on these islands have resulted in violent encounters not experienced at the same level in the sector on the mainland. He notes that Bougainville (PNG) and Guadalcanal (Solomon Islands) were sites of two of the most serious armed conflicts in the Pacific since WWII. He argues that it is important to understand how the scale of these islands worked with longer historical processes and underlying inequalities, to intensify conflict. [excerpt]