Articulation and Concordance: A Dialogue on Civil–Military Relations in Fiji

Abstract

This dialogue took place at a historical moment of transition in Fiji, the country we both call home, but which only one of us currently lives and works in. At the time that we recorded this in 2014, Fiji was preparing to hold elections for the first time in eight years. In December 2006 the Commander of the Fiji Military Forces Commodore Frank Bainimarama executed a coup against the government of Laisenia Qarase, which had been elected earlier that year. For the first time since Fiji's history had begun to be troubled by military interference in political life in 1987, the military seemed to be taking an oppositional stance in relation to notions of indigenous paramountcy. Bainimarama has consistently described his motives as antiracist, and has presented a new constitution for the nation and his radical reforms of the electoral system as being in the interests of a more genuine democracy. In 2014 he officially retired as military commander and announced his candidacy for the country's first election under the constitution and electoral system his unelected regime had introduced.The reasons we chose the format of a dialogue rather than a conventional academic article are both practical and pedagogical. Given that we live in two different countries (Raijeli in Fiji and Teresia in New Zealand), our opportunities to work on articulating a seamlessly shared position have been limited. Since Raijeli is director of a nongovernmental organization in Fiji and Teresia teaches a full load of undergraduate and postgraduate courses while also supervising PhD students at a university in New Zealand, the demands of our careers have meant that we needed to make the best use of technologies available to us for long distance conferencing via telephone and Internet. As feminists, we believe there is pedagogical value in making our analytical processes transparent. So rather than a typical conversation between the two of us, which, given that we have been friends for two decades would involve a lot of insider shorthand, we have staged this particular discussion, mindful that most of our audience will be encountering our work and Fiji's issues for the first time. The format of a dialogue about civil military relations (CMR) in Fiji, most pointedly addresses the ways that the eight years of military rule in Fiji between 2006-2014 have also generated a paradoxical climate of censorship and self-censorship (especially evident in Fiji's print and broadcast media, but also palpable among NGOs and academics) on one hand, and vitriolic polemics and rumor-mongering on the other hand (best illustrated by the proliferation of Internet blogs focusing their commentary on Fiji since the 2006 coup). Our aim in this dialogue is to illuminate a path that can avoid such extremes while advancing understanding of the challenges of CMR that face Fiji.Our discussion is structured along the following lines: first, we provide a bit more background on who each of us is, highlighting in particular, our academic engagement with studies of CMR or militarism more broadly; secondly, we describe what it is that makes the Fiji context so challenging and interesting for each of us in our work. In the third phase of the dialogue we discuss how feminist and other theories have informed and refined our understanding of CMR in Fiji, and we conclude by offering some thoughts about realistic and optimistic ways forward might be for CMR in Fiji. Raijeli Nicole (RN):I am an indigenous iTaukei Fijian and a feminist activist. I grew up and received my education in Fiji. In 2001, I moved to the Philippines and worked for Isis Manila, an international feminist organisation lobbying for women's communication rights in both the UN and social justice movement spaces. I led the organisation for three and half years until 2007 and then I moved back to the Pacific to settle in Christchurch, New Zealand. In July 2013, I returned to Fiji to take up a 3-year contract with Save the Children Fiji. So, apart from a one week visit in October 2012, I have lived away from Fiji for almost 12 years. I only started studying militaries in February 2010, when I undertook my Masters in International Law & Politics at the University of Canterbury. I wrote my dissertation on “Civil Military Relations in Fiji: A Concordance between the Military, Political Elites and Citizenry”. (Nicole 2011)The path to this thesis had its beginnings in my participation in Fiji Women's Rights Movement (FWRM) Collective meetings that followed the May 2000 coup. At that time, the Collective debated and discussed whether to engage or not engage with the military-led interim administration. And, as it had done in 1987 after the first coup, FWRM voted to take an oppositional political stance, demanding for the rule of law and democracy to be restored and for the military to return to the barracks. A decade on, when I began my thesis research, nonengagement with the military continued to be a position that challenged the women's movement in Fiji.My decision to look at civil–military relations (CMR) in Fiji for my thesis was influenced by my six and half years in the Philippines (and in Southeast Asia). I had observed first-hand the role AFP (Armed Forces of the Philippines) played in the removal of President Estrada in 2001 in the EDSA II—People Power Revolution. I also saw how the AFP secured President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo's leadership despite the many challenges she faced over her eight-year rule which included an allegation of vote rigging (Hello Garci saga). At the same time, I got to observe and be part of the intensely vibrant and diverse social justice movements in action. Filipino activists put forward radical democratic change proposals that were deeply rooted in their ideological convictions ranging from the center left to social democrats, to national democrats, the peasant movements, the communist party, the people's army and more.I left the Philippines in 2007 understanding that Fiji's transition to democratic rule would require civil society to actively put forward transformative democratic proposals that examined the Fiji military, the way it functions, and its role in domestic politics.My mixed heritage as a Banaban, Kiribati, and African American definitely shapes my perspective on the military. Banaba and Kiribati served as parts of the theater of World War II, and their people suffered death, trauma, and displacement as a result of conflicts between the governments of other countries. Yet as an organization that upheld notions of meritocracy, the US military offered my African American great-grandfather (during WWI) and grandfather (during WWII) opportunities to earn social mobility and democratic rights even when the civilian society whose freedoms they were meant to be defending still denied equality to individuals on the basis of race. This inherent contradiction in the history of militarism—its checkered record of empowering and victimizing, its transparency and its opaqueness—has held my research interest for over twenty years.I began paying attention to the role of militarized power in the Pacific Islands as a graduate student doing my MA in History at the University of Hawai‘i. As the seat of US military and naval power in the Pacific, Hawai‘i's militarization has been extraordinary. For anyone interested in learning more about the extent to which the islands have been militarized by the USA, I would recommend the award-winning documentary, “Noho Hewa: The Illegal Occupation of Hawai‘i” (Kelly 2009). Very much inspired by the growing Hawaiian sovereignty movement of the late 1980s and early 1990s, my research interests as a graduate student turned toward the impact of US colonialism in Micronesia. Through my MA research I learned about the US program of atomic and nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1962, and the extreme political and economic pressure put by the United States on the republic of Belau to abandon its nuclear-free constitution in the 1980s and 1990s. Sadly, while many Americans have now been conscientized about the impact of US foreign and military policy in other parts of the world, they still know very little about what their government and defense forces and military industrial complex have done in our part of the world. My PhD research at the University of California, Santa Cruz, theorized this camouflage or masking effect as a phenomenon I called “militourism,” noting how the most militarized islands in the Pacific are often also the most commodified for tourism.More recently, my inquiry and analyses have turned away from the macro effects of militarization and more to the experiences of soldiers—in particular women soldiers from Fiji, some of whom served in the British Army (BA) in the 1960s; others who serve in the Fiji Military Forces (FMF) and yet others who serve in the BA today as part of a British recruiting effort in Commonwealth countries that began in the 1990s. I'm finishing a book on this research, and what I've learned, in particular from interviewing servicewomen and some of their male colleagues or commanding officers, has been hugely illuminating—but not in a way that makes militarism in Fiji seem more manageable or less complex. Quite the opposite, in fact.Fiji is a challenging location from which to study the military. It is a developing nation which in the postindependence era was militarized primarily for the purpose of servicing a global peacekeeping industry. Fiji's militarization relies on and exacerbates key social, political, economic and ideological domestic and international structures of inequality and relations of exploitation on one hand, and some fascinating opportunities for the exercise of personal and individual agency on the other.Despite this intricate web of closeness and intimacy; the military's role in politics is not discussed, at least not publicly or in the civil society spaces, partly, because it is a delicate topic and the fear of repression is quite real.But what happened with the last coup in 2006, and under the regime of former military Commander, and now Rear Admiral (retired) Frank Bainimarama, is that the terms shifted into a radically new space where the military is now the champion and defender of a constitution and electoral system based on racial and ethnic equality. We might say that the military since 2006 has taken upon itself the activist role of evening out the ethnic and racial contours of civilian society. While this has won it unprecedented support from Indo-Fijian communities, it has sent shock waves through iTaukei or indigenous Fijian communities—and, it has to be said, that in this century it has been mostly indigenous Fijians who have been intimidated and tortured by the military. By contrast, in the first coups of 1987, it was Indo-Fijian intellectuals and activists who were being targeted by the military.In order to make sense of these shifts and changes in CMR over time in Fiji, the most helpful framework for me has been “articulation theory,” which comes out of British and American cultural studies. Articulation allows us to see how a phenomenon such as militarism comes into being as an assemblage of diverse elements. So articulation theory helps me locate the fulcrum for the intense militarization of Fiji society in the late 1970s; the result of the convergence of international imperatives around conflicts in the Middle East with a domestic crisis in indigenous economic development; and both being the legacy of flawed British colonial social and political engineering. Stuart Hall and James Clifford have described articulation as a system of hooking and unhooking, and used the image of the articulated lorry to good effect in other scenarios (Slack 1996, Clifford 2000). And one could see how Winston Halapua's analysis of militarism in Fiji as the product of a collusion between Methodist Christianity and traditional indigenous chiefly leadership (what he calls turagaism, Halapua 2003) could be rephrased using the language of articulation. In this way, articulation theory also helps me to identify the tendentious forces which historically cohered together to make military service so compelling for young iTaukei men over several generations: hard-bodied ideals of indigenous masculinity and heroism; Christian discourses of righteousness and justice for a chosen people; colonially derived hierarchies around race, civilization, discipline, and modernization (Teaiwa 2001, 2005). However, my own more recent application and testing of the theory in relation to militarism in Fiji has shown that indigenous masculinity, Christian righteousness, and colonial hierarchies of race, for example, are not so easily unhooked from one another, and that in fact, a more appropriate image for understanding their articulation—and by extension the possibilities of their disarticulation—is the articulated limb. Thus, the possibility of disarticulation is not simple or mechanical, but intensely difficult and painful. Whereas feminist analyses might easily veer toward a reductive analysis of militarism in Fiji, by fixating on its culture of hypermasculinity, I feel a feminist analysis informed by articulation theory more accurately comprehends the complexity of the phenomenon.To find a civil–military framework that acknowledged this reality, I drew upon Rebecca Schiff's theory of concordance (Schiff 1995). In summary, concordance theory does the following: It acknowledges and places a premium on civil–military relations being rooted in the historical and cultural experiences of a country.The theory is not prescriptive in the type of institutional arrangement between the military and civil institutions. Instead, the theory argues that each country depending on its own realities will determine the framework—whether separation or otherwise.The theory also brings together three key players—the military, the political elite, and the citizenry (civil society) to formulate the most appropriate civil–military relations for the country.In particular, for an effective civil–military relations, the three partners are tasked with finding agreement on four indicators, namely, (1) social composition of the officer corps; (2) political decision-making process, (3) recruitment method, and (4) military style.At its core, the theory of concordance highlights dialogue, accommodation, and shared values or objectives among the three stakeholders for ensuring smooth relations. Schiff argues such an approach will reduce the likelihood of military interventions (Schiff 1995: 12).In this light, concordance is a useful framework for Fiji because it reimagines and reframes Fiji's CMR modality and at the same time it acknowledges that managing the military and the transitional path to democracy is invariably layered across provincial political lines, and ethnic, cultural, and religious complexities. Concordance also reframes our CMR thinking beyond the common preoccupation with “how” civilian control is established and maintained” toward a model that “seeks to sustain and protect democratic values” (Burk 2002: 7). Furthermore, the focus on military style allows for a closer reading of the cultural dimensions of the military in a small country like Fiji and the preoccupation with reaching agreement through accommodation and dialogue dovetails with the concept of talanoa—the process in which indigenous Fijians (and other Pacific Islanders) achieve consensus building.In order to find a democratic CMR, Schiff includes the citizenry or civic participation in her equation. She sees the citizenry as the segment of society that legitimizes the power of the traditional CMR partners—the military and the political elite. This inclusion marks a radical shift away from the dichotomous Western CMR patterns between civil and military authority. Consequently, concordance offers civil society and the women's movement, in particular, with a framework to engage the military on military matters.Apart from being a useful tool to plan for CMR after Fiji's 2014 elections, concordance theory is also able to capture Fiji's evolving civil–military relations since 1970. Until now, prior analysis on Fiji's military's relationship with the civilian authorities has been through a combination of approaches where the focus has been to explain “why the military has intervened in politics” (e.g., B. Lal 1988, Robertson and Tamanisau 1988, Scarr 1988, V. Lal 1990, Halapua 2003, Firth and Fraenkel 2009). Thus, the approach to CMR that is predominant in the literature on Fiji has been from the perspective of “after the military coups” and very little analysis has been done from the angle of “what type of civil–military relations will prevent a coup?”The public lecture was the first of its kind in six years where the military and its role in Fiji were openly discussed. This lecture almost did not happen because certain approvals had not been obtained from the military. A series of negotiations led to the lecture pushing ahead. The closed meeting looked at the experiences of other countries transitioning from military rule and also attempted to look at actual transitional arrangements that would be best for Fiji before the September 2014 elections. However, both discussions took place without any participation from the military itself. I understand they were invited but chose to not attend citing that both spaces were for the public to have their say without military presence. While the discussions were rich, they were still lacking in substance because we were strategizing on hypothetical scenarios and tensions.Looking back now on that experience and what was to follow in December 2012 (when the Ghai Constitution was thrown out by the government), I am convinced that current engagements with the military are now very deliberate. There seems to have been a conscious shift by those of us in civil society spaces; we understand now that military engagement is necessary not only for the transition to democracy but also during democratic times. Alfred Stepan underscores these points in his work “Rethinking Military Politics” and stated that “the military are a permanent factor in any calculus of power” (1988: 128).Going forward, we can expect that Fiji's transition to democracy will be informed by several givens: first, that the Fiji military is always involved in politics; second, that the new constitution has enshrined a role for the military to continue to play in defending national borders, protecting the people and ensuring the well-being of the people.What if we took military intervention as the norm? What would that do for our analyses? Might that free up our thinking in some way? Could taking military intervention as a norm open up the possibility for talking about demilitarization in a way that seeing it as an aberration forecloses? In other words, if we see coups as aberrations, doesn't that keep us invested in the notion of a professional and disciplined military, and therefore keep us from considering the alternative of demilitarization? Whereas if we start to see military intervention as a norm, then doesn't it make demilitarization much more of an imperative? As you know, I have a penchant for the counterintuitive.But whenever Fiji has faced constitutional crises, its advisors and leaders have looked for models from countries attempting to manage structural inequalities in the context of similar ethnic diversity. When Fiji's constitution was reviewed between 1995 and 1997, Malaysia and South Africa were key focal points for the constitution review commissioners (B. Lal and Vakatora 1997). More recently, some civil society leaders have been encouraged by aid donors to examine Indonesia as an example of a country that has transitioned from military dictatorship to an elected civilian government working in harmony with the military. It's not clear how extensively this perceived concordance would reach across the entirety of Indonesia's diverse archipelago, but obviously there is a rather discordant relationship between civil society in West Papua and the political elite, militarized police, and military of Indonesia (Sands 1991, Kingsbury 2005). I doubt there's much that's positive for the FMF to learn from the Indonesian military in West Papua. On the other hand, I do think it is worth investigating how other non-Western democracies with standing armies have avoided military coups. Maybe we need to be studying countries like Malaysia and India to see how they achieve concordance. But to be honest, I would be more interested in seeing how concordance and articulation theory could be worked together, especially around the question of achieving demilitarization. Maybe we need to study a country like Costa Rica to see how they managed to disarticulate the military from their democratic equation?Recall for a moment that Schiff identified four indicators that the three partners needed to agree on for CMR concordance to be achieved. Indicator 2, which is the political decision-making process, will be of utmost importance during the period of transition to democracy, as it focuses on the type of body and process that will make decisions on how a military functions. Is it an all-military council? Is it a national security type council with civilian representation? By what process might civilian representatives be selected?All the parties that come to the concordance table would benefit from highlighting some of the expected contestations and privileges in the transition to democracy. The areas of significant tension are likely to revolve around the military budget, restructuring of the military and its human rights record (or lack thereof) during military rule. In addition, the rolling back of military prerogatives in areas such as bureaucracy, law-making, and executive power can also create a crisis of control for the military.The other thing that worries me, is that our discussion so far has not taken account of the huge role that both multinational and domestically owned private security companies are playing in the militarization of Fiji society. Although the level of recruiting in Fiji by multinational companies has abated in recent years, Nic Maclellan's research estimated at one point that close to 1,000 Fiji men and some women were in private security service in the Gulf and Middle East (Maclellan 2006). Articulation theory really illuminates the ways that militarism exceeds the institution of the military. In fact, what articulation theory has helped me see are the ways that so-called civilian life—the values, beliefs, and practices around masculinity, religion, race, and even something as innocuous as sport—constitute the cartilage, tendons, and muscles around which the disciplined use of force comes to play such a central role in the functioning of a polity (Teaiwa 2005). How might we negotiate CMR with this in mind?