Political Legitimacy and the Post-colonial State in the Pacific: Reflections on Some Common Threads in the Fiji and Solomon Islands Coups

Abstract

The recent hostage crises in Fiji and the Solomon Islands quickly merged into a series of deeper crises to do with the political legitimacy of the government of the day, of the Constitution, of 'democracy', and even of the idea of the post-colonial state itself as a continuing political entity. While the other twelve post-colonial states in the Pacific share many of the common threads in Fiji and the Solomon Islands, these are unlikely to turn into ethno-nationalist crises concerned with the very survival of democratic change, the system of governance and of the state itself.