Violence and political change in Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Papua New Guinea's government faces challenges to its legitimacy and power over major issues in a number of spheres, including control over mining projects, payments of compensation, and the electoral process itself. This circumstance prompts me to raise a question similar to ones regarding rebellion and revolution posed initially in the very different context of the study of African kingdoms by Max Gluckman (Gluckman 1963): What are the conditions for the political legitimacy of authority in a small-scale multi-ethnic state such as that of Papua New Guinea? Or, to put it in a less a priori way, what contests over such legitimacy occur? To explore this underlying issue, I will use cases from the Highlands region of Papua New Guinea, and in doing so, I will at the same time examine the place of violence in political life from the point of view of its legitimacy or acceptability to different parties, as a part of the overall political process (Riches 1986). Also at stake here is the place of 'custom' in contemporary politics. Keesing's study of Kwaio history clearly shows that for the Kwaio, 'custom' is a way of marking out their resistance to external control (Keesing 1992), and among the Kwaio, as well as elsewhere in Melanesia, violent, physical action has a place in such processes of resistance. My argument here is that the use of violence in political processes that are encapsulated within a state framework leads, whether intentionally or not, to a risk of turbulence reaching the state level itself, and to the possibility that a democratic form of government may not be able to sustain itself in the future. Conversely, state-level institutions and processes, in their impingement on local communities, may themselves contribute to the growth of turbulence and the resurgence of transformed versions of 'custom'. The perspectives of politicians, public servants, local leaders, and ordinary people may be sharply at variance, especially with regard to the place of violence in politics. So 'legitimacy', as Riches points out, is likely to be inherently contested and indeterminate (Riches 1986: 11). As