The Good Neighbour explores the Australian government's efforts to support peace in the Pacific Islands from 1980 to 2006. It tells the story of the deployment of Australian diplomatic, military and policing resources at a time when neighbouring governments were under pressure from political violence and civil unrest. The main focus of this volume is Australian peacemaking and peacekeeping in response to the Bougainville Crisis, a secessionist rebellion that began in late 1988 with the sabotage of a major mining operation. Following a signed peace agreement in 2001, the crisis finally ended in December 2005, under the auspices of the United Nations. During this time Australia's involvement shifted from behind-the-scenes peacemaking, to armed peacekeeping intervention, and finally to a longer-term unarmed regional peacekeeping operation. Granted full access to all relevant government files, Bob Breen recounts the Australian story from decisions made in Canberra to the planning and conduct of operations.
Part I. Pacific War to the Bougainville Crisis, 1942–90: 1. Setting the scene: Australian security and aid policies in the Pacific Islands, 1942–90; 2. Standing by Vanuatu in 1980 and 1988; 3. Testing Australian peacemaking: Fiji coups, 1987; 4. Intervention? The beginnings of the Bougainville crisis, 1989; Part II. The Bougainville Crisis, 1990–7: 5. Facilitating Tok Tok, 1990–3; 6. Giving peace a chance: Australian peacemaking and peacekeeping in 1994; 7. Enough is enough: from Cairns to Sandline, 1995–7; Part III. Australian Intervention in Bougainville: 8. New Zealand joins in: designing and deploying the Truce Monitoring Group in 1997; 9. Smiling and waving: establishing truce monitoring, December 1997–February 1998; 10. Selling Lincoln: finding a peace to keep, January–April 1998; 11. Setting precedents: establishing peace-monitoring operations in 1998; 12. Getting the political focus right: PMG contributions to negotiations in 1999; 13. Trying to leave: reducing ADF support to the PMG, October 1999–May 2001; 14. From offstage to centre stage: securing the guns, part 1: 1998–2002; 15. Trying to finish the job: securing guns, part 2: June 2002–June 2003; 16. Mission accomplished? Peacemaking and peacekeeping in Bougainville, 1988–2003; Part IV. Australia's Interventions in Solomon Islands: 17. From peacemaking to peacekeeping: Australia and the troubled Solomon Islands, 1997–2000; 18. A futile exercise: the International Peace Monitoring Team in Solomon Islands, 2000–2; 19. The path to intervention: Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands 2003; 20. The circuit breaker: RAMSI Intervention, July–December 2003; 21. Security for capacity-building: RAMSI, 2004–5; 22. Back into the streets: the Honiara riots, April 2006; 23. Back to the waters off Fiji: Operation Quickstep, 2006; 24. Monarchy under pressure: responding to civil unrest in Tonga, November 2006; Conclusion.
Associate Professor Bob Breen is Deakin University's Director of Post Graduate Qualifications and Academic Adviser at the Centre for Defence and Strategic Studies, Australian Defence College. Beginning with books on Australian military operations in Korea and Vietnam, he went on to author several books about Australian peacekeeping operations in Somalia, Papua New Guinea (Bougainville) and East Timor in the 1990s, as well as an analysis of post-Cold War Australian military force projection entitled Struggling for Self Reliance: Four Case Studies of Australian Regional Force Projection in the Late 1980s and the 1990s (2008).
