Fiji has experienced four military coups and a military mutiny since 1987, mainly as a result of tension between the majority indigenous Fijian population and an economically powerful Indian minority. Smaller minorities, including Banabans, Rotumans, Chinese, Melanesians and other Pacific islanders are largely politically invisible, and socially and economically excluded. In January 2013, Fiji’s government rejected a draft constitution drawn up by an independent commission, and submitted it to be re-written by the Attorney-General’s office. This intervention threatens to significantly undermine the people’s confidence in the process, the final document and a democratic future for Fiji. Against the backdrop of these upheavals, this report provides insight into the underlying causes and consequences of ethnic tensions in Fiji, based on evidence drawn from extensive interviews across the diversity of Fiji’s ethnic groups. This report urges the government, civil society and religious and ethnic community leaders to promote understanding, tolerance and dialogue between groups. It also provides specific recommendations on tackling ethnic discrimination and exclusion.

This book enhances our understanding as to how diversity and equality are managed in different national contexts. Focusing on workplace equality, diversity, and inclusion, this book brings together a unique blend of scholarly research and professional practice, evidenced through an array of individuals both outside and inside organizations.

Suva Stories explores a fascinating tapestry of histories in one of the Pacific’s oldest and most culturally diverse urban centres, the capital of Fiji. Charting the trajectory of Suva from indigenous village to colonial hub to contemporary Pacific metropolis, it draws on a rich colonial archive and moving personal memoirs that bear witness to their time. The diverse contributions in this volume form a complex mosaic of urban lives and histories that contribute fresh insights into historical and ongoing debates about race, place and belonging. Suva Stories is a valuable companion to those seeking to engage with the city’s pasts and present, and will prompt new conversations about history and memory in Fiji.

This timely handbook critically examines the development and role of tourism in small Pacific Island states located across Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. The volume presents an expansive evaluation of current issues, challenges and potentialities for the 13 self-governing states. Interdisciplinary in coverage and borne of a varied and international authorship, this handbook incorporates 27 specifically commissioned and original contributions. Structured into four thematic sections and embellished with insightful tables and illustrations throughout, the overarching ethos of this volume is to contribute to framing the role of tourism, tourism development and the tourism industry within the context of self-governing Pacific Island states faced with the challenge of pursuing an independent path of development. In doing so, the work highlights and deciphers various tourism development perplexities in the Pacific, examining closely the intersecting sociocultural, geopolitical, environmental, organizational, operational and strategic challenges. This volume, thus, discusses a range of issues: facilitators and inhibitors of tourism growth and development; climate change, ecological concerns, and eco-tourism; non-tourism and undertourism; crisis management and the COVID-19 virus; transportation and tourism infrastructural concerns; tourism policy and planning (including tourism governance); sectoral links between tourism; food and agriculture; gender and micro-entrepreneurship; community management and participation; cultural and natural heritage sites; and the handicraft industry. The work pays critical attention to the various trajectories of sustainable tourism and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Despite the many challenges and concerns raised, the book implicates the importance of good governance, progressive post-COVID-19 recovery strategies and directives, and creative and imaginative options in the successful development, re-development and advancement of tourism. As a definitive reference resource for this subject area, this handbook will be of great interest to students, researchers and academics within tourism, development studies, geography, Pacific studies, sustainability and environmental studies.

While technology is developing at a fast pace, urban planners and cities are still behind in finding effective ways to use technology to address citizen’s needs. Multiple aspects of sustainable urbanism are brought together in this book, along with advanced technologies and their connections to urban planning and management. It integrates urban studies, smart cities, AI, IoT, remote sensing, and GIS. Highlights include land use planning, spatial planning, and ecosystem-based information to improve economic opportunities. Urban planners and engineers will understand the use of AI in disaster management and the use of GIS in finding suitable landfill sites for sustainable waste management. Features Explains the process of urban heritage conservation, including the process of urban renewal and its regeneration and the role of citizens in urban renewal, planning, and management. Includes several case studies highlighting urban environmental problems and challenges in developed and developing countries and the ways for converting urban areas into smart cities. Focuses on urban resources, the supply of energy in smart cities, and their proper management practices. Introduces the role of remote sensing, GIS, and IoT in making a smart city and meeting sustainable goals. Analyzes unique case studies, their challenges and obstacles, and proposes a set of factors to understanding smart city initiatives and projects.

This edited volume provides a critical and comparative discussion of the changing synergy between the military and society in the dramatically transforming global security climate, drawing on examples from the Asian, Pacific, African, Middle Eastern, European and South American regions. The book is interdisciplinary and covers wide-ranging issues relating to civil military relations, democratization, regional security, ethnicity, peace-building and peace keeping, civilian oversight, internal repression, gender, regime change and civil society.

Extending the horizon of regional sport scholarship beyond the Global North, this volume offers an exciting opportunity for sociology of sport scholars to widen the scope of their research in search of fuller understandings of the forms, meanings, dynamics and impacts of sport for Pacific peoples.

Activating Critical Thinking to Advance the Sustainable Development Goals in Tourism Systems focuses on the role of critical thinking and inquiry in the implementation of the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in tourism systems. The impetus for the development of this book emerged from the declaration by the United Nations (UN) General Assembly of 2017 as the International Year of Sustainable Tourism for Development. This declaration purposely positions tourism as a tool to advance the universal 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 SDGs, thus mutually serving as an opportunity and responsibility to appraise from a critical lens what the SDGs signify and how they can be understood from multiple perspectives. The chapters in the book foster the next phase of sustainable tourism scholarship that actively considers the interconnections of the UN’s SDGs to tourism theory and praxis, and activates critical thinking to analyze and advance sustainability in tourism systems. It articulates the need for the academy to be more intrinsically involved in ongoing iterations of multilateral accords and decrees, to ensure they embody more critical and inclusive transitions toward sustainability, as opposed to market-driven, neoliberal directives. The contributions in this book encourage various worldviews challenging, shaping, and more critically reflecting the realities of global communities as related to, and impacted by, sustainable tourism development. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Sustainable Tourism.

His admirers said he was a charismatic leader with a dazzling smile, a commoner following an ancient tradition of warrior service on behalf of an indigenous people who feared marginalisation at the hands of ungrateful immigrants. One tourist pleaded with him to stage a coup in her backyard; in private parties around the capital, Suva, infatuated women whispered ‘coup me baby’ in his presence. It was so easy to overlook the enormity of what he had done in planning and implementing Fiji’s first military coup, to be seduced by celebrity, captivated by the excitement of the moment, and plead its inevitability as the final eruption of long-simmering indigenous discontent. A generation would pass before the consequences of the actions of Fiji’s strongman of 1987, Sitiveni Rabuka, would be fully appreciated but, by then, the die had been well and truly cast. The major general did not live happily ever after. No nirvana followed the assertion of indigenous rights. If anything, misadventure became his country’s most enduring contemporary trait. This is Fiji’s very human story.

Markets are usually discussed in abstract terms, as an economic organizing principle, a generalized alternative to government planning, or even as powerful actors in their own right, able to shape local and national economic destinies. But markets are not abstract. Even as the idea of the market seduces politicians around the world to take advantage of their abstract qualities, they constantly run up against material reality. Markets are always somewhere, in place, and it is in place that the smooth theories of markets falter and fail. More than simply being embedded in particular places, markets necessarily emerge in the various political, social, cultural, and environmental relations that exist in and between places. Markets shape places, but the reverse is also true. This collection of essays approaches markets from the ground up, and from a part of the world often still regarded as peripheral to global capitalism: the South Pacific. With a wide variety of case studies, including on indigenous economies, childcare, agriculture, wine, electricity metering, finance, education, and housing, the authors show how complex local, social and cultural politics matter to how markets are made within and between places, and the insights that can be gleaned from studying markets in this part of the world. They explore the way superficially similar markets work out differently in different places, and why, as well as examining how market relations are constructed in places outside and on the edges of the centres of Western capitalism, and what this says back to how markets are understood in those centres. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students working in and between economic geography, cultural economy, political economy, economic sociology, and more.