Less than five kilometres from Australia's most northern islands in the Torres Strait lies the southern coast of Papua New Guinea (PNG). The people living on the PNG side of the border along the South Fly coast live in abject poverty, with a near total absence of services and infrastructure. The disparity in income, housing and health outcomes when compared with their nearby neighbours and relatives in the Torres Strait Islands, is extreme. The border is the focus of a range of interventions by the Australian and Queensland governments, including border protection, quarantine, marine resource management, and infectious disease control, including an alarming outbreak of multi-drug resistant tuberculosis. Restrictions are increasing on trading, fishing and access to Australian services. However, questions remain as to whether this focus is having unintended consequences, increasing the destitution and frustration on the PNG side, in turn exacerbating the security threat to Australia. And as the Australian border hardens, the Indonesian border beckons. This book presents the results of three years of research into the unique social and political geography of the borderland. The Torres Strait Treaty between Australia and PNG serves to construct a complex institutional layering, a tiered economy and a hierarchy of identities between those South Fly villagers who have rights under the Treaty to travel into Australia, and those who do not. This creates a politics of expectation and frustration that permeates everyday life along the South Fly coast, through which development projects must navigate.

This volume examines comparatively the views and principles of seven prominent ethical traditions on one of the most pressing issues of modern politics - the making and unmaking of state and national boundaries. The traditions represented are Judaism, Christianity, Islam, natural law, Confucianism, liberalism and international law. Each contributor, an expert within one of these traditions, shows how that tradition can handle the five dominant methods of altering state and national boundaries: conquest, settlement, purchase, inheritance and secession. Written by a distinguished group of international specialists this volume is unique in providing both in-depth normative and comparative perspectives on a troubling question that will offer readers real insight into inter-tradition conflict. Those readers will range from upper-level undergraduates to scholars in such fields as philosophy, political science, international relations and comparative religion.

This book offers another frame through which to view the event of the outrigger landing of 43 West Papuans in Australia in 2006. West Papuans have crossed boundaries to seek asylum since 1962, usually eastward into Papua New Guinea (PNG), and occasionally southward to Australia. Between 1984-86, around 11,000 people crossed into PNG seeking asylum. After the Government of PNG acceded to the United Nations Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, West Papuans were relocated from informal camps on the international border to a single inland location called East Awin. This volume provides an ethnography of that settlement based on the author's fieldwork carried out in 1998-99.

This book examines the role of the international community in the handover of the Dutch colony of West Papua/Irian Jaya to Indonesia in the 1960s and questions whether or not the West Papuan people ever genuinely exercised the right to self-determination guaranteed to them in the UN-brokered Dutch/Indonesian agreement of 1962. Indonesian, Dutch, US, Soviet, Australian and British involvement is discussed, but particular emphasis is given to the central part played by the United Nations in the implementation of this agreement. As guarantor, the UN temporarily took over the territory's administration from the Dutch before transferring control to Indonesia in 1963. After five years of Indonesian rule, a UN team returned to West Papua to monitor and endorse a controversial act of self-determination that resulted in a unanimous vote by 1022 Papuan 'representatives' to reject independence. Despite this, the issue is still very much alive today as a crisis-hit Indonesia faces continued armed rebellion and growing calls for freedom in West Papua.

This book describes the historical development of the Irian Jaya guerrilla struggle for independence from Indonesia. The OPM, Organisasi Papua Merdeka, has been fighting Indonesian rule in West New Guinea since 1969; the military presence there was established in 1962. The author believes that the great majority of West Papuans support the OPM. The Indonesian Transmigration programme has forcible alienated clan land and sponsored settlers from Java. As a result of this policy 10,000 Papuans fled Irian Jaya in mid-1984 to seek safety in Papua New Guinea. The exodus was more than 1 per cent of the indigenous population. The OPM has almost no foreign allies. Both Papua New Guinea and Australia emphasize that Irian Jaya is part of Indonesia and thus an internal matter. The author predicts that greater autonomy for Irian Jaya would be more likely to result from political pressure on Jakarta than from a military victory by OPM.