Series Editor's Preface

Summary

This volume of the Bristol Studies in Comparative and International Education focuses upon the Southwestern Pacific contexts of Bougainville (an Autonomous Region of Papua New Guinea) and the independent nation of Solomon Islands. Little in-depth and comparative material on this region is available in the international literature so we are pleased to support this original, challenging and timely work by David Oakeshott from the Department of Pacific Affairs at The Australian National University. This thoroughly researched and well-informed study documents how both societies have recently experienced a period of protracted conflict from which they are now pursuing reconstruction, reconciliation and recovery. The doctoral research upon which the book draws explores the ‘interrelationships between education, conflict and peace’ through multi-site ethnographic research in five secondary schools, informed by critical engagement with the contemporary international literature on transitional justice.

Readers worldwide, and from Oceania in particular, will find much of methodological, theoretical and substantive interest in this scholarly work that makes significant contributions to the critique and advancement of current approaches and strategies for education for transitional justice. As the author argues with some conviction:

Bougainvilleans and Solomon Islanders have convinced me that the combination of place-based justice, the everyday and cultural production are useful tools for transitional justice. Together, these concepts have helped me understand what justice looks like to the people concerned, how it is enacted in the habits and routines of daily life, and appreciate the meanings attached to those seemingly banal practices.

This openness to learning from the cultures, research participants and ‘lived experience’ of the Southwestern Pacific is a distinctive strength that runs throughout the volume and one that fits the rationale for our Bristol University Press series so well with its focus upon ‘social, environmental and epistemic justice’. Helpful concepts that generate insightful analyses, with potential for others engaged in the processes of transitional justice beyond the Pacific, include ‘ethnographic refusal’, the ‘anthropology of silence’ and, as in the title for the book, ‘enemy friends’. This is an interdisciplinary book that is ‘interpretivist’ in nature, comparative in spirit, convincingly argued and inspired by a combination of critical reflexivity and locally generated insights.