Aid, Sanctions and Civil Society: An Analysis of the Impacts of Targeted Sanctions on Fiji’s Non-Government Organisations

<p>In dealing with contested regimes, international aid donors must decide whether to suspend or continue to provide development assistance to a regime considered illegitimate. Since the 1990s a general consensus has existed that conventional sanctions are largely ineffective and essentially violate human rights. Responding to this realisation, targeted or ‘smart’ sanctions emerged with the aim of minimising the impacts of sanctions on civilians, while still targeting the ruling elite. This thesis investigates smart sanctions utilised in a Pacific Island country: Fiji. Following the coups of 1987, 2000 and 2006 three of Fiji’s major aid donors, Australia, New Zealand and the European Union, imposed various levels of smart sanctions including targeted travel bans and sanctioning their aid programmes. In particular, the donors focused on redirecting funding through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Fiji. Within the sanctions literature a particular gap exists regarding assessment of the impacts on local NGOs. What research does exists has shown that in several cases in Africa, Asia and South America when donors have chosen to channel aid through civil society in response to lagging political reforms, this has at times done more harm than good for local NGOs. Since the imposition of smart sanctions in Fiji there has been no evaluation of how rechanneling aid through NGOs has changed the local development landscape. This research evaluates both the explicit and implicit impacts that smart sanctions imposed on Fiji have had on local NGOs.</p>

Aid, Sanctions and Civil Society: An Analysis of the Impacts of Targeted Sanctions on Fiji’s Non-Government Organisations

<p>In dealing with contested regimes, international aid donors must decide whether to suspend or continue to provide development assistance to a regime considered illegitimate. Since the 1990s a general consensus has existed that conventional sanctions are largely ineffective and essentially violate human rights. Responding to this realisation, targeted or ‘smart’ sanctions emerged with the aim of minimising the impacts of sanctions on civilians, while still targeting the ruling elite. This thesis investigates smart sanctions utilised in a Pacific Island country: Fiji. Following the coups of 1987, 2000 and 2006 three of Fiji’s major aid donors, Australia, New Zealand and the European Union, imposed various levels of smart sanctions including targeted travel bans and sanctioning their aid programmes. In particular, the donors focused on redirecting funding through non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in Fiji. Within the sanctions literature a particular gap exists regarding assessment of the impacts on local NGOs. What research does exists has shown that in several cases in Africa, Asia and South America when donors have chosen to channel aid through civil society in response to lagging political reforms, this has at times done more harm than good for local NGOs. Since the imposition of smart sanctions in Fiji there has been no evaluation of how rechanneling aid through NGOs has changed the local development landscape. This research evaluates both the explicit and implicit impacts that smart sanctions imposed on Fiji have had on local NGOs.</p>

‘Let fa’afafine shine like diamonds’: Balancing accommodation, negotiation and resistance in gender-nonconforming Samoans’ counter-hegemony

In the Pacific Island country of Samoa, a gender-nonconforming community known as fa’afafine is said to constitute part of customary tradition and therefore enjoy cultural legitimacy. Yet fa’afafine are also confronted with a binary gender discourse that daily marginalises them within families/communities. This article explores fa’afafine’s gendered positioning in contemporary Samoa and the ways in which they have negotiated it to carve out space for oppositional agency, focusing on the strategies employed by the Samoa Fa’afafine Association. Based on semi-structured interviews with fa’afafine and other gender-nonconforming Samoans, and guided by Pacific methodology of Talanoa, the article examines fa’afafine’s collective pursuits as a case of counter-hegemonic struggle through a Gramscian theoretical lens. If their acts of resistance are covert and incremental, they are effective in aligning Samoa’s powerful cultural institutions with an alternative gender discourse to cultivate social change. The article closes with reflections on possible challenges to this counter-hegemony.