Opening roads through kastom: vernacular diplomacies in Vanuatu

Abstract

This thesis explores the multiple modes of culturally-informed, everyday diplomacies practiced between different political communities and cultural groups in the Pacific island nation-state of Vanuatu. Melanesian diplomatic encounters are cultural, vernacular and scaled, occurring in deeply pluralistic contexts. However, there is a persistent lack of knowledge in Pacific scholarship about the cultural modes of engagement (kastom) in Melanesian statecraft and diplomacy. The failure to recognise the persistence of cultural and vernacular forms of diplomatic practice can be linked to their omission from international diplomatic and peace-making processes and lack of recognition as legitimate forms of contemporary diplomacy.

This knowledge gap is addressed by adopting a broader research gaze that extends beyond state-centric conceptualisations of diplomacy to understand how cultural systems shape identities and relationships across boundaries, at local, national and international scales in the modern nation-state of Vanuatu. This more holistic approach to diplomacy invites closer examination of diplomatic cultures, the cultural and political communities and the spaces and boundaries between plural systems, as a zone of relational encounter. I refer to these multi-boundary, multi-identity and multi-scale practices as vernacular diplomacies.

A core challenge for this thesis is to understand how pluralities coexist and how individuals and collectives embody plurality, introducing a series of research questions that engage the two transversal themes of scale and diplomacy. Exploring the transformation of Melanesian kastom-based systems of diplomacy, as they are embodied across varying scales of relationality, reveals an overarching research question: How does scale shape group identity and peaceful interactions or vernacular diplomacies across boundaries between communities, islands and states, and their respective cultural systems?

The kastom road emerges as simultaneously the research method and the primary subject of this thesis. It unlocks understandings of Melanesian cosmology expressed through relational kastom roads but set against a backdrop of deeply traumatic cultural and political disruption and transformation across almost two centuries--from early European encounters through to postcolonial state-making. This thesis contributes new knowledge about the forms of vernacular diplomacies and the coexistence of multiple political communities and sovereignties that engage in encounters that can be described as diplomatic. Show more