Between Rights and Rightfulness: Regulating Gender and Violence in the Pacific Islands

For decades, activists have drawn attention to gender violence across the Pacific Islands and successfully argued for improved state responses. While reforms have been institutionalised in law and government policy, ongoing violence shows that these have limited effectiveness.

In Between Rights and Rightfulness, Nicole George investigates how gender violence is regulated in Pacific Island countries, the factors that impede regulatory effectiveness, and women’s own efforts and expertise in decreasing gender violence. Incorporating comparative fieldwork in Fiji, Bougainville, and within Kanak communities in New Caledonia, George assesses how gender violence is enabled and constrained by regulations created within and beyond the state. Importantly, the book engages directly with the women affected by systems of gendered regulation to understand how they interpret and navigate the regulatory complex that impacts their security.

Drawing on feminist institutional theory and feminist theories of scale, George argues that the regulation of gender and gender violence occurs at a range of scales, and that efforts to enhance women’s security require a clear and contextualised understanding of this regulatory complexity. This includes identifying the role of rule takers--actors who make determinations on which rules should be rightfully followed and those that they treat as more contestable. As George argues, women themselves must also be treated as active, but often marginalized, rule takers with knowledge and expertise on rule appropriateness. Providing a novel lens on the logics of rulemaking, Between Rights and Rightfulness offers important insights into how gendered security can be improved and made more meaningful to women who are vulnerable to violence.

Nicole George is an Associate Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies in the School of Political Science and International Studies at the University of Queensland.