Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the emergence of the Bougainville Crisis by re-orienting the analysis of the armed conflict to a concern with local conceptualizations of the ‘crisis’ and its relationship to temporal concerns over who ought to be responsible for the violent past and future possibilities.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the emergence of the Bougainville Crisis by focusing and re-orienting the analysis of the armed conflict to a concern with local conceptualizations of the ‘crisis’ and its relationship to temporal concerns over who ought to be responsible for the violent past and future possibilities. By attending to the diverse everyday narratives and understanding of the crisis I attempt to demonstrate how people caught up in the armed conflict located the locus of responsibility for the difficulties visited upon their everyday lives by the crisis. Through an ethnographic account and analysis of what unfolded and became to be known as the ‘Bougainville Crisis’ the paper characterizes the ways in which the political upheaval unevenly unfolded in different moments in time and place engendering in its wake serious questions about responsibility. I shall demonstrate how the temporarily and spatially rooted understandings of the conflict problematizes prevailing conceptions of ‘crisis’ as a monolithic political epoch defined by a singular and overarching category. Bougainville islanders and their Papua New Guinea compatriots unanimously agree that ‘Bougainville Crisis’ forms an important part of the country's political history. That’s the relatively easy part while the issue of where to locate the responsibility for the crisis is contingent upon who one speaks to; and where there are differences in viewpoints and positions, disagreements can rapidly travel down the reductive slope where causation and responsibility for the political turmoil is assigned to a few easily identifiable actors.