Accepted Paper
Paper short abstract
We shows how Pacific Islands use their geopolitical importance to leverage agency and vulnerability amongst donors to secure legitimacy and resources. We find that using geopolitics for development constitutes the mechanism through which this vulnerability can be reimaged as a site of agency.
Paper long abstract
The Pacific Island Countries are considered the most aid-dependent countries in the world (World Bank, 2021) and are historically stereotyped as ‘small, weak, and fragile’, whilst being at the core of global ecological and political challenges. Pacific Island scholarship has long challenged the frame of vulnerability by highlighting the Pacific Island acts of agency (Waqavakatoga and Wallis, 2023; Fry and Tarte, 2015). However, we don’t stop at recognising vulnerability and the acts of agency challenging it, rather go one step further by interrogating the source and mechanisms that allow for this agency.
Our research is based on 32 original semi-structured interviews conducted in 2025 with diplomats, policy makers, politicians, civil society actors, and bureaucrats in Fiji, Vanuatu, and the Solomon Islands.
We find that PICs use their geopolitical importance to leverage their agency and position of vulnerability amongst donors to secure legitimacy and resources. We find this agency being enacted via obfuscation of geopolitics through the mechanisms of global development. It is this development space where vulnerability can be reimaged as a site of agency. The PICs reject geopolitical meddling whilst demanding development support from all donors. Paradoxically, this demand is only possible through the geopolitical interests of the outside actors. The geopolitical competition between OECD-DAC donors and China that plays out in development practice provides this site of resistance for PICs to negotiate within unequal global systems (Mawdsley, 2019). The paper combines insights from development scholarship and IR with our own data to provide a valuable interdisciplinary contribution.
Crisis, recognition, and the politics of vulnerability: negotiating power and agency in global development