Paper short abstract:

Drawing on perspectives from 'Indigenous' Political Science, Critical Development Studies and Digital Anthropology, this paper argues that a new kind of state is emerging in Solomon Islands, one that is both illiberal and relational.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on perspectives from 'Indigenous' Political Science, Critical Development Studies and Digital Anthropology, this paper argues that a new kind of state is emerging in Solomon Islands, one that is both illiberal and relational. An investigation of Constituency Development Funds, local representatives of the state, especially teachers, and the rise of indigenous netizens reveals how Solomon Islanders subvert normative, outsider perceptions of the state. Instead, they re-align them based on long-standing notions of relationality, reciprocity and indigenous forms of governance. This realignment highlights those boundaries between the state and its imagined citizens that matter most to Solomon Islanders and that are actively integrated and blurred in everyday life, not only in the political centre, Honiara, but also in the predominantly rural settings that conventional perspectives often argue to be void of any noteworthy form of statehood. Simultaneously, the everyday blurriness of some boundaries reveals those boundaries that appear to many Solomon Islanders as rigid, impermeable and as such as essentially non-relational, non-reciprocal and foreign. It is the tensions between the relational and the non-relational or illiberal state that defines the particular challenges faced by Solomon Islanders as they encounter the global state system while demonstrating their ingenuity in refashioning their relationships with this system in the everyday.