Community Peace and Safety in Post-Conflict Bougainville. Part 1: The Crisis and Its Legacies

Bougainville’s decade-long conflict, known locally as
‘the Crisis’, officially ended with the 2001 Bougainville
Peace Agreement (BPA). This established the
Autonomous Region of Bougainville (AROB) and
set in train a complex pathway towards possible
Independence that continues to play out today.
However, legacies of the Crisis continue more than
two decades later. One way to understand this is to go
beyond the popular framing of the Crisis as having been
between armed separatists and the Papua New Guinea
(PNG) state and see it as one that also involved multiple
local-scale conflicts between Bougainvilleans themselves.
Its legacies today include individual and collective trauma,
and enduring divisions and animosities that impact the
wellbeing of communities and the ability of the AROB to
move forward. The sons of combatants are now starting to
ask questions about settling old scores. For many orphans
and widows, the search for the bones of their lost ones
continues to haunt them.