Acknowledgments

Thanks to our Advisory Panel for their sage advice on the fieldwork and comments on the book; they bear no responsibility for its deficiencies. Our deepest thanks go to many Solomon Islanders on all sides of the conflict who generously gave of their time and shared their insights and to Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI) members and other internationals whom we interviewed in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu and in Solomon Islands between 2005 and 2010. The Appendix to this book describes the nature of the interviews conducted by John Braithwaite and all the other members of the team of co-authors for this book who spent time in Solomon Islands doing fieldwork for the research with him. Sinclair Dinnen and Matthew Allen have undertaken their own extensive research in Solomon Islands over many years in addition to these interviews. Matthew’s PhD research on the Solomon Islands conflict will be published in future as a book. It will take much further some of the issues only touched on in this publication.

We are fortunate in having such an outstanding community of scholars of Solomon Islands at The Australian National University and beyond, whose work has enriched ours. Their work is cited at relevant points in our text. We especially acknowledge the formidable work in documenting the story of the conflict that has been done in the important books by Jon Fraenkel (2004a) and Clive Moore (2004). Our work would have been much more difficult if we did not have this scholarship to lean on.

Special thanks for all manner of support from our colleagues on the project Leah Dunn, Kate Macfarlane, Charlie Beauchamp-Wood and Nick Kitchin. Leah (2005–08) and Kate (2009–10) in turn provided outstanding administrative leadership for the considerable infrastructure of an undertaking as large as the Peacebuilding Compared project. We also thank the Australian Research Council for funding this research.

We acknowledge our ANU E Press series editor, Margaret Thornton, managers, Lorena Kanellopoulos and Duncan Beard, copyeditor, Jan Borrie, and anonymous referees for their thoughtful insights and guidance. Their wonderful publishing model means this book is available free on the Internet and also at a modest price as a handsome hardcopy. This is a special virtue for research of which the important readers are in developing countries.

Please feel encouraged to make comments on the book on the Peacebuilding Compared web site: <http://peacebuilding.anu.edu.au>