Towards regional neighbourhood watch

This chapter is a story of Australia’s contemporary contribution to peace in its regional neighbourhood and its focus is on a postcolonial struggle with nationhood. The emphasis is on peacekeeping in the 1990s in Bougainville, where Australia made the transition from an in extremis intervention policy to a policy based on applying regional solutions to internal security problems. In Bougainville Australia also began to take what became known as a whole of government approach to local peace support operations, and to incorporate local community engagement. Unarmed peacekeeping in Bougainville presaged a regional approach to armed intervention into East Timor and Solomon Islands in 1999 and 2003, and into both countries again in 2006.
The other part of the story is a necessary evolution towards what will be termed ‘regional neighbourhood watch’, a term originally applied to a community policing system whereby police and communities collaborate to prevent crime and build community solidarity. The preventative and cooperative approach to regional relations in the 1970s and 1980s echoed some of the crime prevention and community building objectives of Neighbourhood Watch, but, crucially, was Neighbourhood Watch without policing. In the late 1980s, disturbances in Fiji, Vanuatu and Bougainville would set the scene for a period of what will be termed ‘neighbourhood watch with policing’; in the 1990s and early 2000s unarmed preventative neighbourhood policing (traditional peacekeeping) evolved into armed policing (at the peace enforcement end of the peacekeeping spectrum).