Dr Anouk Ride was announced as one of two winners of the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Research Higher Degree Theses 2014 from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Queensland. The award is based on examiner’s reports for theses they consider to be a substantial contribution to the field of research. Below is an abstract of the award-winning thesis.

‘Divided yet one’: Narratives of conflict and peace in Solomon Islands

This dissertation examines causes and manifestations of conflict in Solomon Islands. Comparison of academic literature, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (2013) and narrative analysis by a group of local creative writers, finds that research has overemphasised ethnic differences in conflict. More relevant to understanding conflict are the divisions between society and the political and militant elite, who often use state resources for their own wealth and security. The difference between Western academic and local views raises key questions about how conflict analysis includes and excludes its participants and how practitioners work with communities ‘divided yet one’.

Dr Anouk Ride contributed one of many articles on research methodology to the new Springer title: Methodologies in Peace Psychology: Peace Research by Peaceful Means. The article “Involving Participants in Data Analysis” discusses the researcher’s experience with different methodologies in which participants conduct analysis and includes a checklist of things to consider if you are designing participatory research. As it states in the introduction to Methodologies in Peace Psychology its relevance is broader than just psychologists: “Much of the work on peace psychology exhorts researchers to be peaceful but does not provide ideas as to how one might proceed in practice. This book offers a range of creative and sound ideas as to how to go about conducting research with people whose worldview might differ considerably from that of the researchers.” It is available online here: http://www.springer.com/us/book/9783319183947 and at most book resellers.

On a recent blog on Devpolicy, Dr Anouk Ride discusses how gender-based violence is framed in the Solomon Islands context and argues for a more nuanced policy and public debate on why men are violent, what role men and women have in legitimising this violence and, critically, how this can be changed. Read What’s culture got to do with it? Causes of intimate partner violence: http://devpolicy.org/whats-culture-got-causes-intimate-partner-violence-20160413/?utm_source=Devpolicy&utm_campaign=88f43dc2f7-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_082b498f84-88f43dc2f7-312049145

TALEMAOT: Solomon stories of peace and conflict” is a collection of creative writing on the topical issues facing the country today by Solomon Islands writers and includes poems, short stories and short film scripts now printed and available for sale at University of South Pacific. TALEMAOT includes stories about everything from politics to disasters, family disputes to enduring friendships and humour to tragedy.

The publication began with a participatory writing workshop conducted by Anouk Ride in 2013. It enjoyed a sold-out first print run, republication in the curriculum and by UNDP and now is in its second edition, with new stories added.

ORDER BOOK ONLINE HERE: http://uspbookcentre.com/store/merchant.mv?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=UBC&Product_Code=9789820109513

This independent research report, Human Security and Livelihoods in Savo Island, Solomon Islands: Engaging with the Market Economy, aims to identify the ways in which Solomon Islanders from Savo Island engage with the Honiara Central Market (HCM). The main aim of the project is to provide evidence-based research that can inform government and donor responses to issues of economic development and human security on Savo Island, expecially as they relate to issues of agricultural production and the articulation of Savo Island with the urban centre of Honiara. The research was conducted by Dr Nicole Georgeou, Dr Charles Hawksley, Dr Anouk Ride, Melinda Ki’i and Walter Turasi and was funded by the Australian Catholic Univsersity and University of Wollongong.

http://ro.uow.edu.au/lhapapers/2090/

Save the Children Australia’s Solomon Islands office is undertaking a groundbreaking project on alcohol and violence entitled: “Supporting Youth in Dealing with Alcohol Use to Reduce Violence against Women and Children in Solomon Islands” (abbreviated as the Youth and Alcohol Project). In June 2016, the office commissioned a gender analysis regarding alcohol and violence which would be applicable to its ten project sites, five situated around the towns of Honiara, Guadalcanal, and five situated around Auki, Malaita, conducted by Dr Anouk Ride. She also prepared a discussion guide for youth leaders to use in communities to engage all youth in participatory exercises which would increase their conflict resolution and protective behaviour skills.

Told through the voices of local community leaders, “Community Resilience in Natural Disasters” by Dr Anouk Ride and Prof. Diane Bretherton analyzes how communities respond to natural disasters and how outsiders contribute positively – or negatively – to their response, promoting debate on the role of aid and the media in times of crisis. A critical read for those working in development, peace and community mobilisation, the book  is available in a Kindle edition: https://www.amazon.com/Community-Resilience-Natural-Disasters-Anouk-ebook/dp/B009AYK610/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1478737229&sr=8-1&keywords=%22community+resilience+in+natural+disasters%22

In December 2016, Anouk Ride was selected to participate in a workshop designed to assist early career female academics to identify strategies and opportunities to advance their career. With a rousing keynote from reknowned law academic Hillary Charlesworth, facilitation by historian Joy Damousi, and dozens of sessions sharing knowledge of female researchers and lecturers, the scheme illustrated the challenges and potential of participation of women in academia.

UNDP commissioned a national report, Status of Youth in Solomon Islands, which was drafted by Dr Anouk Ride in 2017. The report and its recommendations is currently undergoing revision following feedback from the National Youth Forum in February and a Stakeholders Consultation in May and is due to be released later this year.

This report is an activity of the United Nations Development Programme under the Supporting Peaceful and Inclusive Transition in Solomon Islands Project.

Kind thanks are provided to all the agencies which provided information to the researcher including Ministry of National Unity, Peace and Reconciliation, Ministry of Women, Youth, Children and Family Affairs, Guadalcanal and Malaita Provincial Governments, Honiara City Council, Royal Solomon Islands Police Force, Solomon Islands Development Trust, Save the Children, World Vision, Youth at Work, Consultant Dr Jimmie Rogers and various church and chief representatives and participants at the National Youth Forum February 2017.

The šCommunity Governance and Grievance Management Project of the Ministry of Provincial Government and Institutional Strengthening (with funding from World Bank) is currently preparing an analysis of and strategy for gender and social inclusion in local conflict resolution, drafted by Dr Anouk Ride.

The project aims to strengthen community grievance management capabilities and enhance the effectiveness of linkages with government in targeted communities. šWorks with participating provincial governments to fulfill key responsibilities associated with the selection, contracting, coordination, reporting, performance management and supervision of Community Officers (COs). The aim of the COs work is to build relationships between community leaders and members to address disputes and to build relationships and links between communities and the Police, Provincial Government and the Solomon Islands Government.

The Gender and Social Inclusion Strategy will be launched later in 2017.

PERSONAL MESSAGE: After working for the Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA www.pnatuna.com) for the past seven years, my consultancy with PNA to provide communications, strategic advice, event coordination and archives support has finally come to a close. Its been a great pleasure to work with the PNA, a unique example of indigenous people managing a key natural resource – tuna – across eight countries and to see it grow from the establishment of its office in 2010 to its current might, controlling the bulk of the world’s skipjack tuna supply.

The importance of the PNA’s work to the very essence of Pacific culture is reiterated each year by the PNA World Tuna Day Art and Talent Quest which it has been a privelege to coordinate over the past five years.
Happy World Tuna Day and long live PNA.

World Tuna Day was first adopted by PNA Ministers and now has been ratified as an international day by the United Nations to celebrate each year, May 2.

Working for the Ministry of Women, Youth, Children and Family Affairs of the Solomon Islands, Dr Anouk Ride is collaborating with local researchers on the first social marketing research about attitudes to violence against women and girls to be conducted in the Pacific Islands region. The pilot study will be complete in March 2018, and detail messages that are used to reinforce or stop violence against women and girls. What attitudes allow violence to take place unchecked, and what attitudes would support intervention prior to and after violence is the central research question.

The research will be conducted with women who have experienced violence, men who have perpetrated violence, and male, female and youth representatives from different communities (in Guadalcanal, Malaita and Temotu provinces).

The research is intended to have a practical use – to increase the effectiveness of messages and communications materials, activities and events that the various government, church, women’s organisations, INGOs and refuge services conduct and/or to stimulate new actions that can lead to social change. A review of the previous violence against women policy (2010-2015) found that “greater coordination is required for key messaging” particularly for awareness raising about violence and the Family Protection Act and this research is intended to inform such joint efforts[i].

The report is commissioned by the Ministry of Women, Youth, Children and Family Affairs (MWYCFA) which will be the first to read the report recommendations and then share this with other organisations working on this issue. This project is supported by Oxfam Australia as part of the Safe Families Fund, an initiative funded by the Australian Aid Program aimed at eliminating violence against women in the Solomon Islands.

Dr Anouk Ride and Professor Diane Bretherton presented to the Peace Psychology Conference at University of Notre Dame, Indiana, on “Peace Research by Peaceful Means’, each putting forward principles, approaches and examples of doing research in a peaceful way that advances peace in various different contexts. The session drew on chapters from the book “Methodologies in Peace Psychology: Peace Research by Peaceful Means” released in the Springer Peace Psychology series edited by Daniel J. Christie.

The acclaim for Tanna, a film shot on the Vanuatuan island of the same name, continues into 2017, with its recent nomination for Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars.

Cinematically beautiful, shot with a relatively small crew from Australia, the film tells a story of a young woman whose marriage is arranged while she wants to marry her lover, another young man from the tribe. The real life events (resembling in the film, a Pacific version of Romeo and Juliet) eventually led the Yakel tribe to allow love marraiges in the 1980s.

The local actors were adept at portraying the emotions and push and pull of culture and love, despite being untrained and first-time actors. The media often tinged their praise for the acting with a note of surprise – however, anyone who has worked with Pacific Islanders in film is aware its not such a rare experience to see raw acting talent able to channel experiences and emotions.

The surprise comes in part from the way the “traditional” was played up in the media, suggesting people on Tanna had never seen a camera before or had much contact with the outside world. The connection of the tribe with a worship of Prince Philip also continued the presentation of people on Tanna as having some quaint, old world ideas (e.g. in the Independent ). (I was in the UK when Princess Diana died, the level of fervour and superstition around the royal family then outweighed anything coming out of Tanna!)

The idea of Tanna as living in this “traditional” “closed from outside world” or “quaint” state was more fictional than the film of course, as pointed out by Professor of Anthropology Lamont Lindstrom . Lindstrom details how the local people were told by a photographer to take off their “Western” clothes in the 1970s for photographs and how this developed into dressing traditionally (and doing other things differently) for tourists.

With its active volcano, Mount Yasur, Tanna is one of the main destinations for tourists visiting Vanuatu, with locals making use of this opportunity for small incomes and many Tanna islanders have mobile phones, houses, Western clothes and the like. Documentary crews have often been drawn to locations on Tanna where people are more “traditional” (as reported by SMH)

For the film Tanna, the Yakel crew walked the red carpet in traditional dress – a vision stunning and sometimes strange (bare breasted female islanders in cold temperatures, in many photos all the women had their arms crossed over their breasts, in an attempt to keep warm or cover up). The traditions of the tribe were highlighted visually, but unlike other films, in which the actors and director give interviews, for Tanna the directors remained the mouthpiece for the story the film during interviews, explaining the film and the process by which it was made.

Whether the film directors Bentley Dean and Martin Butler will be seen, as argued by Lindstrom, as similar to Jean Jacques Rousseau (romanticising Tahitians into images of “noble savages”), or progressive film-makers remains to be seen. As I’ve argued earlier , the bar for being inclusive of local cultures is set low in the film industry.

Positive reviews for the film praise the cinematography, acting and the sensitive approach to work with an indigenous tribe. Being documentary filmmakers, Dean and Butler, essentially did what documentary filmmakers do – live with the tribe while shooting and writing the story – but it is seen as a novel approach to feature film making.

The community worked with them on the story, identified actors for roles, story elements and improvisation, with the results that local Yakel leaders, according to Dean and Butler, feel the film is “theirs”. On the other hand, despite Vanuatu having a thriving writers’ scene (including writers fluent in French and English) and many experienced film technicians (thanks in large part to Australian and New Zealand aid to produce a drama series Love Patrol) there are no Vanuatuan credits in the script, direction or camera/sound roles. Even the music composition was done in Australia (again surprising given the local music scene).

An interesting question is then raised by the title of the film: Tanna. It’s a bit like setting a film in Wollongong and then calling the film “Australia” or setting the film in Miami and calling the film “United States of America”. The film is the story of one tribe, the Yakel, but the majority of tribes on the island of Tanna live with different histories and customs. While they may know the story depicted in the film it is not “their story”. However, the name suggests it is a story owned by the island, and therefore all its peoples. Some other tribes reportedly refused to be involved and it will be interesting to see if resentment arises if the Yakel tourism activities increase in popularity and a relative rise in income (compared to the other tribes) because of the film.

My feelings about the film remain mixed because of all these unanswered questions. It is a cinematic achievement, beautiful to watch and worth seeing. It was amazing to see a Melanesian community depicted in their environment dealing with complicated issues of gender, culture, relations between communities, relations between elders and youth. There were certain points in the film (like when the grandmother reproaches her granddaughter about her reluctance to get married with a dose of humour and guilt) which felt as though they authentically captured a common Pacific experience. However, there was also something missing in the complexity of the story, which I think could have been added through the participation of local writers. While it is often compared to Romeo and Juliet because of its key dramatic events, Romeo and Juliet is a drama while Tanna remains simpler, more of a fable.

There was a missed opportunity for the few film-makers in Vanuatu to work on their country’s first foray into feature film. If any local writers or film-makers wanted to make a film situated on Tanna it will forever be compared to the film with the same name and probably seen in the international industry as a topic which “has been done”. Hopefully some local film-makers will be able to use the interest in the film Tanna to hook funding and other support to their upcoming projects, maybe even presenting a counterpoint to Tanna’s romantic tragedy with stories that challenge Westerners about their beliefs, attitudes and behaviour towards indigenous peoples. (The potential and down-sides of tourism and the purchase of seaside holiday homes by expatriates from Australia and France – which removes chiefs and locals from land ownership of these aresa –  would be a great documentary for local film-makers to take on for example).

Right now Tanna is seen as “exceptional” because the film-makers took the time to live in the local community, understand their history and work with them to depict it in a feature film. All of this is laudable, but I sincerely hope this “exception” does not become the norm. If Australians, New Zealanders and other Western film crews write, direct and shoot all the international feature films shot in the Pacific, we’re going to have to a new genre: “noble savage” films, but not new forms of representation and empowerment of islanders through films. The next step, a truly “exceptional” step, is to work with Islanders so they can tell their stories themselves, and we can see what results from a deeper level of ownership of the film-making process.