Nation-making, the army and the institutionalisation of Fijian power

The present regime in Fiji can be understood, in part, as the 'will to power' of a military strengthened and emboldened by three decades of international service, as well as by its past impositions of control at home. It is important also to appreciate the significance of this regime as a phase in a long trajectory of conflicting and changing forms of ethnic Fijian power. The regime should be viewed in the context of a historical process that reflects the central question for Fiji's political development: how to devise constitutional government that can reconcile the indigenous Fijian conviction of their entitlement to political power with a just representation of the interests of other sections of the population-primarily the Indo-Fijians.