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Since the time of decolonisation in Fiji, women's organisations have navigated a complex political terrain. While they have stayed true to the aim of advancing

This discussion examines how and why the peacebuilding environment in Solomon Islands presents profound constraints for women despite the promises of global, regional, and national policy stipulating the importance of this activity. The analysis draws on theories of scale to explain
how gendered geometries of power are configured in the Solomon Islands peacebuilding environment. These power geometries are shaped by interplaying local and global factors and have limited the space that is open to women peacebuilders. A "crisis response" orientation to Australian-led conflict
stabilization missions has been coupled with a national bureaucratic tendency to equate "customary governance" with peacebuilding. Both trends have augmented masculine power and constrained the space for women to engage in conflict mediation. As I show, these developments contradict United
Nations Women Peace and Security principles, set out in United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 and localized in National Action Plans developed in Australia and in Solomon Islands. These expressly stipulate the importance of supporting women's contributions to peacebuilding when conflict
flares. The article's analysis makes clear how women continue to push against these constraints, but against overwhelming pressures. It concludes with the claim that conflict mediation processes can only be made more durable in Solomon Islands if the discriminatory gendered geometries of power
identified are confronted and greater emphasis is placed on women's customary authority and capacities as peacebuilders.

Although there is growing recognition that women's participation is critical for the durability of peaceful conflict transition, grounded research examining the political scale of women's participation has not been common. Where feminist researchers have tackled this topic, they have generally reproduced binary representations of political space, sometimes strongly critical of local spaces as restrictive of women, sometimes strongly critical of a hegemonic liberal international. In this article, I address the issue of women's participation in conflict transition governance from another more ethnographic angle, drawing from fieldwork conducted in the Solomon Islands, a Pacific Islands country destabilised by conflict in the late 1990s and early 2000s. I apply theories of political scale to consider where and how women are politically active in the conflict transition environment, how that political activity is constituted relative to other political scales and where and how women seek to make their political ambitions understood. The 'emplacement' lens I develop offers a critical vantage point for analysis of the ways women constitute political identities and the agendas they might meaningfully progress, at scales ranging from the small worlds of the household and the community to the broader scale of national politics.

Efforts to adopt provisions of the United Nations Women, Peace and Security agenda in local policy contexts are often hailed enthusiastically by gender advocates as a transformative development. But closer scrutiny of these localisation efforts may reveal something different. This article draws on theories of feminist institutionalism to examine the formal and informal institutional interplays which have shaped the Regional Action Plan on Women, Peace and Security that was formalised by the Pacific Islands Forum in 2012. My analysis shows that although the Regional Action Plan is a significant development in rhetorical terms for the Pacific region, and may lay the foundation for future policy progress on gender and security, its focus is also constrained. This becomes particularly evident when the Regional Action Plan's emphasis on women's peacebuilding is compared with the plan's relative silence on the growing regional challenge of gender and environmental insecurity. To explain these developments I show how the plan sits in interesting, and unresolved, tension with existing institutional norms and practices which gender the 'architecture of entitlements' governing how Pacific Island women can legitimately enter debate on regional security.

Since the time of decolonisation in Fiji, women's organisations have navigated a complex political terrain. While they have stayed true to the aim of advancing women's status, their work has been buffeted by national political upheavals and changing global and regional directions in development policy-making. This book documents how women activists have understood and responded to these challenges. It is the first book to write women into Fiji's postcolonial history, providing a detailed historical account of that country's gender politics across four tumultuous decades. It is also the first to examine the 'situated' nature of gender advocacy in the Pacific Islands more broadly. It does this by analysing trends in activity, from women's radical and provocative activism of the 1960s to a more self-evaluative and reflexive mood of engagement in later decades, showing how interplaying global and local factors can shape women's understandings of gender justice and their pursuit of that goal.

Despite the fact that Fiji is one of only a handful of states to have given constitutional recognition to the rights of sexual minorities in its most recent constitution enacted in 1998, controversy over the issue of individual sexual orientation, and powerful condemnation of those who choose to publicly demonstrate a homosexual or transgender identity, has flourished in the public domain. The focus on male homosexuality has been predominant in this debate, with many influential political actors framing discourses of masculinity in ways that affirm Christian ideals of morality while also reinforcing the Christian Church's normative political authority. However, as this article demonstrates, public discourses of masculinity have also been articulated in a highly selective manner. This becomes clear when public debate that construes homosexuality in Fiji as a threat to the integrity of the country's key social institutions is contrasted with some church and political leaders' far more lenient responses to the forms of violent and lawless masculine behavior that predominated during the 2000 coup. While these developments have increased the political and social vulnerability of Fiji's homosexuals, young gay men have also employed strategies that contest mainstream discriminatory attitudes. In this article, I describe how the terrain of sexual minority politics is configured in ways that authorize certain varieties of masculine behavior and subordinate others, and consider the strategies deployed by local gay males to contest homophobic sentiments articulated in the public domain.

Despite the fact that Fiji is one of only a handful of states to have given constitutional recognition to the rights of sexual minorities in its most recent constitution enacted in 1998, controversy over the issue of individual sexual orientation, and powerful condemnation of those who choose to publicly demonstrate a homosexual or transgender identity, has flourished in the public domain. The focus on male homosexuality has been predominant in this debate, with many influential political actors framing discourses of masculinity in ways that affirm Christian ideals of morality while also reinforcing the Christian Church's normative political authority. However, as this article demonstrates, public discourses of masculinity have also been articulated in a highly selective manner. This becomes clear when public debate that construes homosexuality in Fiji as a threat to the integrity of the country's key social institutions is contrasted with some church and political leaders' far more lenient responses to the forms of violent and lawless masculine behavior that predominated during the 2000 coup. While these developments have increased the political and social vulnerability of Fiji's homosexuals, young gay men have also employed strategies that contest mainstream discriminatory attitudes. In this article, I describe how the terrain of sexual minority politics is configured in ways that authorize certain varieties of masculine behavior and subordinate others, and consider the strategies deployed by local gay males to contest homophobic sentiments articulated in the public domain.

Since the time of decolonisation in Fiji, women's organisations have navigated a complex political terrain. While they have stayed true to the aim of advancing