SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Places that live in the collective Western imagination as paradisiacal – once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon and holiday destinations replete with the whitest sands and the bluest seas – are incommensurable with imaginaries of violence, conflict, and exclusion. Yet Fiji is an exemplar of both. Coups in Fiji often express a competitive struggle between the notions of Fijian ‘paramountcy’ versus Indo-Fijian calls for equality of opportunity. Within a week of the author's arrival in Suva, the capital city of Fiji, in mid-September 2002, one of the English-language daily newspapers published an editorial predicting the ‘real possibility’ of a ‘race war’ between the country’s Indigenous Fijians and Indo-Fijians. Almost a decade after the author returned from fieldwork in Fiji, she formally resumed her PhD. She prepared for it by writing some 70,000 words about ethnic identity, relations, and conflict; and about culture, coups, and constitutions.