Jacob Joseph Puthenparambil

The largest and most strategically significant unincorporated territory of the United States has been denied self-determination for over a century—and the military buildup that defines its present may foreclose its future. Guam occupies a unique and uncomfortable position in the American constitutional order. It is a territory but not

Beneath the Pacific's surface lies a resource frontier that could reshape global supply chains—or devastate ecosystems we barely understand. The nations with the most to gain are also those with the most to lose. Four thousand metres beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, in a region

The 2021 election crisis that paralysed Samoa for months exposed a fundamental tension between parliamentary democracy and fa'amatai—the chiefly system that governs Samoan society. Resolution came, but the tension endures. For three months in 2021, Samoa—often cited as the Pacific's most stable democracy—had

The world's third-smallest nation has reinvented itself twice already. Its latest transformation—as offshore detention provider and aspiring financial centre—tests the limits of what sovereignty can be leveraged to achieve. Nauru's national story reads like a parable about the perils of extractive economics, written across

The renewed Compacts of Free Association secure American military access to the Pacific's most strategically vital waters—but whether they secure the futures of three island nations is another question entirely. In 2023 and 2024, the United States completed the renegotiation of its Compacts of Free Association with

Facing existential inundation, the world's fourth-smallest nation has negotiated a treaty with Australia that may become the template for how Pacific states survive the loss of their physical territory. In November 2023, on the margins of the Pacific Islands Forum in the Cook Islands, Tuvalu and Australia signed

The longest-running and least-reported conflict in Oceania pits Indonesian sovereignty against Melanesian self-determination—and exposes the Pacific Islands Forum's deepest fault line. In the corridors of the Pacific Islands Forum, one issue generates more private anguish and public silence than any other. West Papua—the Indonesian-administered western half

The only remaining non-self-governing territory of New Zealand, Tokelau, has twice rejected independence, raising uncomfortable questions about whether self-determination includes the right to remain colonised. Tokelau consists of three coral atolls—Atafu, Nukunonu, and Fakaofo—scattered across 290 kilometres of the South Pacific, with a combined land area of approximately

After three referendums and a century of colonial rule, New Caledonia's indigenous Kanak population confronts a future in which self-determination may be neither granted nor abandoned—but permanently deferred. In May 2024, the streets of Nouméa erupted. Barricades went up across the capital of New Caledonia, buildings burned,

Five years after an overwhelming vote for independence, Bougainville remains tethered to Papua New Guinea—a case study in how sovereignty can be won at the ballot box and lost in the corridors of power. In November 2019, the Autonomous Region of Bougainville held a referendum that produced one of