According to the Late Nobuya Banba, any actors—whether individuals, social groups, regions, states, or trans-national organizations, seeking their own identities—relate to each other multi-dimensionally, communicate, unite, conflict or separate and thus create the dynamism of structural changes.
Based on this assumption, the paper, taking the Bougainville crisis as a case study, discusses identity pursuits as seen in Papua New Guinea. On Bougainville Island, a compensation claim made by customary landowners against the Australian copper mining company in 1987 later developed into a secession movement. From this process, what we can observe, on one hand, is the ethnic integration of this island, which is fragmented into small socio-political units based on traditional landowners' communities and on the other, social disintegration of these communities.
We presume that these integrational and disintegrational movements actually resulted from such identity pursuits as (1) the identity of a nation sought by the people of Bouganiville under the increasing awareness as an ethnic group, and (2) that of the landowners sought by those who are politically aware of their land rights.
We also presuppose, however, these contradictory results, integration and disintegration, can be attributed to such characters of identity itself as composed of the twofold elements of the self/other and destined to pursue autonomy or sovereignty as its proposition.
Therefore, in this paper, we first discuss and define what identity is. Then, after summarizing the history of the Bougainville crisis, we analyze two opposite views on the crisis. Thirdly, based on the analysis, we discuss the identity pursuit as a nation of Bougainville and that of landowners of the traditional communities.
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