For the island nations of the South Pacific, the past few years has been a turbulent period in which existing political and economic structures have come under considerable strain and in some instances undergone substantial change. Nowhere has this been more dramatically seen than in the case of Fiji, where the incumbent government of seventeen years was defeated at the polls in April 1987 and the new government was overthrown by a military coup, the region's first, a month later. The French colony of New Caledonia, too, has witnessed considerable turmoil in recent years as the independence struggle of the indigenous Kanaks has led to sometimes violent confrontations. Elsewhere in the South Pacific violence has been less in evidence, but the pressure for change has been widespread.
On Facilitating Regional Integration and Economic Development with Collaborative Technologies in the South Pacific