Land and people in the Pacific change in tandem. The land itself is changing as it submerges under rising tides in Tuvalu or as tectonic plates quake in Vanuatu. People are changing the land as resource extraction processes, such as mining in Papua New Guinea, terraform the earth.Footnote 1 Yet again, the land is changing people as political, ethnic, and gendered conflicts over entitlements to land take root in Fiji and the Solomon Islands. How does law shape these multidirectional relations between land and people in the Pacific? This is the entry point for Professor Rebecca Monson’s monograph.
Monson’s book presents a multisited, multi-scalar investigation into the nature and implications of land tenure disputes in the Solomon Islands. Rooted in colonial archives, court records, and extensive ethnographic work, Monson’s work is the first to scrutinize land disputing in the Solomon Islands through the paradigms of legal pluralism and feminist political ecology. Monson’s key intervention is that land disputes in the Solomon Islands are not simply local but are entangled in wider and highly gendered processes of constituting public authority, political participation, and state formation. According to Monson, the gendered processes of land disputing and authority forming are mutually constitutive and reproduce the state as a hypermasculine domain. This is an important intervention into three fields of study for law and society which I examine here in turn: legal pluralism, feminist political ecology, and Pacific legal studies.
First, Monson turns to legal pluralism to frame her inquiry into land disputing in the Solomon Islands. Monson takes as her starting point the colonial transformation of customary land tenure into a system of land registration. Monson argues that this state intervention has generated social fragmentation and consolidated control over land with elite men. Rather than mapping these distinct “Melanesian” and “Western” systems as semi-autonomous, Monson draws on the concept of interlegality to explore how Solomon Islanders navigate these dynamic and mutually constitutive moral-normative orders. In particular, Monson focuses on the state, custom (in Solomon Islands Pijin, kastom), and Christianity as the key moral-normative and institutional orders that men and women navigate when contesting land tenure.
Monson’s major contribution to the literature on legal pluralism is to show that when men dispute land, they turn to state law and state institutions, whereas when women dispute land, they invoke kastom or Christianity. Monson also demonstrates that Solomon Islander women intervene in land disputes in ways that do not use their voices but rather their bodies, as they physically intervene in fighting or deliberately put themselves at the front line of protests and efforts to disrupt industrial-scale logging. Monson effectively illustrates the coexistence of these plural legalities and the ways that a rights-based focus on state law in land disputing obscures and undermines women’s efforts in the Solomon Islands. Yet, I wanted to push Monson a little further to understand how these plural legalities interact. How do state actors receive women’s efforts to dispute land in forms that are corporeal or invoke kastom or Christianity? And how do these efforts challenge or disrupt the masculinity of the state? Further work on the interlegalities and their interactions could be fruitful for research on land, gender, and legal pluralism.
Second, Monson employs feminist political ecology as a theoretical lens for her study. When it comes to situating law within the multidirectional relations between land and people in the Solomon Islands, Monson correctly identifies that a rights-based approach only takes us so far. Instead, she turns to feminist political ecology, which situates gendered land relations within wider political and economic processes of globalization, neoliberalism, and resource extractivism. Through the lens of feminist political ecology, Monson is able to see local land disputes as bound up with large-scale struggles over natural resources and political ordering in the Solomon Islands. Thus, in Chapter 4, Monson demonstrates how disputes over a series of peri-urban settlements in Kakabona have been tied up in processes of labor migration, urbanization, and the consolidation of masculine authority in culturally specific and fundamentally emplaced ways.
The lens of feminist political ecology allows Monson to appreciate land disputing at multiple scales, giving rise to a sense of zooming in and out from detailed local contexts to wider global processes as she narrates the processes of land disputing. Moving between the micro- and macroscales enables Monson to theorize from the ground up, subverting a more traditional structure which might present Global North theory from a bird’s-eye view before zooming into the Pacific case study. Her approach is ambitious, as the reader makes sense of intricate local conflicts while also recalling the underlying political and ecological processes at play. Monson is grappling with deeply grounded ethnographic material, while also acknowledging that sharing certain details may be dangerous in reproducing violence and dispossession, and deepening racist objectification and exoticization of Pacific Islander peoples.
One of the main contributions that Monson makes to the field of feminist political ecology is to demonstrate how land disputing and authority forming are mutually constitutive and produce the state as a hypermasculine domain. This is an important insight. Yet I wondered whether Monson had missed an opportunity to further develop the implications of the hypermasculinized state in the Solomon Islands. I wanted to ask Monson: what are the impacts of the hypermasculinized state outside of land disputing? How does this hypermasculinity play out in other domains such as labor, migration, or the regulation of family life? I also wanted to know: if men turn to state law in land disputing and women turn to kastom, Christianity, and the corporeal, has state law been colonized within the realm of hypermasculinity? If so, how do plural and non-state ways of speaking for land begin to disrupt or dismantle the hypermasculine domain? Here, there is a rich line of research to pursue which would further the agenda of feminist political ecology.
Finally, Monson’s monograph is both a contribution to the realm of Pacific legal studies and an invitation to us all to become an audience for Pacific law and society scholarship. As Monson and her colleagues have written elsewhere, the Pacific has been written into the foundations of law and society studies by leading scholars such as Sally Merry, Annelise Riles, and Brian Tamanaha.Footnote 2 Despite this, scholars and insights from the region remain on the margins of law and society scholarship. As Monson has expertly exemplified in her monograph, studies from the Pacific offer distinctly place-based, Indigenous and Oceanic concepts and approaches that help to ground critical and decolonial law and society scholarship in its unique contexts. Her monograph is at once a valuable contribution to Pacific legal studies as well as an invitation to us all to be an audience for Pacific law and society scholarship.
The subtitle of Monson’s book, Who Speaks for Land?, is catchy. It sets up a neat narrative arc that begins in Chapter 1 with an oft-repeated local phrase that “women do not, may not or should not speak about land” and ends in Chapter 6 by setting out convincingly the many ways that women do speak for the land in the Solomon Islands. Yet the true nature of Monson’s inquiry in her monograph has more to do with how people speak for land and the implications of these ways of speaking for law and society in the Solomon Islands. What first appears as a study of land tenure practices quickly becomes so much more as Monson layers on theoretical, methodological, and analytical approaches that traverse pluralism, gender relations, political ecology, and more. The result is a stunning, multisited, multi-scalar work that commands the attention of scholars of legal pluralism, feminist political ecology, and Pacific legal studies.
