Which Agency? Small States and the Pacific

Open almost any scholarly article on the Pacific Islands and one word recurs with striking regularity – agency. Pacific states exercise agency, Island leaders assert it, and the region has it. The word arrives so often, and so approvingly, that we rarely stop to ask what it means. We should ask, because in small state studies agency does two different jobs at once, and the two are easy to confuse.

The first job is analytic, and it carries a long pedigree in international relations. The agent-structure debate, which Alexander Wendt gave its canonical IR statement in 1987, asks how much of world politics we explain by the choices of actors and how much by the system that constrains them. In that debate agency names one side of the problem and sits opposite structure. Used this way, agency is one half of a question.

The small-state literature has continued to explore the concept of agency. Tom Long offers the clearest case. In A Small State's Guide to Influence in World Politics (Oxford, 2022), he asked when and how do small states achieve their goals against larger ones? He answers with a relational theory built on asymmetry. Small states gain influence through specified channels, agenda-setting, the framing of narratives, and work inside institutions, and they gain it most when great powers divide, drift, or seek legitimacy. His earlier taxonomy sorts small-state power into three kinds: derivative power that runs through a patron, collective power that runs through an institution, and particular-intrinsic power that rests on a specific asset. The crucial feature of Long's scheme is that agency can fail. Many of his cases are failures, and he counts them as such. This is agency as a variable. It discriminates, and it identifies when influence works and when it does not.

The Pacific studies literature uses the same word but differently. Here agency affirms rather than explains. Its inspiration lies in Epeli Hau'ofa's "Our Sea of Islands" (1993), which refused the colonial framing of Oceania as a scatter of tiny, poor, isolated dots, and argued that internalised belittlement damages a people's capacity to act. Hau'ofa corrects a moral wrong and does so powerfully. Later scholars inherited his commitment. Greg Fry's Framing the Islands (2019) treats the framing of the region as a political contest rather than a neutral map. The return of great-power competition then recharged the theme. Once observers read the region as a chessboard, as Wesley-Smith and Finin's Partners or Pawns formulation captured, every account has to insist the islands are players, not pieces.

This is agency as a normative claim. It affirms worth, and says the Pacific matters, its leaders choose, and the region is no one's prize. The claim corrects a bias, the reflex that reads world politics only from the capitals of great powers. But used this way, it is not analytic. It names no mechanism and states no condition, and nothing a Pacific state does can count against it, because the claim exists to be honoured rather than tested.

The difference has implications for policy and analysis. The normative use of agency resides within a frame. When agency means the refusal of belittlement, it casts Pacific politics through the lens of resistance to external domination. That post-colonial frame is often apt, since much of the region's history is exactly that struggle. But the frame arrives pre-installed with the word, attached to the vocabulary rather than chosen for the case. Analysts who lean on normative agency, therefore, inherit a reading they did not select. An analyst can affirm that a small state owns its choice of alignment. They cannot easily call the choice a failure, or costly, or a mistake, because to label a Pacific state as a bystander in its own affairs, even when the label fits a given case, echoes the same condescension that agency refuted.

None of this makes the normative use wrong. Pacific studies challenged a demeaning colonial frame, and agency became its watchword. But challenging a demeaning colonial frame and analysis are different tasks, and one word cannot perform both at once without confusion. Analysis requires that the thing explained might otherwise have been, whereas challenging a demeaning colonial frame cannot open the door to the status quo ante.

Analysts and policymakers must ask, when the word appears, which agency it is. Is it a mechanism that allows for failure, or is it a claim of worth? Both are legitimate, but they are not the same. The trouble starts when a claim is offered in one way and received in another.

Disclaimer: Views expressed are of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Statecraft Institute.