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Abstract

Amid growing strategic competition, regional powers have intensified their engagement with Pacific Island Countries. This article examines Australia’s ‘Pacific Step-up’, a signature foreign policy initiative of the Scott Morrison government (2018–2022), from a signalling perspective. Through the Step-up, Australia sought to affirm its resolve to be partner of choice for Pacific Island Countries. This was not cheap talk but led Canberra to invest substantially in its ties with the region. Despite this and significant prior Australian engagement leading to a bilateral security pact, Solomon Islands’ government signed an additional security agreement with China in 2022. How can we explain this sender–receiver gap? I argue that close attention to the agency of domestic actors on the receiver side and the context in which such agency occurs – in this case, an extended history of insecurity in the Pacific country – provides us with analytical leverage when examining concrete instances of signalling.

Keywords

audience Australia foreign policy Pacific Island Countries Pacific Step-up security sender–receiver gap signalling Solomon Islands

Introduction

In 2018, the government in Canberra launched a substantial policy response to what was perceived to be a serious strategic challenge to Australia’s preeminent regional position; namely, China’s growing influence in the Pacific Islands region (henceforth simply ‘the Pacific’ or ‘the region’).¹ In line with China’s global rise, the region has witnessed a significant expansion of the country’s diplomatic and economic presence. The local effects of stiffening strategic competition between China and the United States (plus the latter’s allies and partners) have become ever more visible since the late 2010s. The region has effectively become a strategic arena, with Australia responding to China’s increased presence by ‘stepping up’ its ties with the Pacific. New Zealand followed suit with its own ‘reset’ of relations with the region. More recently, external powers – including the United States itself – have also become very active again in this part of the Pacific (Köllner, 2022; Wallis et al., 2024; Zhang, 2020).

Pacific Island Countries (PICs) have welcomed the increased attention and resources devoted to their region. Employing sometimes ‘very tactical, shrewd, and calculating approaches’ (Ratuva, 2019b) to dealing with foreign powers, PICs have sought to use their political agency to leverage strategic competition in order to pursue national policy goals, to gain material benefits, and to elicit diplomatic concessions (Cavanough, 2023: 6; Wallis et al., 2023b: 279–280). They have also sought to use such competition to commit external powers to their collective ‘Blue Pacific’ vision and strategic narrative which emphasises their collective stewardship of the Pacific Ocean (Wallis et al., 2023a).

Renewed strategic competition in the Pacific, and PICs’ efforts to deal with these dynamics, are bound to increase the interest of International Relations (IR) scholars in this vast and diverse world region. This leads to the question of how analytical tools from the discipline and its subfields can help make sense of regional dynamics. The reverse also applies: How does empirical evidence from the region speak to IR research agendas? In line with this special issue’s focus on foreign policy signalling in the Indo-Pacific, I analyse in this article Australia’s ‘Pacific Step-up’, a signature foreign policy initiative of the Scott Morrison government (2018–2022), from a signalling perspective. With respect to the sender side, I ask whether the Step-up constituted a signal to the region – and, if so, what exactly that signal was. Turning to the receiver side, I sketch the responses of Pacific leaders to the Step-up before addressing in more depth the case of Solomon Islands.

The latter is of particular interest to scholars and policymakers alike because geopolitical competition has intensified in the Solomons since the country switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China in 2019. As Solomon Islands’ scholar Transform Aqorau (2023) notes, the country now ‘lies at the heart of geopolitical tensions between the West and China [in the Pacific]. The nation provides a fertile ground for studying the evolving challenges of a country navigating complex choices among varying development partners’. Viewed through the lens of rationalist signalling theory, the case of Solomon Islands is a puzzling one. Why would a ‘small power’ – a ‘microstate’ even in terms of population size² – not be wooed by the costly signalling of Australia, a ‘superpower’ in the region (Wallis and Wesley, 2016: 26)? Why would it sign an additional security pact with a power whose regional interests do not align with those of Australia?

Rationalist signalling theory itself is of limited use in solving this puzzle, I suggest, because it gives short shrift to the agency of local actors on the receiver side and the context in which such agency occurs. In the Solomon Islands case, the domestic situation – including a long history of security challenges – helps to explain why its government, led between 2019 and 2024 by Prime Minister (PM) Manasseh Sogavare, opted for an additional security ally rather than relying solely on Australia. The country’s response to the Step-up underlines how domestic issues and considerations on the receiver side can dull even costly signals; it also indicates the need to engage with agency and context on the receiver side when examining concrete instances of foreign policy signalling.

The remainder of the article is structured as follows. In the next section, I delineate my theoretical and methodological approach, focusing in theoretical terms on costly signalling and sender–receiver gaps. The subsequent two sections are devoted to the empirical analysis. First, I examine this foreign policy initiative from a signalling perspective. I then highlight Pacific leaders’ reactions to the Step-up before turning to the Solomon Islands’ ‘multi-alignment’ approach to security ties with external powers. In closing, I summarise the main findings and delineate avenues for future research.

Theoretical and methodological framework

To answer whether the ‘Pacific Step-up’ policy initiative was intended to be a signal to the region, I rely on the extant literature to provide an understanding of what exactly signalling entails and who is involved in such interactions. To determine whether my assumption – derived from an immersion in the scholarship on the Step-up, as well as from policy documents pertaining to it – that the initiative was also meant as a signal was correct, I conducted in early 2023 a series of semi-structured, anonymised interviews with current and former Australian diplomats, using snowballing techniques to locate interview partners. I draw on these interviews in the empirical analysis offered below.

Foreign policy signalling, costly signals, and sender–receiver gaps

Robert Jervis (2017: 107, 108) once noted that ‘actors [in international politics] not only perceive others, they signal in order to project images’. Signalling is ubiquitous and features prominently in diplomacy, that is, communication between polities and their representatives (Jönsson and Hall, 2005: 37; Quek, 2016: 925). Kai Quek (2016: 925) defines a signal as ‘a piece of information intentionally communicated by one party (“signaler”) and observed by another (“receiver”)’.

Who is on the recipient side here? Early rationalist analyses of signalling tended to focus on sender–receiver dyads. Recent research has noted that especially covert signals (Carson and Yarhi-Milo, 2017) – but also ‘offstage signals’ such as arms deals and military aid – are targeted at individual receivers. Signals in the public domain – or what Roseanne McManus and Karen Yarhi-Milo (2017) call ‘frontstage signals’ – may also target one receiver or groups of receivers, be they allies or adversaries. But other audiences will also consider such signals.

The IR literature on signalling has been informed by the rational actor models and game theory perspectives interested in decision-making under conditions of risk. Much of that scholarship has focused on the role of signalling in adversarial great power relations and high-stakes crises, partly reflecting its closeness to deterrence theory and the Cold War context in which the earlier literature was conceived. The rationalist approach assumes signalling to respond to the challenge of asymmetrical information. Signalling addresses this information gap by one state (actor) providing the receiver(s) with input intended to affect their behaviour. Erik Gartzke et al. (2018) define signalling as

the purposive and strategic revealing of information about intent, resolve, and/or capabilities by an actor A to alter the decisions of another actor B to improve the chances that an outcome desired by A is reached when the desired outcomes of A and B are dissimilar.

From a game theory perspective, signalling offers a solution to common foreign policy dilemmas. Much attention has been devoted to how actors can signal credibly in strategic, conflictual or cooperative interactions. The most prominent strategies discussed in the literature are ‘sinking costs’ (actions that are costly at the time of signalling) and ‘tying hands’ (actions that may become costly later, for example, in terms of domestic-audience costs; see review in Gartzke et al., 2018). The rationalist signalling approach posits only ‘costly’ signals to be credible and effective in terms of convincing the receiver of the sender’s resolve, capability or other quality indicating what ‘actor type’ the latter is. ‘Cheap talk’ or ‘scraps of paper’ (treaties or other diplomatic documents) are not assumed to do the trick, as they cannot help determining how committed or capable a given actor truly is. Examples of costly signalling include actions such as introducing conscription systems, military mobilisation, or stationing troops abroad (Farrell and Rabin, 1996; Fearon, 1994, 1997; Fuhrmann and Sechser, 2014; Horowitz et al., 2017).

Yet, costly signals have a mixed record in terms of effectiveness (for a review, see Yarhi-Milo et al., 2018: 2151–2156). Diverse scholars have questioned the inherent impact of costly signalling. Starting with Jervis, political psychologists have noted the important role of perception in (mis)understanding signals, interpreting them and in responding to them. ‘[K]nowing how theorists read a signal does not tell us how the perceiver does’ (Jervis, 2017: 110). Thus, it is important to bring the receiver side into the study of signalling. For example, political leaders can vary significantly in how they perceive and respond to signals. Those leaders’ experiences, beliefs, and orientations, including assessments of their counterparts’ sincerity, may affect their responses to signals (Hall and Yarhi-Milo, 2012; Yarhi-Milo et al., 2018).

A sender–receiver gap can thus be at work when it comes to signalling. Addressing this gap, Quek (2016: 938) provides experimental evidence that ‘the logic of sinking costs is more straightforward and distinct to the signaler than it is to the receiver’. ‘S]inking costs may be a poor way to sharpen credibility, yet signalers sink costs nonetheless’ (Quek, 2016: 937).³ Whereas senders of such signals thus consider them credible, receivers do not automatically see things in the same way. Quek (2016: 926) surmises that this sender-receiver gap, which contrasts with the assumptions of rationalistic signalling theory, may reflect a ‘deeper phenomenon in human behaviour’.

The possibility of such gaps existing underlines the need to examine both sides of the signalling relationship. I hence do so when exploring why Solomon Islands’ government did not conform with an implicit assumption of the IR alliance literature; namely, that small powers should count themselves lucky to receive signals of support from a major regional power (McManus and Yarhi-Milo, 2017: 705). As we cannot get inside the heads of political leaders directly, we must rely on their observable statements and behaviour. Of course, they may misrepresent their intentions. For added nuance, I thus also draw on secondary sources, including assessments by Solomon Islands and other scholars before and after the signing of the security pact with China.

Abductive reasoning, agency and context

Solely relying on such evidence and additional sources is, however, not sufficient. If we want to explain why the Solomons’ government signed a security pact with China in the face of Australia’s Step-up initiative – or why, more generally, sender–receiver gaps in signalling occur – we can profit from abductive reasoning. Philosophers of science see abduction as a cornerstone of scientific methodology (Douven, 2021; Folger et al., 2023: 1182–1183), but it remains less well-known among social scientists than induction and deduction. Abductive reasoning helps us to move from an outcome of interest to hypotheses accounting for it. Abduction gets triggered by surprising encounters between theoretical assumptions and empirical evidence – or ‘puzzles’ (Douven, 2021; Folger and Stein, 2017: 307–308). It occurs when we reason from the puzzling encounter with a phenomenon to possible conjectures concerning its occurrence (Folger et al., 2023: 1183).

Building on Atocha Aliseda (2006), Robert Folger et al. (2023: 1184) suggest that different kinds of ‘triggers’ are involved here, as initiating attempts to develop hypotheses and explanations. Puzzlement may, for example, be induced by abductive novelties (phenomena not predicted by existing theories but potentially consistent with them) or by abductive anomalies (phenomena contradict existing theories). Abduction often involves moving between theory and empirical evidence with the aim of creating causal explanations (Folger et al., 2023: 1183; Yom, 2015: 618).⁴ In terms of iteration, abduction thus has methodological implications, but it comes with no fixed sets of methods leading to the generation of hypotheses. One solution is to seek explanatory approaches in cognate fields.

Abductive reasoning can help to account for Solomon Islands’ government signing a security agreement with China, the first such pact with a Pacific country. Seen through the prism of rationalist signalling literature, this foreign policy behaviour is curious because it rubs up against the idea of credible costly signals. Why was a small power like the Solomons not wooed by the costly signalling of Australia, a regional ‘superpower’? What accounts for this abductive anomaly? I suggest that close attention to the agency of domestic actors and the local context in which such agency occurs are key to understanding this puzzling behaviour. I also posit, based on iterations between the empirical evidence and IR theory, that Solomon Islands’ foreign policy behaviour in the period examined largely matches the ‘omnibalancing’ theory (David, 1991) from the literature on alliances and alignments.

Australia’s Pacific policy and the ‘Step-up’

Australian policymakers have frequently referred to the Pacific as the country’s ‘patch’ or ‘backyard’ (Wallis, 2017: 3, 2023: 3). Still, successive Australian governments have exhibited a ‘longstanding ambivalence’ about their country’s relationship with PICs (Wallis, 2023: 1). Relatedly, their interest in the neighbouring region has waxed and waned ever since the second half of the 19th century. The ‘mercurial nature’ of Australia’s approach to the region, ‘oscillating between neglect and intervention’ (Varrall, 2021: 123, 131) reflects, as Michael Wesley (2023: 22) notes, two major impulses in Australia’s policy community: on one hand, impatience with the region’s pace of development and a tendency to overestimate regional challenges, and, on the other hand, periodic inclinations to ‘think big’ about the region and Australia’s role in it. At different times and sometimes simultaneously, the Pacific has been perceived and portrayed in Australia as an opportunity, as a threat and as a special responsibility in security and development terms (see Schultz, 2014).

Australia was a key protagonist in the Cold War’s ‘strategic denial’ policy in the Pacific, seeking to keep external powers out of a geographical area which intersects with some of the country’s air and sea lanes of communication (Fry, 2019: 171–178; Herr, 1986; Wesley, 2023: 11–15). The end of the Cold War, however, led to the region falling off the ‘map of global geopolitics’ (Morgan, 2022b). Yet, for Australia, it remained an area of primary strategic interest, with Canberra cultivating security ties with PICs through its Defence Cooperation Program (DCP; Wallis, 2017: chapter 4). After the onset of the United States’ ‘War on Terror’ and influenced by strategic narratives about an ‘arc of instability’ extending into the southwest Pacific (Ayson, 2007; Kabutaulaka, 2005), the region saw between 2003 and 2017 the longest and costliest Australia-led overseas intervention in form of the Regional Assistance Mission to Solomon Islands (RAMSI).

RAMSI’s short-term mandate was to restore law and order in the Solomons in the wake of violent ‘ethnic tensions’ between 1998 and 2003, occurring against the backdrop of a complex melange of colonial legacies and more contemporary politico-economic issues concerning land ownership, inter-ethnic frictions and (limited) development (Bennett, 2002; Kabutaulaka, 2001; Ratuva, 2019a: chapter 6). RAMSI was a police-led mission which also involved personnel from 13 PICs. The diversity of the participating police force contributed to the relative success of law and justice-pillar of the mission (Putt et al., 2018). RAMSI, however, also involved an ambitious, and ultimately far less successful, mission to establish sustainable administrative and economic governance structures (Fraenkel, 2019; Hayward-Jones, 2014; Wesley, 2023). While RAMSI was welcomed by most Solomon Islanders, some viewed Australia’s motives with suspicion⁵ or considered the operation an undignified, paternalistic foreign intervention (Cavanough, 2023: 47–48, 59). Others criticised the role of highly paid Australian consultants and their effects on the local economy (Wickham et al., 2022) or simply judged the operation depending on whether they had personally benefitted from it or not (Aqorau, 2013).

When the last Australian personnel were withdrawn, RAMSI was replaced by Australia’s first bilateral security treaty with a Pacific country. The ‘Agreement between the Government of Australia and the Government of Solomon Islands Concerning the Basis for Deployment of Police, Armed Forces, and other Personnel to Solomon Islands’ (Australasian Legal Information Institute (ALII), 2018) became active in mid-2018. The bilateral pact enables, upon the request of Solomon Islands’ government, the deployment of Australian police, military and civil personnel in the event of a breakdown of law and order (Wesley, 2023: 130, 250). A 450-strong Ready Battalion Group can be deployed to the Solomons within 48 hours (Wesley, 2023: 248).

RAMSI, and Australia’s defence and security cooperation with the region more generally, must also be understood in the context of the alliance with the United States. As Wallis and Wesley (2016: 26) argue, alliance commitments and global politics constitute major, if less visible, shapers of Australia’s Pacific policy when it comes to maintaining peace and order in the region. The United States outsourced the management of the Southwest Pacific, and Melanesia in particular, to Australia after the Second World War as part of the latter’s alliance obligations (Medcalf, 2023: 16–17; Wesley, 2020: 193, 2023: 14–15). Australia’s DCP, existing since the 1970s, reflects Canberra’s ‘strategic interest in being the principal security partner’ of Papua New Guinea (PNG) and other PICs (Wallis, 2017: 128). Such cooperation has involved training, exchanges of personnel, infrastructure support, capacity-building, and the delivery of 22 patrol boats to PICs between 1987 and 1995. It has made Australia the most important security and defence partner for countries in the southern Pacific islands, while the United States plays a similar role for the freely associated states of the northern Pacific. Australia’s role as a leading supplier of development and defence cooperation has taken on new importance in the context of US–China strategic competition, with the region considered by the North American country (and its allies and partners) part of the Indo-Pacific strategic space.

Australia’s response to the perceived Chinese challenge

In the second half of the 20th century, Australia tended to focus on the Pacific at times of domestic crisis in PICs and when external strategic interests became apparent. Taking an even longer term perspective, Richard Herr and Anthony Bergin (2011: 12) note that the ‘strategic importance of the Pacific islands to Australia has in fact been determined by the extent of great power interests since the first European contact’. Thus, Australia’s attention to the Pacific has been greatest when external powers became active in the region – be it as colonial powers like France or Germany, as a wartime enemy (Japan in the Second World War) or a Cold War adversary, with the Soviet Union showing greater interest in expanding ties with newly independent states in the Pacific. Australia’s Step-up policy also aligns with this general pattern of response to regional activities by external powers – in this case, China.

China’s interest in the Pacific had initially been triggered by its competition with Taiwan over diplomatic recognition, with the region becoming a particularly important arena once momentum had begun to shift in favour of the PRC globally (Atkinson, 2010). The new millennium’s first two decades then saw increased Chinese diplomatic and economic resources being devoted to the Pacific. This reflected China’s rapid economic growth and burgeoning appetite for natural resources (Nicholas, 2021), the ‘going global’ of its companies as well as Beijing’s more proactive foreign policy and related geo-economic designs – most notably the Belt and Road Initiative, whose maritime segment was extended in 2015 to the Pacific. China’s diplomatic initiatives as well as growing trade, investment, development cooperation, and tourist flows have been welcomed by many PICs interested in diversifying their external linkages and seeking to be ‘friends to all’ in pursuit of national development goals and their collective ‘Blue Pacific’ vision (Manele, 2023: 21; Taylor, 2019a; Wesley-Smith, 2013: 366–370).

Australia had initially welcomed China’s regional presence and encouraged it to help PICs become more self-reliant economically (Wallis and Wesley, 2016: 31). However, Australian foreign policy and strategic circles grew increasingly worried in the mid 2010s. They harboured doubts about the quality and sustainability of Chinese infrastructure projects and were concerned about their detrimental effects on the good-governance thrust of Australia’s own development cooperation. There were also concerns about the growing dependence of some PICs on Chinese concessional loans, with accompanying risks in terms of undermining PICs’ sovereignty. Added to this was anxiety and speculations about China’s future military presence in the region involving dual-use naval bases or even missile launch pads (Australian Government, 2020: 3–4; Kilcullen, 2023; Varrall, 2021: 112–120). Reports about a planned Chinese military base in Vanuatu in spring 2018 – denied by both countries – led then PM Malcolm Turnbull to issue a stern warning to the Pacific state (Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), 2018; Fry, 2019: 266–267).

Sending the signal

Strategic anxiety about China’s role in the region thus represented a major, but not the only, driver of the Australian government’s ‘Pacific Step-up’ initiative. In September 2016, Turnbull announced at a Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) summit a ‘step change’ towards the region (Newton Cain, 2019: 42). According to one senior Australian diplomat, what Turnbull had in mind was greater ambition to and impact for Australian policy vis-à-vis the region, including in terms of development. While Australia had been a long-standing part of the Pacific, it ‘needed to do better and needed to do more’ (Author interview, 2023c). The new policy was spelled out in the 2017 Foreign Policy White Paper. This was the first iteration in which an entire chapter was devoted to the region. Notably, the chapter in question talks not just about security issues but also about economic cooperation (including new avenues for labour mobility from the region to Australia) and boosting people-to-people links (Australian Government, 2017: 99–105).

Under Turnbull’s successor Morrison, the geostrategic and security dimensions of the new Pacific policy became more pronounced, also reflecting the growing competition between China and the United States (and its allies) centring on the Indo-Pacific. Tellingly, Morrison outlined the directions of the new Pacific policy not at a PIF summit but at a military garrison in Queensland. With the Step-up, Morrison (2018) said that the Pacific returned

to where it should be – front and centre of Australia’s strategic outlook, our foreign policy, our personal connections, including at the highest levels of government. This is our patch. This is our part of the world. This is where we have special responsibilities. [. . .] We are more than partners by choice. We are connected as members of a Pacific family.

According to Tess Newton Cain (2019: 42), the speech at Laverack Barracks constituted a ‘distinct turning point’ for the Pacific Step-up, with much of the new engagement in the region becoming visible afterwards. While the Step-up addressed different areas, its strong security focus reflected, as Joanne Wallis (2019) notes, ‘Australia’s preoccupation with the potential for threats to come through the region’.⁶ Building in part on existing DCP activities, endeavours included the establishment of the Pacific Fusion Centre in Vanuatu, charged with managing information on regional security threats; the provision of national-security and law-enforcement training for Pacific officials at a new Australia Pacific Security College; the delivery of bigger patrol boats to the region and engagement in aerial surveillance; the transformation of the Blackrock Camp in Fiji into a regional hub for police- and peacekeeping training; and the joint development of the PNG Defence Force’s Lombrum Naval Base.

The choice of venue for Morrison’s speech and the security thrust of the Pacific Step-up reminded long-time observers of Australia’s Cold War’s ‘strategic denial’ approach (Dobell, 2020: 6; Fry, 2019: 274; Tarte, 2022: 40). The Department of Defence’s 2016 White Paper, which stated that Australia would work to ‘limit the influence of any actor from outside the region with interests inimical to our own’ (Australian Government, 2016: 74), could also be read that way. The Step-up was thus intended to ‘make sure that the Pacific Islands don’t embrace China’ (Layton, 2022). This was also reflected in some of the language used by the Australian government here, such as emphasis on the ‘sovereignty’ of PICs. As interviewees noted, the subtext here was that that sovereignty was threatened by Chinese activities (Author interview, 2023a, 2023b; see also Wallis and Powles, 2023: 19).

Interviewees agreed that the Step-up also served as a signal principally targeted at political decision-makers in the region. Furthermore, the Australian government aimed to reach broader communities in the PICs: to show them how focused Canberra was on the region, that it understood PICs’ own priorities and that it wanted to work with these concerns (Author interview, 2023a, 2023b). The explicit signal was that Australia wanted to be the partner of choice for PICs, with security a key area of cooperation but not the only one (Author interview, 2023a).

According to a senior Australian diplomat, there were ‘secondary audiences’ as well, including allies and partners such as the United States and Japan (Author interview, 2023a). A former high-ranking Australian diplomat suggested that, concerning international audiences, China was included here too – the message being that Australia viewed the region as a ‘primary strategic interest’. The interviewee furthermore posited that the Step-up sought to educate the Australian public, in making them aware of the importance of relationships with the region and the need to substantially invest in it (Author interview, 2023b). Another Pacific-based interviewee concurred, suggesting that the site of Morrison’s speech had also been chosen to make sure that it reached, through national media coverage, a domestic audience (Author interview, 2023d).

In reaffirming Australia’s desire to remain – or, in the case of Fiji, become again⁷ – partner of choice for PICs in the security realm and beyond,⁸ the government invested heavily in the Step-up, underlining Canberra’s strengthened commitment to the region and making the signal sent a credible one. Relevant measures included a substantial increase of development assistance to the Pacific. According to the Lowy Institute Pacific Aid Map, Australia has been by far the biggest provider of Official Development Finance (ODF) to the region in the past few decades, disbursing AU$17 billion between 2008 and 2021 – accounting for nearly 40% of the total amount hereof regionally. During the Step-up years, Australia’s ODF to the region went from AU$968 million in 2020 to AU$1.89 billion in 2021.⁹ In the latter year, PNG received 44% of the funding, including an AU$466 million loan – the single-largest transaction ever recorded in the Pacific Aid Map (Letman, 2023).

On no less than three occasions, government funding was used to outbid Chinese infrastructure tenders in the Pacific: for an underwater telecommunications cable linking remote Solomon Islands communities to the capital and ultimately to Australia; the Black Rock base redevelopment project in Fiji; and for a corporate takeover of Digicel Pacific, the leading mobile telecommunications and network services provider in the Pacific (Dayant, 2023; Minister for Foreign Affairs, Senator the Hon Penny Wong, 2022; Mudaliar, 2018). Australia also opened six new embassies/high commissions in Micronesia and Polynesia, bringing the regional total to 19 and making it the only country with diplomatic representation in every PIF member state (Newton Cain, 2019: 38–40; Varrall, 2021: 125–127). The Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade came to host a new ‘Office of the Pacific’ and saw a doubling of staff working on the Pacific (including secondments) to about 175 full-time equivalents (Parliament of Australia, 2020: 8–9).

The Step-up also involved intensification of the high-level-visit diplomacy costly in terms of time and money (including opportunity costs). Before the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous ministerial visits to the Pacific took place – including to Micronesia, which had previously not figured heavily on Australia’s regional agenda (see Newton Cain, 2019: 39). This diplomacy included leaders’ visits; according to McManus and Yarhi-Milo (2017: 702), the latter constitute frontstage signals due to the ‘pomp and circumstance’. Monetary costs aside, leadership visits are a scarce resource because they take time out of the respective head of governments’ busy schedules and require significant preparations (McManus and Yarhi-Milo, 2017: 714). Leadership visits involve widespread media coverage and provide an opportunity for intra-government debate, especially when they are linked to signing agreements which require executive or legislative approval (McManus and Yarhi-Milo, 2017: 706). Symbolically, Morrison’s first overseas visitors were the PMs of Solomon Islands, Fiji and PNG, while his own first official visit took him to the Solomons, where he announced a bilateral 10-year, AU$250 million infrastructure programme. Australia’s signalled resolve to serve as partner of choice for PICs was thus loud and clear.

Primary-audience reactions: Pacific leaders’ responses to the Step-up

How did Pacific leaders, the Step-up initiative’s primary audience, respond to this signal? Pacific leaders at the time such as the PM of Samoa Tuila’epa Sa’ilele Malielegaoi (Tuilaepa, 2018), the Foreign Minister of Vanuatu Ralph Regenvanu (2021: xi) or PIF Secretary General Dame Meg Taylor (2019b) generally welcomed the new emphasis on Pacific affairs in Australian foreign policy. They also applauded the latter’s support for both regional and national projects – some of which fitted with the political agendas of the governments in question, for example, extending rural electrification in PNG or developing Fiji into a regional hub for police- and peacekeeping training courtesy of the Black Rock facility (Bainimarama, 2019; Wall, 2020 see also Tarte, 2022: 38).

Yet, despite Australia’s heavy investment in its ties with PICs, a subcurrent of criticism indicated a sender–receiver gap here. Pacific leaders preferred cooperation based on their countries’ needs, not Australia’s strategic concerns (Collins, 2023). Pacific scholars Tarcisius Kabutaulaka and Katerina Teaiwa (2019) pointedly state that the Step-up

largely ignored the interests and priorities of Pacific countries, resulting in increased militarisation rather than environmental, cultural and human security desired by islanders. Central to these is climate change, which island countries identify as the single most important security issue for them [. . .].

Indeed, several Pacific leaders were very critical of the Morrison government’s unambitious climate policy and Australia’s continued reliance on coal – seen as inimical to the interests of the country’s ‘Pacific family’. For instance, Tuvalu’s PM Enele Sopoaga told the Australian government that its foot-dragging on climate change risked undermining its Step-up (Dziedzic, 2018). During Morrison’s official visit to Fiji in early 2019, PM Bainimarama also criticised the Australian government for placing the ‘interests of a single industry’ above the ‘welfare of Pacific peoples’ (Dziedzic and Handley, 2019). Yet, a more ambitious climate change policy was not forthcoming, with the Morrison government shying away from imposing severe costs on domestic constituencies, including important corporate backers of the then Coalition government (Brett, 2020; see also Rudd and Turnbull, 2021).

Pacific leaders’ criticism reached its high point when the Morrison government saw to it that the 2019 PIF summit declaration got watered down on climate-related issues. Taking aim at the family analogy employed in the Step-up’s messaging, Kiribati President Anote Tong accused Australia of behaving like an ‘abusive relative’ by refusing to take meaningful action on climate change (Hannaford, 2019). Fiji’s Attorney General Aiyaz Sayed-Khaiyum called Australia the ‘family’s black sheep’ in view of Canberra’s refusal to take a more proactive stance on climate change (Tahana, 2019).

With action on climate change not being in tune with words, the family analogy employed in the Step-up backfired at least in part. Scholars dissecting the official discourse accompanying the Step-up, including the use of the ‘family’ analogy as a framing device (Wallis, 2021: 489–492), have noted some of the contradictions and disconnects at play. Newton Cain (2019: 43) points to the disconnect between the family metaphor and the lived experience of Pacific Islanders wanting to visit Australia. Wallis (2023) contrasts the Morrison government’s framing of Australia and PICs as a ‘Pacific family’ with exclusionary practices regarding labour mobility and scholarships. This contradiction, she argues, exemplifies successive Australian governments’ ‘ambivalence about [. . .] relationships with PICs and Pacific peoples’ (Wallis, 2023: 7).

Along with other PIF member states, Australia had endorsed in 2018 the landmark ‘Boe Declaration on Regional Security’.¹⁰ Its Article 1 affirms that ‘climate change remains the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and wellbeing of the peoples of the Pacific’ (Pacific Islands Forum, 2018). Yet, the Morrison government devoted much more attention to traditional security issues, emphasising the geostrategic threats emanating from China’s presence in the Pacific instead. The ‘mismatch of security priorities’ between Australia and PICs (Morgan, 2022a: 57; see also, Tarte, 2022) undoubtedly dulled Australia’s signal in the eyes of some Pacific leaders. Wesley (2023: 255) states, accordingly, that ‘Canberra’s stance on climate change has eroded Australia’s legitimacy as a member of the Pacific community, undoing many of the gains made during the RAMSI operation’.

It is beyond the scope of this article to determine the overall effectiveness of the Step-up signal, that is, whether, or to what degree, the very visible discord on climate change action hindered collaboration between Australia and PICs from being strengthened. A senior Australian diplomat interviewed was, however, adamant climate change was ‘not a showstopper’ and that Australian assistance during the COVID-19 pandemic was ‘absolutely critical’ to keeping the economies of several countries in the region going (Author interview, 2023b). More generally, interviewees argued that the Step-up had in many ways delivered by improving bilateral relations, reducing levels of friction, and leading to higher degrees of Australian influence and leverage vis-à-vis the region (Author interview, 2023a, 2023c). One regional organisation official added that the Step-up helped to ensure that the country’s engagement in the region was no longer just crisis-driven but ongoing and more entwined with the rhythms of policy development and government work in the Pacific. Furthermore, the interviewee suggested that the Step-up helped to get Australian allies and partners (re-)engaging in the region (Author interview, 2023d). Yet, in the case of Solomon Islands, Australia’s Step-up signal did clearly not have the desired effect but constituted a ‘reverse’, as a senior Australian official put it diplomatically (Author interview, 2023a).

A new partner of choice? Solomon Islands’ security pact with China

In March 2022, a draft security agreement between China and Solomon Islands was leaked on social media. It came less than three years after the Solomons and Kiribati had switched diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China. Together with China’s attempt to lease Tulagi island in the Solomons, which had hosted a Japanese naval base in the Second World War (Cavanough, 2023: 105–111; Moore, 2022: 7), and offer to upgrade an airstrip in Kiribati which had served military functions in the Pacific theatre (Barrett, 2021), the security pact heightened concerns in Australia. It indicated that Canberra’s signal of wanting to be partner of choice for PICs had failed to impress the government of Solomon Islands – a country in whose stability Australia had invested massively under RAMSI and to which it was tied by a bilateral security treaty.

In response to the leak, the government in Honiara stated that it was seeking to ‘broaden its security and development cooperation with more countries’ and, worryingly for Canberra, referred to Australia and China as its ‘two major partners’ (Karp and Lyons, 2022). The security pact came as a shock to Australia and its allies and led to political contestation in the Solomons themselves. There was certainly no bipartisan support in the Solomons for the new pact which proved as polarising as the initial government decision to switch diplomatic recognition from Taiwan to China (Kabutaulaka, 2023; see also Cavanough, 2023: chapter 10). The chairman of the country’s parliamentary foreign affairs committee, opposition MP Peter Kenilorea Jr, for instance, repeatedly argued that there was no need for the pact; to his mind, it would only benefit China (Bainbridge and Aumanu-Leong, 2022).

In Australia, one senior Coalition politician suggested that Solomon Islands could turn into ‘our own little Cuba’, while PM Morrison warned that a naval base in the Solomons would amount to crossing a ‘red line’ (see Cavanough, 2023: chapter 14 for details). Campaign-trail hyperbole aside – news of the pact broke as Australia was preparing for a general election – the episode showed the regional power to be unable to prevent a small neighbouring nation from pursuing closer relations with China. Last-ditch efforts, including the dispatch of high-level delegations from Canberra and Washington, failed to derail the new security agreement – which got signed in April 2022 (Wallis and Powles, 2023: 16, 17).

While the government in Honiara did not publish the final text of the new agreement, former PM Danny Philip confirmed it to be ‘very close’ to the leaked version (Dziedzic and Greene, 2022). If so, it permits the Solomons to request the deployment of Chinese police and military to assist in ‘maintaining social order’ and ‘protecting [. . .] lives and property’; China, meanwhile, may – ‘in accordance with its needs and with the consent of Solomon Islands’ – make maritime visits to the Solomons, use the country’s facilities for stopover and logistical purposes, and use ‘relevant forces’ to protect Chinese ‘personnel and major projects’ (Powles, 2022). While the agreement ‘opens strategic space for China’ in the Pacific (Connolly, 2024), it also provides the Solomon Islands with more options. In Canberra, the security pact rekindled suspicions that Beijing might set up a naval base less than 2000 km away from the Queensland coast. Sogavare vehemently denied that there were any such plans (Lyons and Wickham, 2022). While historian Clive Moore (2022: 4–7) has identified several potential Chinese naval-base sites in the Solomons, Solomon Islands scholars have argued that such an outcome is unlikely – mainly because most land in the Solomons is customarily owned and thus very difficult for third parties to obtain (Aqorau, 2022; Kabutaulaka, 2022).

In any case, the new security agreement constituted a substantial setback for the Australian government. For two decades, Canberra had been Solomon Islands’ main security partner, training and equipping the latter’s police force (Wesley, 2023: 92, 105–122). Now the government in Honiara sought to diversify its security partners to meet its perceived security needs. In July 2022, PM Sogavare said he wanted China to play a permanent role in training the Solomons’ police force (Dziedzic, 2022). Adding further layers of ambiguity, he reassured the new Australian government under PM Anthony Albanese that Canberra would remain the Solomons’ security partner of choice. Sogavare later also affirmed a ‘Pacific family first approach to peace and security in the region’ (Movono and Lyons, 2022; Prime Minister of Australia, 2022). While the Sogavare government aligned Solomon Islands more closely with China, it effectively continued to hedge it bets. With the new security pact in place, the second half of 2022 saw Canberra and Beijing engaging in a de facto ‘bidding war’ (Fraenkel, 2023) with respect to training Solomon Islands’ police force and supplying it with new equipment (Dziedzic and Wasuka, 2022; Lyons, 2022a, 2022b).¹¹

Exploring the drivers of the China–Solomon Islands security pact

Why was Solomon Islands’ government left unimpressed by Australia’s costly signalling of strengthened regional engagement? Why did it go for an additional security pact when it already had one with Australia – a pact that overlaps in part with the new one with China, inviting complications if both are activated at the same time? Notably, the security pact with Australia had been used as recently as November 2021 when political protests in Honiara turned violent, leading to the looting of the capital’s Chinatown (see Cavanough, 2023: chapter 12 for details) and resulting in the immediate dispatch of more than 100 Australian federal police and soldiers to help quell the unrest.¹²

Signalling theory is only of limited use in answering why the Sogavare government chose to ignore Australia’s costly signal. Especially the rationalist literature strand has, due to its universalising thrust, not shown an interest in exploring how agency and context shape audience responses and possible sender–receiver gaps. Yet, whether signalling has the desired effect on the behaviour of receivers does not solely depend on the costliness of such signals. As noted earlier, costly signals have a mixed record in terms of effectiveness. Examinations of concrete instances of signalling require engagement with both sides ends of the relationship. Some scholars interested in the psychological dimension of receiver reactions have pointed to the experiences, beliefs, and orientations of political leaders on the receiver side as factors which may affect responses to signals (Hall and Yarhi-Milo, 2012; Yarhi-Milo et al., 2018). This chimes with the insight that all ‘foreign policy is context-specific: it fluctuates according to leaders’ perceptions, cultural and historical experiences [and other factors]’ (Paquin, 2020: 1216).

The decision to conclude a security pact with China might thus have been affected by the personal experiences and worldviews of PM Sogavare who, according to Herr (2023), might have initiated the agreement himself. Herr argues that the PM did not lack the motivation to go for an additional security pact, given his long-standing search for stability and security of tenure in the face of ongoing social strife and repeated political upheaval in Solomon Islands. Not being endowed with a strong political base of his own but relying on patronage, Sogavare might have been interested, according to Herr (2023: 4), in ‘physical protection against the fickleness of the public. Violence in and around [. . .] Honiara had destabilised governments the whole of his political career’.¹³

As Moore (2022: 4, 11) points out in this context, before the outbreaks of unrest in 2019 and 2021, there had been outbursts of civil unrest in the Solomons in 1989, 1996, the ‘tension years’ 1998–2003, 2006 and in 2014, too. According to Moore (2022: 4, 11), Sogavare might thus have been happy to combine Australian and Chinese assistance to build a strong police force capable of coping with such threats. Edward Acton Cavanough (2023: 179–182) concurs, noting a series of personal threats against Sogavare. He also suggests that the security relationship with China was attractive to the PM as it not only made Solomon Islands less dependent on Australia for the maintenance of law and order (especially in case of a breakdown in the bilateral relationship) but incentivised Canberra to react promptly to any requests from Honiara for assistance to avoid similar requests going out to Beijing. Moreover, Cavanough (2023: 184, 193) suggests, the security pact with China might even help to deter future political unrest instigated by opponents of the government. According to such individualising accounts emphasising the agency of the PM, then, the security agreement with China may have helped to allay security concerns on the part predominantly of Sogavare himself.¹⁴

Going beyond Sogavare’s personal motives for a pact with China, Solomon Islands officials, politicians and scholars have emphasised domestic security concerns as a particular rationale for the new security agreement. According to Collin Beck, the country’s highest Foreign Ministry official, the security agreement with China was designed to address development needs and ‘domestic security threats’ (Kekea, 2022). Former PM Philip specifically defended the new security pact by arguing that Beijing’s support was necessary to protect Chinese property in the Solomons (Dziedzic and Greene, 2022). And the Office of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in Honiara stated that the pact with China constituted a response ‘to Solomon Islands’ soft and hard domestic threats’ (Solomon Islands Government, 2022), as linked to implementing the country’s new ‘National Security Strategy’ whose primary purpose it is to ‘[s]olicit and elevate support for national security in the country’ (Solomon Islands Government, 2020: 6).

Gordon Nanau (2022) notes that the new security agreement can be understood in the context of

domestic security challenges, including tensions, riots and general lawlessness in Honiara. Many Solomon Islands MPs emphasised during the motion of no-confidence debate that followed the November 2021 looting that they were disheartened by the inability of the country’s police force to quell the lawlessness. This was despite decades of training and support from [RAMSI] and capacity building under the Solomon Islands–Australia security treaty. A national police force with limited capacity to protect citizens and property is a critical security issue for Solomon Islands. Looking for additional support to strengthen the police force is driving the security agreement with China.

A Chinese offer to assist the Solomon Islands police had apparently existed since the switch of diplomatic recognition and the riots in late 2021 provided the Sogavare government with the justification to take up that offer (Cavanough, 2023: 177–178).

What seems like an abductive anomaly from the perspective of rationalist signalling theory thus becomes less of a puzzle when the domestic context and the agency of political actors on the receiver side are taken into consideration. Regardless of the personal motives of PM Sogavare – something that must remain the subject of (informed) speculation – we can infer from both public statements by Solomon Islands policymakers and from assessments by third parties that ultimately domestic security concerns linked to an extended experience with insecurity in the Pacific country constituted a key driver behind the security agreement with China.

Iterations between the empirical evidence and relevant bodies of theory make it possible to connect the case with explanatory approaches offered in cognate strands the IR literature. Traditional balance of power/threats theories emphasise that states opt for ‘alliances’ (a concept of limited analytical utility for ‘Global South’ world regions such as the Pacific, see Wilkins, 2012: 75) or ‘alignments’ more generally¹⁵ due to the structure of the international system or the external threats they face (see Miller and Toritsyn, 2005: 326–328 for an overview). Yet, as Steven David (1991) has argued, states’ internal characteristics can also decisively influence their alignment choices. David offered up the idea of ‘omnibalancing’ to explain why political leaders in parts of the Global South in which political legitimacy is weak and the stakes for power are very high align as they do. The theory posits that political leaders in such states do not primarily have external threats in mind when making alignment decisions (see also Barnett and Levy, 1991: 395).

Rather, David argues, the alignments these political leaders seek are driven to a considerable extent by their desire above all for political survival and physical security. Accordingly, it is more important for them to believe that alignments benefit them in terms of warding off security threats and enhancing their hold on power, rather than the states in question per se. If a core aim of abduction is to generate hypotheses helping to explain puzzling outcomes in politics, IR and beyond, omnibalancing provides a fitting theoretical starting block for hypothesising about the Sogavare government’s decision to pursue closer alignment with China despite Australia’s past security-related engagement and efforts under the Step-up initiative. Balancing internal threats to political survival and physical security becomes a plausible rationale for an additional security pact with China, regardless of whether agency lies primarily with the PM himself or the wider political circles.

A possible objection to such a tentative explanation of the Solomons’ pact with China is that an additional security agreement was unnecessary given it already had one with Australia providing adequate protection against internal security risks. In fact, one of the interviewees with substantial experience in Solomon Islands, suggested invoking domestic security concerns here constituted a mere ‘ruse’ given the availability of Australia’s stand-by forces and the possibility to draw on other Pacific partners with military forces as well. Instead, the interviewee speculated about the Sogavare government’s need to deliver tangible outcomes to its new diplomatic partner and financial backer, Beijing (Author interview, 2023c).

While this counterhypothesis cannot be ruled out based on the available evidence, it may well underestimate the advantages (in the eyes of the Sogavare government) of having another security partner. Such ‘multi-alignment’ may lead to better leverage with both extant and new partners, resulting in greater material benefits. As noted, in 2022, Australia and China effectively competed with one another to supply the Solomons’ police force with training and equipment. Moreover, multi-alignment can be an attractive ‘sovereignty booster’ by making states and their leaders less dependent on just one partner – especially a formerly dominant one, like Australia here. More generally, multi-alignment may also reflect the fact that most Global South countries ‘do not want to become a permanent part of any alliances [but] want to retain their strategic autonomy by adopting [more] ambiguous alignment [stances]’ (Patnayak, 2023).

Conclusion

Scholars following Jervis’ lead have noted that the effectiveness of foreign policy signals also depends on what receivers themselves make of them. Analyses of concrete instances of signalling thus need to examine both the sender and the audience side of the equation. Perceptions and priorities might diverge concerning the issue area in question and the sender’s reputation in this regard. Moreover, the experiences, beliefs, and worldviews of those on the receiver side can affect what they make of signals and how they respond to them, potentially leading to sender–receiver gaps.

This article, examining Australia’s Pacific Step-up initiative and how it has been received in region, underlines, for one, how signalling theory can be usefully employed to analyse the foreign policy behaviour not only of great or rising powers but also of regional ones. Through the Step-up, Australia, a regional (super)power in the Pacific, sought to convey to its intended primary audience, namely PICs’ political leaders, its resolve to be the partner of choice in the security domain and beyond. China’s growing regional presence provided important impetus for the policy. From the start, the Step-up included development and mobility-related components but morphed over time, with the security dimension coming to loom particularly large under the Morrison government. Canberra committed considerable time, money, and energy to backing up the signal conveyed by expanding development assistance as well as diplomacy in the region; by intensifying high-level political exchange; and by instituting a host of security-related initiatives which built on prior cooperation with PICs.

In general terms, the costly Step-up signal was well-received in the region. However, the Morrison government’s unambitious climate policy meant that a major disconnect existed between Australia and PICs in terms of respective security perceptions and narratives. Whereas Morrison – and influential parts of the Australian media (see Wallis et al., 2022) – emphasised traditional geopolitical security concerns vis-à-vis China’s increased regional presence, PICs’ political leaders instead highlighted climate change as the single-biggest threat confronting the region. Whether this mismatch on security priorities effectively hindered closer collaboration between Australia and PICs at the individual and collective level this study cannot answer. Current and former Australian diplomats interviewed argued that the disconnect on climate change policy was not a ‘showstopper’ and believed the ‘Step-up’ to have delivered in many ways.

Yet, one sender–receiver gap stands out. Australia’s costly signal and the country’s earlier, very substantial security-related engagement in the Solomons did not prevent the Sogavare government from signing the region’s first security agreement with China. The episode underlines that small powers may use their agency not to heed a costly signal sent by a regional power – especially if they have additional options, in this case, through relations with Beijing and the latter’s interest in closer engagement with Honiara¹⁶ – and if they also have good reason – in this case substantial domestic security concerns – not to comply with the signal in question.

In broader theoretical terms, this study, empirically drawing on foreign policy behaviour and IR in the Pacific, demonstrates that there are definite limits to what signalling theory can explain. While it is especially useful for analysis from a sender perspective, the universalising thrust of the rationalist literature strand leads to certain limitations when examining concrete episodes of signalling. The study shows that close attention to the agency of actors on the receiver side and the context they operate in, political and otherwise,¹⁷ provides increased analytical leverage. Also emphasised has been the fact that abductive reasoning, involving iterations between the empirical evidence and relevant literature in IR’s cognate fields, can help produce plausible theory-informed explanations for the outcomes in question.

Why, then, did the Sogavare government opt for a security pact with China despite Australia’s costly signal and a bilateral security pact between them? I have argued that domestic security concerns connected to the repeated outbursts of violence in the Solomons help to explain why the Sogavare government found an additional security pact with China useful. Honiara’s foreign policy behaviour largely matches with David’s (1991) omnibalancing theory, which posits the offsetting of internal threats and the quest for political survival and physical security to be powerful drivers in political leaders’ alignment choices in parts of the Global South in which political legitimacy is weak and the stakes for power are high.

Of course, the offered explanation of Solomon Islands multi-alignment is at this point just a plausible – empirically and theoretically grounded – hypothesis. Future scholarship might thus want to probe deeper into the origins of the Solomons’ security agreement with China. Such research could aim at explaining the outcome in question by way of process tracing (Beach and Pedersen, 2019: chapter 10), analytically enriching it by focusing on the social mechanisms at play – that is, the perceptions, actions, and interactions (see Nullmeier, 2021) which led to the new security pact. Access to relevant sources, including archives potentially, may well prove a challenge. If surmountable, such endeavours might help answer the question of whether PM Sogavare’s decision to conclude a security pact with China constituted genuine strategic behaviour on the part of a small power – or whether the government did not fully think through the geopolitical ramifications of its decision (see Aqorau, 2022).

An in-depth study here might also speak to current debates about ‘hedging’ (He and Feng, 2023) – or what I refer to as ‘multi-alignment’. Does such foreign policy behaviour by small powers in the Pacific really reflect the strategic allocation of loyalties to competing powers? Or are, as David Martin Jones and Nicole Jenne (2022: 207) argue, the strategic intentions of hedgers/multi-aligners overstated – and, as such, we are simply witnessing the diplomacy of small powers who attempt to align ‘strategic ends with limited means’?

A related line of analysis could place the study of Solomon Islands’ foreign policy behaviour into broader debates about the agency of small powers operating amid strategic competition. At least in the short term, the government in Honiara seems to have successfully leveraged geopolitical competition to meet its perceived security needs, with then PM Sogavare ‘play[ing] one side off against the other in his efforts to secure concessions’ (Fraenkel, 2023). Over time, however, there might be different answers to the question raised by Solomon Islands multi-alignment – namely, ‘who is leveraging whom?’ (Wallis et al., 2023b: 280). And we can also ask about the agency of other small powers, including those that possess less geostrategic leverage than Solomon Islands. Ian Roberge (2023: 211) argues that smaller states’ ‘options and room to maneuver [. . .] are highly dependent on the particulars of their situation’. Comparative case studies could thus help us to systematically explore the political agency of PICs and other small powers at the current stage of great power competition in the strategic space of the Indo-Pacific.

Footnotes

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Patrick Köllner

Notes

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Explaining sender–receiver gaps in signalling: Australia’s ‘Pacific Step-up’ and Solomon Islands’ multi-alignment

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Theoretical and methodological framework

Foreign policy signalling, costly signals, and sender–receiver gaps

Abductive reasoning, agency and context

Australia’s Pacific policy and the ‘Step-up’

Australia’s response to the perceived Chinese challenge

Sending the signal

Primary-audience reactions: Pacific leaders’ responses to the Step-up

A new partner of choice? Solomon Islands’ security pact with China

Exploring the drivers of the China–Solomon Islands security pact

Conclusion

Footnotes

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References