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China’s Higher Education Diplomacy at the University of Goroka

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The recent Post-Courier article “UoG warms up people to people bond with China” provides a snapshot of how China is embedding itself in PNG’s higher education sector. What may appear as a colourful cultural event—martial arts, Mandarin displays, and Chinese cuisine—is in fact part of a broader process of soft power projection. As my PhD research examines the influence of China’s Higher Education Exchange Programs on PNG–China relations, this article offers valuable evidence of how such programs are taking shape at the institutional and cultural level. University of Goroka Vice Chancellor Dr. Teng Waninga samples Chinese cuisine during the Sino–PNG cultural exchange, highlighting how food diplomacy complements language and education programs in shaping people-to-people ties. At the heart of the article is the framing of “people-to-people” diplomacy. This is central to my study, which looks at how exchange programs, scholarships, and language initiatives create interpersonal connection...
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Broncos vs Panthers: When NRL Passion Becomes PNG’s Soft Power Battlefield

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The National Rugby League (NRL) is proving itself to be more than a game—it is a soft power asset with ripple effects reaching far beyond Australian borders. Nowhere is this clearer than in PNG, where rugby league is not just sport but national culture. The viral circulation of a recent video from Western Highlands Province underscores how deeply embedded the NRL has become in PNG’s social fabric. Brisbane Broncos fans in Dei District burn a Panthers jersey after the NRL clash — a viral display of passion that shows how deeply rugby league shapes identity and rivalry in PNG. The footage shows Broncos supporters physically stripping a Panthers jersey from a rival fan and burning it in public, celebrating Brisbane’s win over Penrith. The video has gone viral on Facebook and WhatsApp groups, amplifying the spectacle far beyond Dei District. What might have been a local outburst of passion is now a transnational moment of rugby league politics, consumed, debated, and reshared thousands of...
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Papa, Lombrum, and PNG’s Strategic Crossroads in the Indo-Pacific

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By Bernard Yegiora  The strategic concern surrounding Papa and Lombrum highlights the depth of PNG’s entanglement in great power competition. On the surface, these facilities are framed as projects to bolster PNG’s infrastructure, maritime capacity, and regional security cooperation. Yet beneath that veneer lies a clear geopolitical calculus: Australia and the U.S. are embedding themselves into PNG’s geography as part of their broader strategic hedging against a rising China. The notion that Papa could become a refuelling hub and Lombrum a forward operating base is not speculation; it reflects long-standing patterns of external powers leveraging PNG’s location to offset their own vulnerabilities. Papa’s selection is particularly instructive. Its proximity to northern Australia provides strategic depth to Canberra and, by extension, Washington. In military planning, distance translates into both opportunity and constraint. For Australia, having an offshore hub close enough to m...
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Archiving Foreign Policy Teaching: Why PG428 Moved from Facebook to YouTube

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By Bernard Yegiora  PG428 Foreign Policy in PNG is delivered fully online for students based on our Madang campus. The teaching plan set out in the unit outline revolves around three strategies: online webinars, structured Moodle lessons, and group case studies . At the start, we relied on livestreaming through Facebook to broadcast our lectures and student presentations. It worked well in creating immediacy, but as the semesters went on, we found this model lacked one crucial feature: proper archival value. Facebook livestreams were convenient in the moment, but they were not reliable as a long-term storage platform. Once a session ended, students often struggled to revisit it. Videos could be buried under layers of posts, hard to search, or simply disappear. For a unit on foreign policy, where continuity of debates and access to past material is vital, this was a serious weakness. Students needed a way to build on the lectures of previous weeks—and future cohorts needed a recor...
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Framing Maritime Security: Lesson 6 Overview

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By Bernard Yegiora  Lesson 6 takes students into the heart of one of PNG’s most pressing strategic challenges—maritime security. As highlighted in recent scholarship, including my contribution to Blue Security in the Indo-Pacific (2025), the maritime domain is no longer a peripheral concern. Instead, it sits at the intersection of sovereignty, economic development, and regional diplomacy. PNG’s Exclusive Economic Zone is under pressure from illegal fishing, transnational crime, and great power competition, making the framing of security responses more than just an academic exercise. The lesson begins by situating maritime security within PNG’s foreign policy framework, referencing the Department of Foreign Affairs’ Corporate Plan 2018–2022 . This document underscores border and maritime security as central to safeguarding sovereignty, while simultaneously stressing the need for balanced engagement with external partners. Australia, China, and the United States all present compet...
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Israel, PNG, and the Question of Security Loyalty

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By Bernard Yegiora PNG’s foreign policy has long been guided by the principle of “friends to all, enemies to none.” Yet, as the geopolitics of the Pacific intensify, Port Moresby increasingly finds itself navigating difficult trade-offs between loyalty, sovereignty, and pragmatism. One area where this tension is visible is in the way PNG positions itself on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and whether that loyalty could translate into tangible security cooperation with Israel. On October 8, 2024, The National reported PNG’s renewed pledge of support for Israel, reaffirming the country’s long-standing loyalty in international forums. Australia, PNG’s closest defence partner, has taken a more cautious and calibrated approach to the Middle East. Canberra generally aligns with Western positions, balancing its alliance with the United States with sensitivities in the Arab world. PNG, on the other hand, has consistently demonstrated strong loyalty to Israel, including at the UN. This dive...
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From Vision to Execution: Operationalizing Foreign Policy at the Bureaucratic Level

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By Bernard Yegiora  Assessment Task 3 in Foreign Policy in PNG is designed to test not only a student’s ability to think about foreign policy in theoretical terms, but also their capacity to translate abstract policy statements into operational strategies. In Semester 2 of 2024, students authored foreign policy reviews that set out broad visions and strategic directions for PNG’s external relations. The challenge now is to revisit those proposals and move them from the rhetorical plane into the bureaucratic machinery of government. This is where policy vision is tested against institutional realities. The assignment is built around a critique by former diplomat and academic Lahui Ako, who noted that nearly all of PNG’s foreign policy statements have been “ambiguous, and ad hoc, lacking that required bureaucratic support and capacity to operationalize them into an actual foreign policy white paper.” This observation highlights a structural weakness in PNG’s foreign policy practice...
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