The Yegiora Files

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

When people ask what research theory underpins my PhD research, my answer is simple but deliberate: critical realism . In studying China’s Higher Education Exchange Programs in PNG—from scholarships and language training to public sector upskilling—I needed a lens that could help me see beyond the numbers and stories. Critical realism allows me to ask not just what is happening , but why , and what deeper structures are at play . This is essential when dealing with international education, soft power, and foreign policy. This diagram illustrates the layered structure of the research design: starting with a critical realist epistemology, guided by soft power as the theoretical lens, employing an explanatory sequential mixed-methods methodology, and using surveys and interviews as core data collection methods. At its core, critical realism is a philosophical framework developed by British philosopher Roy Bhaskar. It suggests that reality exists in layers: what we can observe (empirical)...