Brokerage in Oceania reconsidered: Positionality, agency, morality in a (dis)ordered world

Abstract

This paper introduces a special issue examining brokerage in Oceania amid intensifying geopolitical competition, resource extraction, labour mobility and shifting development regimes. Building on renewed global interest in brokerage as a set of practices, we argue that brokers in Oceania operate within—and actively reshape—conditions of disorder produced by these contemporary economic and political transformations. Recent theoretical approaches that emphasise scale-making, friction and the temporality of order are drawn on to show how brokers mediate across state, market and community spheres while simultaneously fragmenting and consolidating social fields. The cases in this issue reveal how actors mobilise diverse forms of capital, assert legitimacy and reposition themselves within evolving ecologies of brokerage, often in morally charged and contested ways. By tracing these dynamics across multiple domains—from landowner recognition and mining negotiations to peacebuilding, labour mobility and kinship politics—we demonstrate that Oceania, with its widespread emphasis on relational rather than categorical ordering principles, offers critical insights for current endeavours to rethink brokerage as a dynamic, generative and unstable process central to neocolonial entanglements and local aspirations for development and autonomy.