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Research and Impact – Pacific regional security – Associate Professor Danielle Watson

QUT Centre for Justice member,  Associate Professor Danielle Watson is currently facilitating a workshop on Transnational Organised Crime for the Cook Islands Government. The workshop is funded by the Pacific Security College in collaboration with the Cook Islands Office of National Security. This initiative feeds directly into the development of the Cook Islands National Transnational Organised Crime Strategy.

Read more about the workshop here

This initiative supports Australia’s recent strategic success where Pacific Island leaders have endorsed a new policing initiative, which will create a police training facility in Brisbane and establish a support group that could be deployed across the region.

Australian officials believe the new initiative will bolster Pacific law enforcement and make it harder for China to embed itself in Pacific police forces.

Read more about this program here. 

Danielle Watson is an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow in the School of Justice. She is also an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of the South Pacific and an Affiliate of the Resilient and Sustainable Islands Initiative (RESI). Her research focuses on Pacific regional security, border security, policing, police/community relations, policing culturally and linguistically diverse communities and plural regulatory systems in the Caribbean and Pacific. She conducts research on (in)security in Pacific Island countries, capacity building for security service providers, recruitment and training as well as many other areas specific to improving security governance in developing country contexts. Her research interests are multidisciplinary in scope as she also conducts research geared towards the advancement of tertiary teaching and learning.

Danielle has contributed significantly to the development of context specific scholarship on security in small island developing states in the Global South. She leads a research group on Small Islands Security Governance and she is the principal researcher on three additional ongoing projects: “Reimagining insecurity in Pacific Island States”, “Policing Pacific Island Communities” and “Indigenising Discourses on Access to Justice in the Pacific”. She is also the lead author of Policing in the Pacific Island (2023, Palgrave) and Police and the Policed (2018, Palgrave).

Read more about Danielle here.

 

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