An arms race has begun in Papua New Guinea as candidates prepare for the 2012 political elections. This feature explores the relationship between traditional costume, machine guns, ancestral belief, copious amounts of marijuana and some of the most palpably optimistic and overtly corrupt political shenanigans on the planet.

West Papua is one of the last great frontier wildernesses. Over 250 distinct indigenous communities live amongst spectacular rainforests, mountains and coral ecosystems. But all is not well on the world’s second largest island – which now serves as a backdrop to one of the most severely underreported conflicts in recent history.

Destructive fishing techniques are common practice amongst the coastal populations of the Coral Triangle. The favoured methods are homemade fertiliser bombs and potassium cyanide, which have not only decimated reefs in the largest and most diverse marine bio-region in the world but have destroyed countless human lives as well.
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You don’t need a degree to be a conservationist. A USaid funded collaboration between WWF, Conservation International and The Nature Conservancy are working to empower local communities to look after their own environments. This series of images looks at two projects; one on Tetepare, the largest uninhabited island in the South Pacific, and another on Nuakata, a small island off the eastern coast of Papua New Guinea.
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The Achuar territory, which straddles the Ecuador-Peru border, is currently home to one of the most diverse and best protected eco-systems in the world. For the most part a ‘non-contact’ ethnic group right up until the arrival of catholic missionaries in the early 1970s, the Achuar have been thrown headfirst into a tumultuous and hugely abstract relationship with the outside world.
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Two hundred years ago the advance of the Russian empire into Kazakhstan sent many Kazakhs across the border into western Mongolia where they settled in the region of Bayan Ulgii. As the Russians continued to occupy Kazakhstan, traditional Kazakh culture continued to be diluted to the point where, when the soviet union collapsed in 1991, new prime minister Nursultan Nazirbyaev began offering financial and domestic incentives for diaspora Kazakhs in Bayan Ulgii to relocate back to Kazakhstan.
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