Join PhD candidate Romitesh Kant (DPA, ANU) as he explores how masculinities shape leadership, legitimacy & power in Fiji’s politics.
How are political masculinities constructed, legitimised, contested, and performed within Fijian political parties? This pre-submission seminar presents findings from Romitesh Kant’s doctoral thesis, which examines masculinity as a political formation that structures leadership, authority, and belonging in Fiji’s postcolonial state. Rather than treating masculinity as a background norm, the thesis foregrounds it as a central logic of institutional power and legitimacy.
To explore this, the study develops a four-part conceptual framework: masculinities as political infrastructure, grammar, adaptive legitimacy, and relationality. This framework enables a multi-scalar analysis of how masculinist authority is embedded, enacted, and sometimes unsettled. The research draws on political ethnography informed by feminist and decolonial approaches and is based on a year of fieldwork (2023–2024) involving immersive observation, interviews, and document analysis.
Through case studies of FijiFirst, the Social Democratic Liberal Party (SODELPA), the People’s Alliance, and the National Federation Party, the thesis reveals how militarised, chiefly, technocratic, and redemptive masculinities operate across intersecting lines of race, class, generation, and sexuality. The study contributes to global debates on political masculinities, feminist institutionalism, and postcolonial governance by making visible the gendered logics that scaffold political life in Fiji.
Event Speakers
Romitesh Kant
Romitesh Kant is a PhD candidate at the Australian National University's Department of Pacific Affairs, where his research explores the relationship between politics and masculinity in the Fijian national context. With over 15 years of experience as an independent research consultant, Romitesh has worked extensively in the fields of governance, civic education, and human rights.