Associate Professor Sinclair Dinnen

He is a Pacific specialist — particularly Papua New Guinea (PNG) and Solomon Islands — and has a background in socio-legal studies and criminology.

Sinclair completed his PhD at the Australian National University in 1996, which investigated gang crime and other forms of communal conflict in PNG and was undertaken while working at the National Research Institute in Port Moresby.

Previously a law lecturer at the University of Papua New Guinea, Sinclair has longstanding research interests in the areas of legal pluralism, policing and justice reform, conflict and peace-building, and ongoing processes of state and nation-building in the post-colonial Pacific.

He is a chief investigator on two Australian Research Council Discovery projects. One, with Professor Miranda Forsyth, examines community rule-making in the Pacific Islands as regulatory innovation. Another, with Dr Judy Putt, looks at improving responses to sexual violence against children in PNG.