In most countries across the globe, police serve as the most visible arm of governance and have primary responsibility for the maintenance of law and order. For many countries, state police operate parallel to non-state regulatory bodies. However, the legitimacy of actors in varied policing contexts differs and is at times acknowledged, challenged or disregarded.

In rural contexts, where there is usually a lesser presence of state-appointed police, the responsibility for the maintenance of law and order is usually shared with non-state actors (see Mawby and Yarwood, 2016). The acknowledgement of contextual differences and the recognition of spatial distribution as impacting factors on policing primarily underscores rural policing scholarship.

Despite an initial primary focus on mining, fishing and agriculture-related crimes in sparsely settled areas on the distant outskirts of urban metropoles in developed countries, rural policing scholarship has shifted towards a broader focus. Recent scholarship on rural policing now explores societal manifestations of dysfunction in sparsely inhabited areas across the globe, contextually considered the inverse of the urban. These shifts have also resulted in further acknowledgement of the variations in understandings of rurality and the recognition of additional categories of spaces identified as ‘rural’, specifically rural areas in small island developing states (SIDS).

A total of 58 SIDS with a combined population of 65 million people have been identified by the United Nations. These SIDS tend to be characterized by geographic location and topography, population size and climatic and economic vulnerabilities. Many SIDS have rural economies and are further characterized as multi-island microstates dispersed across the Atlantic, Caribbean, the Indian and Pacific Oceans and the South China Sea.

For microstates, explanations of rurality are expanded to account for remote or outer islands (usually only accessible by irregularly scheduled petrol patrol boats) away from capital cities, towns or central business districts; as well as areas more densely populated than urban city centres that bare all the other characteristics of rural areas. The location, limited resource availability, remoteness, high transportation costs and high reliance on external support contribute to SIDS development and economic diversification challenges (see Newton, 1998).