Guy Fiti Sinclair: From Port Moresby to Professor

Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland’s Guy Fiti Sinclair becomes Auckland Law School’s first Professor of Pacific heritage - a milestone shaped by a winding personal journey, unwavering family legacy and a deep commitment to service through scholarship.

Professor Sinclair’s path to academia began almost immediately, growing up around the campus of the University of Papua New Guinea in Port Moresby, where his mother Ruta Fiti Sinclair lectured and his late father Peter Sinclair worked in the finance department.

“My mother taught history and did lots of other amazing things. She studied and taught with one of the great Tongan historians – Sione Lātūkefu. When I think about my academic inspiration, maybe that’s part of it - growing up on campus,” he says, becoming emotional about carrying on his mother’s legacy.

“She would probably say why didn’t it happen sooner," he laughs. “But she’s proud, and I’m grateful.”

His mother’s academic journey saw her leave Sāmoa as a teenager on scholarship to Hamilton Girls High, afterwards training at Teachers College, before returning home. Sinclair’s father, a farm boy from Motueka, had also made his way to Sāmoa, where the pair met while both teaching at Sāmoa College, they married and moved to Papua New Guinea.

There is also a wider genealogy of service and sacrifice that has greatly influenced the new professor. Sinclair’s grandfather Fiti Sopo’aga was a missionary who travelled to Tuvalu and also helped to found the Avale School in Sāmoa. When he died, it was left to Sinclair’s uncle, Seti Fiti, to step into his shoes and care for the family despite only being a teenager.

“My grandfather died young. So, my uncle went to work as a teenager to support the family, in a way that’s also made my story possible.” His uncle eventually moved to Wellington and continued to support the family, sending money back home.

Sinclair admits it took some time before he found his true path, as he tells his students, he didn’t enjoy studying for his Law degree and stepped away for two years to do some volunteer work because he “didn’t feel like he had direction.” During this time he met and married his wife Tina Dustdar, which helped him to find more focus and direction in his studies.

Finding his path

While he practised commercial law for nearly a decade - first in London (where Tina completed her university studies) and then back in Aotearoa, he felt the culture and purpose of corporate practice weren’t for him:
“I was looking for the off ramp… I thought there must be a better way for me to serve humanity.”

That search eventually led him back to where it all started, where the intellectual spark for a life in academia finally caught flame, firstly a Masters degree at Auckland Law School and onward to a fully-funded doctorate at New York University, on a Fulbright scholarship. After being supervised and mentored by some of the world’s top international law scholars, he decided to return to Aotearoa to be of service to his community here.

He has been Associate Dean (Pacific) in the Law Faculty since 2021, working alongside an outstanding group of Pasifika academics and professionals to support Pasifika students and foster the development of Pacific legal scholarship.

Today, Sinclair’s scholarship sits at the intersection of public international law, international organisations and Pacific/Oceania governance - fields in which he has garnered global recognition for reframing an understanding of the role of law in global governance and in particular Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, the Pacific.

His book To Reform the World: International Organizations and the Making of Modern States won the European Society of International Law Book Prize and his current research programme is supported by a prestigious Rutherford Discovery Fellowship from Royal Society Te Apārangi.

Building our own tables

The significance of Sinclair’s professorship marks an historical moment for Pacific representation in law. In 2024, Auckland Law School launched its first Pacific Law Week, affirming a commitment to making Pacific students “feel more at home in the Law School” and celebrating Pacific legal contributions across Aotearoa and internationally.

Sinclair was instrumental in launching this programme, which culminated with a packed Fale Pasifika to honour trailblazer Olive Malienafau Nelson - the first Pacific person, and one of the first women to graduate in Law from the University nearly 90 years ago. The Olive Malienafau Nelson Pasifika Scholarship for Excellence, launched in 2022 by Lady Maliena and Sir Michael Jones provides a $10,000 endowed scholarship to foster Pacific leadership and excellence at the University.

Sinclair often tells students not to rush their decisions: law can be a vocation of service in many forms. For some, practice in a firm will be the right fit; for others, it might be working in government or business; and yet for others, scholarship and teaching can provide the imaginative space to interrogate power, institutions and the everyday realities of governance.

Pro Vice-Chancellor Pacific, Professor Jemaima Tiatia Siau said Sinclair’s promotion is symbolic of a broader shift underway at Waipapa Taumata Rau.

“If you’re not invited to the table, set up your own,” she has urged Pacific communities - a call to agency that resonates with Pacific Law Week and with Sinclair’s career-long insistence on finding a path aligned to service and purpose.

“Our Pacific peoples are excelling and taking their rightful place around the table. And when that invitation doesn’t come, we build our own tables - because Pacific knowledge systems, leadership and excellence were always meant to be at the centre of our being.”