Fifteen Polynesian isles run foreign policy without an army
The Cook Islands are a self-governing Polynesian country in free association with New Zealand—fifteen islands totaling about 236.7 square kilometres of land but nearly two million square kilometres of ocean EEZ. The 2021 census counted 14,987 residents, most on Rarotonga (10,863), while a larger diaspora lives abroad.
Avarua on Rarotonga is the capital, and Rarotonga International Airport there is the main way in. Since the early 2000s the country has set its own foreign and defence policy and customs rules. Like most Pacific Islands Forum members it keeps no military; its police patrol the sea with the Australian-supplied Guardian-class boat Te Kukupa II. A Cook Islander, Henry Puna, led the Forum as secretary general from 2021 to 2024, and the country has belonged to the Pacific Community since 1980.
Most islanders hold New Zealand citizenship along with a separate Cook Islands national status that other New Zealanders do not get. Far more of them live overseas than at home: the 2018 New Zealand census found 80,532 people of Cook Islands identity or descent, and Australia counts about 28,000. Tourism dominates the economy, with more than 168,000 visitors in 2018, ahead of offshore banking, pearls and exports of fish and fruit.
Polynesians, probably from Tahiti 1,154 kilometres to the north-east, settled the group around AD 1000. The first European sighting came in 1595, when Álvaro de Mendaña spotted Pukapuka and called it San Bernardo. In 1606 Pedro Fernandes de Queirós, a Portuguese captain sailing for Spain, landed on Rakahanga and named it Gente Hermosa, beautiful people.
James Cook passed through in the 1770s and named Manuae after Augustus Hervey, so the southern group became the Hervey Islands. The Russian admiral Krusenstern relabelled those southern islands after Cook in an atlas in the 1820s. The name covered the northern group only after New Zealand annexed the territory: a 1901 act still spoke of Cook and other islands, and the Cook Islands Act 1915 finally drew the full boundaries. In Māori the country is Kūki 'Āirani, a rendering of the English.
Source: Cook Islands
