Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses PNA's struggle to take back control over their maritime boundaries and to assert property rights over the resources they hold, notably highly migratory tuna species. PNA's collaborative effort opens a critical understanding of state sovereignty as sovereignty by mutuality.

Paper long abstract:

Since the early 1980s, the big ocean states of Oceania have fought a persistent battle to assert and enforce their sovereign rights over their enormous exclusive economic zones (EEZs) and the resources they hold, most notably in the form of highly migratory tuna species. For decades, these resources were extracted by distant water fishing vessels without any form of monitoring and without leaving any revenue for the Pacific state whose EEZs in which they were caught. The nationalist drive to claim property rights over the tuna that swims within their maritime boundaries gains its strength from state-level ties of interdependency rather than ideas of state independence. The Parties to the Nauru Agreement (PNA) is a prime example of this. Through a pronounced ethos of mutuality, these states have built up a cartel-like collaboration that has been instrumental in asserting state sovereignty and regaining control over and state revenue from tuna resources. In recent years, the PNA has made an unprecedented power-play by successfully closing off several pockets of the high seas from commercial exploitation. In this paper, I analyse PNA’s struggle to take back control over their maritime boundaries. This case opens up two critical understandings of sovereignty: sovereignty beyond the state and sovereignty by mutuality, both of which speaks to the changing state forms in Oceania today.