Paper short abstract:

Tuvalu's territory is threatened by global warming. While reclaiming land from the ocean promises the possibility of an artficial territorial extension, the indigenous landowners question the Government's title to the land, and threaten to "evict" the State from the archipelago.

Paper long abstract:

The low-lying island State of Tuvalu, threatened by sea level rise, is often discussed as an in vivo specimen of the disappearing State. However, this leads to obliterating the country’s unique territorial regime – one that is poorly described by conventional notions of sovereignty. With the aim of countering this tendency, my paper points at one paradoxical feature of the country’s material constitution: Tuvalu’s Government only owns a small portion of artificial land that was reclaimed from the lagoon of Funafuti, the rest being the customary property of indigenous landowners. As such, most Government infrastructures rest on native land acquired through lease agreements, and, as I will show by recourse to an ethnographic vignette, are structurally exposed to the threat of being evicted. Dwelling on the paradoxical condition of a “renting State”, my paper explores the inherent ambivalence of “land reclamation”, an expression that can signify both efforts to regain control of usurped lands on the part of indigenous landowners and the geoengineering practice of creating artificial land by filling portions of an atoll’s lagoon. Examining the paradoxical “place” of the State within the archipelago can allow developing a new gaze on Tuvalu’s sovereignty. Thus framed, the material, geo-political stakes of land reclamation (“by the State” or “against the State”) in Tuvalu offer a privileged point of observation on post-Westphalian territorialities, allowing to explore fluctuating distinctions between State and estate, territory and land, sovereignty and ownership in the face of incumbent ecological scenarios.