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- Convenors:
-
Nicola Manghi
(Università di Torino)
Ola G. Berta (University of Bergen)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores islands as politicised spaces in a time of global restructuring, tracing tensions of sovereignty, jurisdiction, and scale, and interrogating dialectics between enclosure and interconnectedness, locality and globality, centrality and peripherality.
Long Abstract
Islands are spaces of contradiction. They epitomize enclosed territoriality, where physical and political space ideally coincide, but also unsettle the continental assumptions of Western political thought by clustering into archipelagos, fragmenting into sub-island jurisdictions, or displaying a wide array of relations with continental spaces. Islands therefore compel us to think beyond Westphalian sovereignty and continental state forms, revealing how local quests for self-determination unfold through a constant balancing act between secession and integration, dependence and autonomy, centre and periphery, friction and flow.
In the contemporary upsurge in competition among large continental empires, islands are cast as peripheral or liminal spaces, or alternatively framed as strategic geopolitical hotspots. The ethnography of island spaces has the potential to reverse this gaze, and to open fresh perspectives on the current state of global power politics. Often constrained by limited size and resources, islands must navigate persistent tensions between economic dependency and political self-governance. Some embody distinct, overlapping, or even fragmented sovereignties that profoundly influence local politics. Others have turned to the commodification of sovereignty as a pathway to economic development. Yet others, facing existential threats from the ecological crisis, are achieving collective political empowerment and pushing path-breaking changes in international law through cross-regional cooperation.
We seek to address these tensions by bringing together researchers working in a range of different island contexts to develop a cross-regional comparative take on island politics of self-determination. Among the questions we seek to investigate are: How are islands made into political spaces? How are archipelagos assembled, and how are their borders drawn? What does sovereignty look like when observed from the vantage point of islands? How does the notion of scale figure into island politics? How do islands challenge conventional ways of thinking about borders and frontiers?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper argues for tracing claims to self-governance on Réunion Island to "la habitation", a plantation realm in which political autonomy was historically contingent on economic dependencies, and considers the implications for a postcolonial island lacking a precolonial perspective.
Paper long abstract
Any cross-regional approach to islands must include an analytical perspective of plantations as formative to modernity, this paper argues. It explores the French island of La Réunion through the historical concept of the “habitation,” which I see as a precursor to contemporary tensions of autonomy and dependence in the agricultural sector.
Derived from the French verb “habiter,” meaning to live, the term describes how the inhabitants initially lived on the land before becoming landowners. The habitation served as both a production unit and a social unit, encompassing the plantations, workers, fields for sustenance, the factory, and the landowner’s family home. Embodying all key societal institutions, the habitation was seen as a “colony within the colony”, with the landowners free to govern within its boundaries.
I argue that the dual nature of the habitation, with economic dependencies enmeshed in political imaginations of autonomy, animates contemporary tensions between a plantation sector subsidized by France and the EU and activist farmers pursuing self-sufficiency. While the plantations live on through the state's subsidy regimes, the idea of the habitation as an autonomous political unit has been reclaimed by activists who seek to decolonize the Plantationocene by redefining their place within its historical framework.
Overall, this illustrates how, on plantation islands like Reunion, which has no “pre-colonial” past, contemporary notions of autonomy and dependency are fundamentally linked to colonial frameworks, leaving autonomy claims stuck within those same colonial frames.
Paper short abstract
This paper explores how political space, belonging, and self-determination in the Cook Islands are shaped through everyday movements and relationships across the archipelago, showing sovereignty as a lived and negotiated practice rather than a settled political condition.
Paper long abstract
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this paper shows how centre–periphery dynamics are produced not only through relations with metropolitan powers, but also within the archipelago itself. Rarotonga has become a focal point for government authority, infrastructure, investment, and development funding, concentrating opportunities at the centre while drawing people, goods, and livelihoods away from the outer islands. These dynamics generate forms of internal marginalisation that coexist uneasily with narratives of national unity and shared island identity.
At the same time, political belonging in the Cook Islands is shaped by long-standing transnational ties that blur the distinction between inside and outside. For many Cook Islanders, New Zealand appears less as a distant metropolitan power than as an extension of everyday social and economic life, woven into histories of migration, citizenship, education, and care. While recent political initiatives aim to diversify diplomatic and economic relationships, everyday conversations reveal a strong desire to sustain closeness to New Zealand as both a source of security and a grounding point of collective belonging. The tension between official political trajectories and popular attachments underscores sovereignty as something lived unevenly, rather than resolved through constitutional arrangements alone.
Attending to these layered relations, the paper approaches sovereignty as an ongoing practice of negotiation shaped by mobility, dependence, and selective connection. From an island perspective, self-determination emerges not through territorial closure, but through the careful cultivation and management of ties, offering a grounded account of how islands rework political scale in a time of global restructuring.
Paper short abstract
The Baptist Revival Movement in San Andrés Island advocates for a dependence on God, while calling for Raizal self-determination. Yet, it clashes with other sovereign claims, revealing the role of contested and scalar questions of responsibility and salvation in constructing island sovereignty.
Paper long abstract
The Revival Movement of the Raizal Baptist Churches in the Island of San Andrés, Colombia, seeks to resolve the Archipelago of San Andrés’ moral crisis through individual spiritual transformation. As a small island, San Andrés faces overlapping challenges of over-tourism, overpopulation, narcotrafficking, geopolitical disputes, and tensions between the Colombian state and the Raizal community, the majority-Baptist descendants of Northern European colonists, African slaves, and Miskito Indians. Reframing these challenges as a crisis of spiritual corruption, Raizal Revivalists call for a greater dependence on God, acknowledging God’s sovereignty over human action, while simultaneously advocating for greater autonomy from the state.
Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork and semi-structured interviews, I argue that the Revival Movement structures the possibilities of political action, constructing the Archipelago as a political space through material, discursive, and relational practices of scaling. Raizal Baptist churches scale up individual revival to the global Christian community, drawing on transnational Baptist networks. Yet these practices of scaling are contested and do not correspond neatly with San Andrés’ physical boundaries. Christian universalism clashes with demands for ethnically exclusive Raizal sovereignty, framed through Colombia's multicultural constitutional reforms, and Raizal affiliation with a trans-Caribbean Creole-speaking ‘maritorio’ (sea territory), built on ties of interdependence. At the heart of these tensions are questions of responsibility and salvation: who is spiritually corrupt, who or what can be saved, and what are the outcomes of salvation, revealing the contested and relational work of constructing sovereignty in and beyond the Island of San Andrés.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how Rapa Nui people expand their margins of self-determination through negotiations operating within and beyond Chilean state frameworks. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I demonstrate how Indigenous island sovereignty can be practised incrementally rather than through rupture.
Paper long abstract
Located 3,700 km from continental Chile, Rapa Nui embodies the contradictions this panel addresses: a Polynesian island under South American colonial rule, where over 70% of the territory remains registered as "state land" while 40% constitutes a National Park administered since 2017 by the Indigenous community Ma'u Henua.
Drawing on sixteen months of ethnographic fieldwork (2023–2024), I analyse how Rapa Nui families and institutions practise what I call "transformative continuity": the incremental expansion of self-determination, generation by generation, through strategic negotiations that operate simultaneously within and beyond state frameworks.
The COVID-19 pandemic revealed this capacity dramatically. The community closed the island's borders for over two years, exercised territorial control over entry and exit, reconstituted local food production, and created new ceremonial practices—including the annual commemoration of founding ancestor Hotu Matu'a—that reassert genealogical authority over the territory. These practices challenge Westphalian assumptions by grounding sovereignty not in exclusive state jurisdiction but in relational connections between people, ancestors, and land (kaiŋa).
This perspective contributes to cross-regional debates on island politics by showing how Indigenous sovereignty operates through two complementary registers: one legible to the state (land restitution claims, park administration, international law), another grounded in everyday practices that sustain authority through genealogy, ritual, and territorial knowledge. Rather than a binary between dependence and autonomy, Rapa Nui reveals sovereignty as ongoing negotiation.
Paper short abstract
Gibraltar, a peninsula frequently misnamed an island, shows how islandness is political and affective. Amid Brexit and an enduring Anglo-Spanish sovereignty dispute, this paper examines how Gibraltarians rework insularity and national self-determination in relation to Europe and the British State.
Paper long abstract
Although Gibraltar is geographically a peninsula, it is often experienced and imagined as an island territory. As a small (6.8 sq km) British Overseas Territory that “breaks away from the Iberian Peninsula and becomes an island unto itself” (David Alvarez 2000), Gibraltar is frequently misidentified as an island in everyday speech. Dalia Munenzon (2016) describes Gibraltar as a “continental island” due its geopolitical and geomorphological separation from its hinterland. Gibraltar’s participation in the Island Games, even hosting it in 2019, further exemplifies how “islandness” is not simply a geographical fact, but also an affective condition shaped by historical, political, and infrastructural conditions.
As a non-sovereign territory, Gibraltar’s political self-determination remains constrained by the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht which would affirm Spain’s enduring territorial claim if Britain withdraws. While referendums in 1967 and 2002 overwhelmingly rejected Spanish sovereignty, Brexit has come to intersect with the long-standing Anglo-Spanish dispute. A recently announced UK-EU agreement proposes to remove land border infrastructure and effectively incorporate Gibraltar into the Schengen Area, raising the prospect of diminished territorial insularity through projects of European integration.
Drawing upon two years of ethnographic doctoral fieldwork, this paper examines how Gibraltarian nationalism and political self-determination are being rearticulated amid anticipation of shifting border regimes. Preliminarily, it proposes that the Brexit conjuncture constitutes a moment in which forms of insularity are reworked as Gibraltarians negotiate and imagine political futures in relation to Europe and the archipelagic form of the British State - the UK and its overseas territories.
Paper short abstract
This paper sits with the Faroe Islands at the crossroads, exploring how renewable energy is being mobilised as a relational practice through which island autonomy, interdependence, and geopolitical relevance are renegotiated in the making of Arctic energy futures.
Paper long abstract
The Faroe Islands, a self-governing archipelago in the North Atlantic, offer a distinctive vantage point from which to rethink energy, autonomy, scale, and geopolitics in a rapidly decarbonising world. Often cast as remote and peripheral, Faroese energy experts and policymakers are increasingly re-imagining this marginality as an advantage, reframing the islands as “the middle of everywhere”: a prospective hub in global circulations of renewable energy, shipping, and Arctic governance. This pursuit of energy autonomy through renewables seeks to deepen ties with Nordic grids, European carbon markets, and Arctic policy arenas and reveals that decarbonisation is not only about independence from fossil fuels but also about reconfigurations of energy relations across the North Atlantic.
This paper draws on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork to trace the emergence of a future where renewable energy is deployed not merely as infrastructure but as a relational practice through which autonomy, security, and geopolitical relevance are negotiated. Drawing on Faroese energy histories, this paper shows how ideals of the island-laboratory (Greenhough 2006) have framed the grid as a site for technological testing and world-making. Today, this ethos extends to geopolitics as the islands’ renewable ambitions intersect with strategic concerns over North Atlantic security. By foregrounding islands as vantage points from which to interrogate the evolving dependencies, sovereignties, and futures that structure global renewable transitions, this paper offers an empirically grounded account of how renewable imaginaries reshape the relational politics of island energy transitions.