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?

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