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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how - despite dominant framings that render it peripheral through narratives of smallness, remoteness, and victimhood - doomsday tourism and the "Future Now Project" have paradoxically positioned Tuvalu as central to contemporary debates on climate justice

Paper long abstract

Tuvalu's emergence as a global symbol of climate crisis appears paradoxical: a nation the colonial world rendered "small," "remote," and "disappearing" now commands unprecedented geopolitical influence. Yet this paradox dissolves when examined as deliberate strategy and not an accident. Through decades of international diplomacy that strategically mobilizes vulnerability as capital, Tuvaluan leadership has transformed narratives of weakness into instruments of moral authority and defiant presence.

This paper demonstrates how tourism, diplomacy, and digital nation-building function as contested sites where Tuvaluans assert control over their own representation. When young Tuvaluans reject doomsday merchandise and online content about "the disappearing islands" they contest not the reality of climate threat, but their reduction to international spectacle. Similarly, Te Ataeao Nei" (the Future Now Project) extends this logic, as a defiant assertion that Tuvaluan sovereignty and "fenua" -- an indivisible entanglement of physical territory, cultural identity, ancestral belonging, sociality, and community -- will persist regardless of physical inundation. Yet these governmental and youth-driven refusals coexist with competing visions. Thousands of Tuvaluans pursue migration through the Falepili Union; others invest in coastal adaptation; still others embrace digital preservation. Each choice reflects different calculations about futurity, belonging, and survival.

The paper traces how Tuvalu's historical trajectory from colonial marginalization through ethnonational consolidation to contemporary digital innovation reveals a consistent pattern: the strategic mobilization of apparent weakness into forms of power. The centre Tuvalu now occupies reflects neither fantasy nor gift; it emerges from the persistent labor of refusal, adaptation, and world-making under climate-induced existential threats.