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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.