Looking through a territorial lens: militarization and local fishers’ everyday livelihoods in Okinawa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Drawing on the literature within feminist geopolitics and debates on territoriality, this paper looks at a case of local fishers living near the construction of a new US military installation on Okinawa Island, Japan. In doing so, it proposes a territorial approach to bring into focus lived experiences as an important site of enquiry, integrating Sack’s and Raffestin’s conceptualizations of territoriality both as a strategy of control over bounded spaces and as outcomes of social relations in the particular environment. As it looks at the case of the fishers, this article argues that the territorial lens is useful to critically examine the working and implications of the dominant territorial logic while considering multiplicity of territorial and social relations. With this territorial approach as a critical lens, the study ultimately contributes to the scholarly endeavour to better understand the relationship between space and society while exploring different scales and forms of governance in examining issues deriving from geopolitical entanglements and the drawing of boundaries.