Abstract
Abstract Various countries and cultures, washed by the waters of these amorphous oceanic boundaries and sea spaces, are currently seeking to establish exclusive territorial claims over these water spaces by invoking stories and narratives taken from pre-colonial, colonial, and post-colonial eras. In this chapter we select some of these stories, often used in an attempt to legitimate ‘natural’, more essentialist relationships between certain cultures and/or nation-states with their surrounding seas. These narratives both challenge and/or support the broader international system and its rule of law; creating internal tropes, strengthening domestic support for state-building programs in the region/s. But the Indo-Pacific is more than a contestation between nation-statist imaginations and aspirations. It also invokes stories which seek to develop and celebrate a shared ‘maritime regionalism’ beyond the exclusive and usually dominant politics of nation-states. Finally, a third interpretive category is used: the construction of the Indo-Pacific as a globalized ‘non-space’.
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