Putting the State in its Place. An Ethnographic Look at Tuvalu’s Sovereignty in the Context of the Ecological Crisis

Abstract

Composed entirely of low-lying coral atolls and reef islands, the Polynesian microstate of Tuvalu is at risk of being submerged by sea levels rising due to global warming. Such circumstance raises unprecedented scenarios: were it to become uninhabitable, in fact, Tuvalu would be the first state to lose its sovereignty due to a physical damage to its territory. However, traditional understandings of sovereignty are of little use in assessing Tuvalu’s political consistency, and speculations on the future of the country, such as those that predict its disappearance, are at risk of overlooking the specificity of its history. Combining a historical and an ethnographic approach with an analysis of recent land conflicts that arose in the capital of the country, this article explores the question of Tuvalu’s future within a) the long history of institutional vicissitudes that led a disparate group of islands to become a sovereign state; and b) a study of the dynamics underlying the political texture of Tuvalu and the complex architecture of its sovereignty.