Unmapping the Indo-Pacific: A Strategic Communications Perspective

Abstract

The Indo-Pacific captures the imagination of the strategic communicator. Although the concept of the Indo-Pacific remains vague and difficult for many policymakers and practitioners to grasp, particularly those from outside the area, it may be because the idea of the Indo-Pacific is at heart founded on ambiguity. The Indo-Pacific is a work in progress, as multiple actors and stakeholders try to define their own diplomatic, geopolitical/economic, and security parameters. And that process is inherently ambiguous. That process, too, is strategic communications.46 Defence Strategic Communications | Volume 12 | Spring 2023 DOI 10.30966/2018.RIGA.12.3 The two books reviewed here explain why the Indo-Pacific should merit the attention of the strategic communicator and of policymakers and practitioners. Medcalf’s Indo-Pacific Empire is not specifically presented as dealing with strategic communications, and Michelsen and Bolt’s Unmapping the 21st Century is not confined to the Indo-Pacific. Both, however, focus on the notion of ‘maps’ or cartography, which I argue to be the key to understanding the Indo-Pacific as an emerging geopolitical space. Michelsen and Bolt, further, focus on two types of ‘maps’—a hierarchical one (‘the state map’) and a horizontal one (‘the network map’)—and reveal the tension and symbiosis between the two. It is, then, critical to understand the Indo-Pacific by recognising its essential characteristics as a map, as well as a network in the making, with the network’s principal attributes manifest, centring on ambiguity.