Territorial Questions Research Articles

Victorian liberalism and the effect of sovereignty: a view from the settler periphery

Postcolonial thinking has offered ‘new imperial’ historians productive avenues to reconsider the relationship between nineteenth-century liberalism and the British Empire. Questions of territory and sovereignty have, however, often been seen as secondary in these new histories of the citizen-subject of liberalism. From an Antipodean perspective, this seems a remarkable elision. Through an examination of the ideas of liberals in colonial Victoria, this article explores whether we might consider sovereignty as a ghost in the machine of everyday liberalism and asks whether these questions should remain safely on the imperial margins. Drawing on theorisations of settler-colonialism that have emerged in Antipodean historical research, this article proposes to read the political subject of the mid-nineteenth-century liberal imagination as both effecting and an effect of sovereignty.This article has been peer reviewed.

Peace, Conflict and Identity in Religious Representations of India

This article explores the history of a semi-religious local figure established through visuals, in relation to local, national and global society, culture and politics. The topic is the mother goddess Thayee Bhuvaneshwari, represented as the embodiment of the state of Karnataka and beloved daughter of Mother India or Bharat Mata. Representations of the goddess are discussed against the backdrop of political developments during the twentieth century: the politics of linguistic communities, agitations by minorities over language, the dispute over the Kaveri river waters, and questions of territoriality. While there has been much work on Indian poster art and its relation to popular visuals, little of it is on south India. The article deals with iconography, the politics of poster art, and the relationship between such art and popular visuals. From a socio-religious perspective, it explores how this icon has contributed in developing the identity of the state of Karnataka in close parallel to the role played by the concept of Bharat Mata at the national level. secondly, it illustrates the religious influence of the mother representation and the role the goddess played during the movement for the formation of the state of Karnataka after Independence. Finally it delineates the peace-keeping role of the goddess as a patron of all religious communities of Karnataka.

Limited Visibility; Or, Confessions of a Satellite

In March 2013, a New York Times cover story exposing the author's childhood relationship with disability forced Rodas to confront her usual practice of nondisclosure in the disability studies classroom. This article is both memoir and identity theory, a remembrance of the writer's childhood experience as guide and companion to a blind and spectacularly noticeable sibling, an exploration of the possibilities and politics of ambiguous disability identity, and a meditation on the responsibilities and pitfalls of disability identity politics and practice. Contextualized by theoretical writing about self-disclosure and pedagogy, the article traces the writer's own learning trajectory around public exposure, disability identity, and disability representation, visiting the politics of language, considering how disability insiders should respond to novice thinkers about disability, and contemplating questions of legitimacy, hierarchy, and political territory. While couched in autobiographical terms, at its heart the article explores implicit relationships of power and violence around the naming or claiming of disability identity—violating exposures, colonizing practices, grappling for ownership—and proposes a “satellite” model to figure the way many ostensibly nondisabled people discover and define themselves in relation to the apparent centrality and authenticity of disability.

A Paradox of Secessionism: Slavery and the Confederate Security State

Drawing upon insights from public choice political economy and an examination of historical records, this paper posits an explanation for the causes of secession by the original seven members of the Confederacy in 1860-61. Secession is examined as a Hirschman exit, intended primarily to shore up and secure the waning federal subsidies and enforcement expenditures that had been afforded to plantation slavery in previous decades. Fears over the impending decline of these subsidies and protections explain the decision to withdraw from the Union, even though slavery itself was, legally, much more secure in the Union than out of it, to quote Confederate Vice President Alexander H. Stephens. The premises of secession are most evident in southern declarations complaining of the non-enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Act, the instigation of slave insurrections, and the decline of southern political clout. These emphases suggest the perceived threat to slavery was more readily realized in its legal enforcement than in the oft-emphasized territorial question.

Serious Work for a New Europe: The Congress of Vienna after Two Hundred Years

Given the current challenges to European unity, in particular Russian aggression in Ukraine and dissent in the European Union over economic policy toward Greece, Europeans should remember that, two hundred years ago, they celebrated together a long-awaited peace, as their statesmen collaborated on a lasting settlement to solve territorial questions and ensure international stability. Revisiting the Congress of Vienna, however, is not an exercise in nostalgia. New works on the Congress underscore the critical international stakes in 1814 and 1815, following two decades of war and revolution, and reveal the complexity of the negotiations, political goals, and the unsettled nature of postwar Europe. The Congress was so successful in solving the existential problems of Europe that Europeans would not fight a comparable war against each other for another century—until the Great War in 1914. The challenges that Europe faced in the twentieth century suggest, in fact, that the type of collaborative diplomacy developed at the Vienna Congress remains essential to limit conflict.

‘Bones in the wrong soil’: reburial, belonging, and disinterred cosmologies in post-conflict northern Uganda

In the aftermath of the war in northern Uganda between the Lord's Resistance Army and the Ugandan government, most of the internally displaced have returned to pre-displacement areas of residence. As efforts to remake homes and reorder lives take centre stage, reburials from sites of displacement to former homesteads have become a widespread practice. Based on an ethnographic study in the formerly largest internal displacement camp in Acholiland, northern Uganda, we argue that the importance of reburial is twofold: first, it stems from a cosmological idiom in which, while in constant flux, belonging is spiritually embedded and territorially circumscribed; and second, the practice of reburial becomes implicated in post-conflict agendas of development and ‘reconstruction’ with pronounced material and cosmological consequences. Yet, contemporary debates in refugee studies have failed to grasp the importance of cosmological concerns and the ways these are bound up with questions of territoriality in post-displacement societies. It is therefore theoretically important to shift the contours of debate around post-conflict return and reconstruction from a focus on the critique of fluidity of social identities – or alternately emphasizing livelihoods and material ‘reconstruction’ – to an interrogation of the myriad ways in which place is made meaningful through ritual action invoking the material and the non-material alike, while at the same time being attentive to how the politics and materiality of post-conflict developmentalism continually shape, intersect with, and disrupt cosmological practice.

Centralisation and Disgregation and Public Opinion: the Future of the Spanish State of Autonomias.

The Spanish model of decentralisation has been described by academics as a successful example of solving territorial questions under difficult circumstances. The original assessment is confronting with a reality that shows that in the last decade political forces and public opinions have changed the evaluation that made of this process. This paper analyses the evolution of the decentralisation model in Spain and assess the changes among the Spanish public with the presence of two opposite tendencies: a centrifugal one, in favour of increasing the level of autonomy moving towards confederative solutions; and a centripetal one, that defends the need of rationalising the state of autonomias increasing the capacity of the central government to legislate and coordinate the actions of the regions.

Review of Brandon Labelle. 2010. Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life . New York and London: Continuum

Where do sounds come from, and where do they go? is the framing question of Acoustic Territories: Sound Culture and Everyday Life, Brandon LaBelle's wide-ranging investigation into the function of sound as a binding, relational medium. This core query is answered with a series of gestures: self- touching, gesturing to the air, touching others. Over the book's course, LaBelle amply demonstrates how much about the acoustic paradigm can be read into this simple (silent) interaction: how sound-and listening-attaches us to one another and to our environments, and the ways in which these attachments are woven into the shared condition of the everyday. In a book about subtle and fleeting connections, any attempts at narra­ tive continuity seem overwrought. Often Acoustic Territories reads more as a collection of standalone essays-three of the six chapters presented here have appeared on their own and carry perceptible shifts in attention and scope-that, when placed together, seem to shatter into myriad discrete points of departure, courtesy of the great wealth of examples. Each fragment begs further interest. In some ways it follows from where LaBelle began in his 2006 historical survey of sound art practices, Background Noise, now juxtaposing case studies and theoretical writing on sound with examples of artistic intervention, intentionally blurring the already vague boundaries between "sound culture" and "sound art," traveling from site to site without historical linearity. In another sense the text is a targeted contribution to the slippery and expanding field of sound studies that examines "the exchanges between environments and the people within them as registered through aural experience" and takes into account the "careful consideration of the performative relations inherent to urban spatiality;' proposing "sound studies as a practice poised to creatively engage these relations" (LaBelle 2010, xviii). Is there any way to speak precisely about sound studies? Constructed as scaffolding onto an open-ended array of established fields (including musicology, sociology, history of art, performance studies, and the study of science and technology), it eschews strict formal boundaries, taking the shape of correlative networks. The 2010 Society for Ethnomusicology an­ nual meeting, held in Los Angeles shortly after the publication of Acoustic Territories, took the theme "Sound Ecologies," foregrounding music's link to discussions of human rights, social action, identity, and environmental

Necessary, but not sufficient

This response to John Agnew agrees that the history of ideas is never enough for the project of understanding the world but argues that it is a crucial part of that work. The commentary begins by contesting the claim that there is a turn towards this perspective in geography and suggests that much more needs to be done. I engage with Agnew’s article, especially with regard to the question of territory, by clarifying the project undertaken in The Birth of Territory. The inquiry there, I suggest, examined the complicated relation between words, concepts and practices; and many of the texts examined were not detached works of theory but practical texts – either written by or for political actors, or constitutions, treaties, papal bulls, handbooks of land surveying or law. This commentary closes by suggesting that the history of ideas, genealogy and conceptual history can, as part of what Foucault called ‘the history of the present’, offer valuable tools for critical geography. They are one element within such a project, necessary, but not sufficient.

Saskia Sassen

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsSaskia Sassen is the Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology and Co-Chair of the Committee on Global Thought at Columbia University. She has held various academic positions both in and outside the USA, such as Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard University and Ralph Lewis Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. During the 1980s and 1990s, Sassen emerged as a prolific author on immigration and on cities. She was one of the first scholars to study the impacts of globalization on movements of labor, capital, and people in urban contexts. She expanded this research to include the significance of communication technology and transnational human migration. Sassen's 1991 book, The Global City, quickly became one of the most cited studies in the social sciences. The award-winning Territory, Authority, Rights has launched a whole new type of engagement with the question of territory. Her newest book is Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (2014). Her books have been translated into over 20 languages. She has received multiple honors, ranging from numerous doctorat honoris causa to receiving the Principe de Asturias 2013 Prize in the Social Sciences. Professor Sassen is a Member of the Council on Foreign Relations, a member of the National Academy of Sciences Panel on Cities, and chaired the Information Technology and International Cooperation Committee of the Social Science Research Council (USA). She has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, Newsweek International, among others, and contributes regularly to Opendemocracy.net and HuffingtonPost.com.

Socio-cultural dimensions of climate change: charting the terrain

We have reached a crucial turning point in debates around climate change. A well established scientific consensus regarding the physical causes, dynamics, and at least many likely implications of anthropogenic climate change has thus far failed to result in any substantial movement towards mitigation. For many, then, the most urgent questions regarding climate change are now socio-cultural ones, such as: how do people come to hold and act on certain beliefs regarding environmental conditions and processes; how do institutional forms and histories shape and constrain the views and options of various sorts of actors; and what are relationships among fossil fuels, climate change, and the historical geographies and future trajectories of capitalism? Far from being simpler than physical and life science questions, these social science questions introduce entirely new sorts of actors, dynamics, and methodological challenges into this already complex and dynamic domain. This special issue takes up these topics. In this essay, we chart some of the major contours of contemporary social science thinking regarding climate change and introduce the articles in the special issue. We begin by examining work, from political science and scholarship on the commons, that foregrounds questions of sovereignty, territoriality, and cooperation with respect to environmental governance. Then we examine work from neoclassical economics and radical political economy, which frame climate change in terms of externalities, or contradiction and crisis, respectively. Finally, we examine the rapidly proliferating work exploring how individuals think and feel about these issues, emphasizing concepts of risk, communication, and governmentality.

LAS “IDENTIDADES” DE CHILE EN SUS RELACIONES INTERNACIONALES. ¿ENTRE EL PARADIGMA COMERCIALISTA Y EL TERRITORIALISTA?

Este trabajo analiza diferentes perspectivas academicas y politicas que reconocen en Chile una “identidad” fuertemente signada por los logros comerciales internacionales. Su apertura al mundo, factores institucionales y politicos que aseguraron gobernabilidad y continuidad en el diseno de su insercion internacional, lo han diferenciado del “vecindario”, es decir, la region a la que suele percibirse como inestable. Esa clara adscripcion al paradigma comercialista, sin embargo, no significa que hayan perdido relevancia en su Politica Exterior las cuestiones territoriales, por lo cual la identidad chilena se construye entre uno y otro modelo.

The Territorial Question in the Naga National Movement

The article concerns itself with the current phase of the Indo-Naga peace talks, seemingly rendered intransigent on the contentious issue of administrative integration of contiguous Naga-inhabited areas. It historically examines the ethno-territoriality of the Naga national movement in the states of Nagaland, Manipur, Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. This article finds that notwithstanding the soundness of the claims, Naga territoriality is not a non-negotiable given but an active construction of the changing politics of the movement. The findings suggest that any proposed federal arrangement should balance ethno-territorial urges with historical peculiarities. A substantial measure of non-territorial autonomy, in a mutually binding federal arrangement, would necessitate a redefinition of both Naga ethno-national aspirations and the post-colonial Indian state’s insecurities. However, it holds the potential for sustainable peace in the region.

Place and region III

Research on alternative economic and political spaces seeks to expose the diversity of economic forms in the landscape. However, this research has become detached from questions of territory and regionalism. Radical scholars are revisiting the relationship between anarchism, populist movements and territory, potentially opening up a discussion about alternative regionalisms. This report examines the potential for marrying the analysis of alternatives with critical-theoretical work on regionalism and territory.

How Should We Do the History of Territory?

This article approaches the question of territory, and its relation to politics and governance, from a historical perspective. The approach here is to interrogate the claims made by Foucault concerning territory in his work on governmentality. Foucault sees territory as crucial to the Middle Ages through to Machiavelli, but as displaced as the object of government by the emerging concept of population. In distinction, this piece argues that territory is not crucial to medieval determinations of rule, but actually emerges around the same time as Foucault's notion of population, making use of similar techniques of rule. The historical examples relate to the broader book The Birth of Territory. While what he says about territory directly is misleading, Foucault is, however, extremely helpful in thinking about these questions more generally, especially in terms of his historical approach. Thinking more deeply about the history of the emergence of the concept and practice of territory is helpful in understanding contemporary concerns, transformations and disputes. Extracto En este artículo se aborda la cuestión del territorio, y su relación con la política y la gobernanza, desde una perspectiva histórica. El planteamiento que aquí se propone es cuestionar las afirmaciones sobre el territorio realizadas por Foucault en su trabajo sobre la gubernamentalidad. Foucault considera que el territorio fue algo fundamental desde la Edad Media hasta Maquiavelo, no obstante, quedó desplazado como el fin último de gobierno por el nuevo concepto de población. En comparación, en este artículo argumento que el territorio no es fundamental para las determinaciones medievales de reinar, sino que en realidad surge más o menos al mismo tiempo que la noción de población de Foucault utilizando técnicas similares de reinar. Los ejemplos históricos se hallan en el libro más general The Birth of Territory. Aunque lo que explica directamente sobre el territorio es erróneo, Foucault es, no obstante, extremadamente útil al pensar en estas cuestiones de modo más general, especialmente en cuanto a su enfoque histórico. Analizar más a fondo la historia de la creación del concepto y la práctica de territorio nos permite entender mejor las preocupaciones, transformaciones y disputas actuales. 摘要 本文透过历史的视角，探讨领土及其与政治和治理的关系。本研究取径将探究傅柯在治理术的著作中有关领土的主张。傅柯将领土视为自中世纪延续至马基维利时期的关键元素，但逐渐浮现的人口概念逐渐将之取代成为治理的主要对象。有别于此，本文认为领土对于确立中世纪的统治而言并非关键，领土实则与傅柯所谓的人口概念同时期兴起，并运用相似的统治技术。历史案例部分关乎一本范围更为广泛的书籍《领土的诞生》。虽然傅柯对领土的直接论述是令人误解的，但对更广泛地思考这些问题而言仍相当有帮助，特别是他的历史取径。更深刻地思考有关领土概念和实践的兴起历史，将有助于理解当代的问题、转变与争议。 Résumé Cet article aborde d'un point de vue historique la question du territoire, et de sa relation avec la politique et la gouvernance. L'approche vise ici à s'interroger sur les affirmations énoncées par Foucault concernant le territoire dans ses travaux sur la gouvernementalité. Foucault considère que le territoire est essentiel du Moyen Age jusqu’à Machiavel, mais qu'il est remplacé en tant qu'objet de gouvernement par le concept émergent de population. A l'inverse, cet article soutient que le territoire n'est pas un élément décisif des déterminations médiévales du règlement, mais qu'il apparaît en réalité à peu près au même moment que la notion de population de Foucault, en utilisant des techniques similaires du règlement. Les exemples historiques se rapportent au livre The Birth of Territory, au propos plus large. Bien que ce qu'il dit directement sur le territoire soit fallacieux, Foucault est néanmoins extrêmement utile pour réfléchir de manière plus générale à ces questions, s'agissant en particulier de son approche historique. Le fait de réfléchir de manière plus approfondie à l'histoire de l’émergence du concept de territoire et de sa pratique est utile pour comprendre les préoccupations, les transformations et les conflits contemporains.

Geopower: The Politics of Life and Land in Frantz Fanon’s Writing

Geopower:The Politics of Life and Land in Frantz Fanon’s Writing Stephanie Clare (bio) In Becoming Undone, Elizabeth Grosz makes a powerful argument for the potential of "the philosophy of life, the philosophy of biology, [and] the philosophy of nature" to renew contemporary feminist thought. Grosz explains that this philosophical tradition, elaborated in Darwin, Nietzsche, and Bergson, "flourished well into the earliest decades of the twentieth century and then entered a long dormancy, only to be restored as a research program at the end of the twentieth century."1 However, a version of this tradition finds expression in the middle of the century as well, in the political, philosophical, and psychological writings of Frantz Fanon. Far from dormant in the 1950s, the philosophy of life was developed and transformed in Fanon’s trenchant analyses of colonialism.2 Especially because of his connections to Jean-Paul Sartre, as well as his explicit references to G. W. F. Hegel and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Fanon has largely been read as partaking in and developing the phenomenological tradition. Among readers who focus on his Black Skin, White Masks, the tendency has been to interpret Fanon in order to understand the experience of racialization, objectification, and otherness.3 Such a reading owes its popularity in part to Homi Bhabha’s powerful poststructuralist reframing of Fanon, which even imagined him as a proto-poststructuralist, postcolonial thinker. Questions of identity and recognition, subjectivity, and objectification therefore became central to research on the writer. However, beginning in the late 1990s, scholars such as Ato Sekyi-Otu and Nigel Gibson returned to Fanon through his other texts, such as The Wretched of the Earth and Toward the African Revolution, to show how Fanon’s concerns exceed the framework of recognition. Sekyi-Otu revisits Fanon to better understand experiences of postindependence Africa.4 Gibson demonstrates how The Wretched of the Earth provides not simply a valorization of violence, as Hannah Arendt famously critiqued, but also details the particular challenges of decolonization, such as the danger that the once-colonized bourgeoisie may usurp national liberation.5 Yet while these scholars analyze Fanon as a theorist of national liberation, they have yet to show his contribution to the philosophy of life, nature, and biology. Fanon’s characterization of decolonization draws heavily on his training in medicine and psychiatry. He uses organic metaphors and the vocabulary of biology: he writes of muscles and breath, life and death. Citing Nietzsche, he insists on the importance of action and, placing Fanon alongside the philosophers explored by Grosz, we might draw on his work to develop an understanding of freedom that consists in an engagement with matter instead of freedom from material constraint.6 Fanon’s new humanism highlights life’s dependency on the land, and resistance emerges not simply in life itself, but in life as it engages with land. Fanon thus figures a distributed form of vitality that recognizes how life exists between the living and the earth. My interest in the relationship Fanon draws between life and land emerges in the context of new materialisms and new feminist materialisms. These fields have developed rich accounts of materiality, arguing that matter is open to becoming and is forceful in itself.7 But matter is also appropriated. It is transformed into territories, such as the [End Page 61] territory of the nation-state. Notwithstanding new materialists’ departure from Marxism, questions of property, appropriation, and territoriality have not disappeared. Fanon’s writing provides a starting point for a new materialist understanding—and interruption—of appropriation, one that highlights life’s earthliness. This can be understood as an ecocritical move, insistent on transforming concepts to interrupt the mentality that has led to climate change all while being attuned to histories of colonization and decolonization, histories that make clear human life’s dependency on land and the violence of expropriation.8 Most specifically, this essay shows how Fanon can be drawn on to intervene in the rendering of life that we find between Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. In his powerful reading of Foucault, Deleuze contends that The History of Sexuality culminates in a form of vitalism wherein life consists of the "capacity to resist force."9...

Ranging behaviour of roe deer in an experimental high-density population: Are females territorial?

We studied the ranging behaviour and spatial relationships between seven roe deer during more than 4 years in a partly wooded 14.2-ha enclosure. The animals (three young males, four adult females) were monitored with GPS telemetry collars. As expected, the surface area and overlap of the males’ bimonthly ranges decreased, and the distance between their arithmetic centres increased, as they became adult and, for two of them, territorial. Unexpectedly, females also tended to space out, the surface area and overlap of their bimonthly ranges being minimal in May to June, i.e. during the birth period. The distance between their arithmetic centres reached its maximum at the same time. Overlap between females’ ranges was consistently lower than those between males and females’ ranges, or between 1-year old males’ ranges. Our results raise the questions of female seasonal territoriality and of independence of the spacing systems of the two sexes in roe deer.

Strategy and Tactics: Chinese Immigrants and Diasporic Spaces in Johannesburg, South Africa

Migration studies in South Africa have partially taken the spatial turn, giving some attention to questions of territoriality and spatial relationships. Recent literature has drawn on de Certeau's distinction between the strategies of the powerful and the tactics of the subordinate, revealing for example how migrants occupy hidden spaces to evade control and social hostility. Within the broad aegis of de Certeau's work, we engage the historical and contemporary spaces of the Chinese diaspora in Johannesburg. We describe a highly differentiated grouping of migrants that has deployed, and continues to deploy, varying tactics over time and across space. There are, for example, processes of clustering and processes of dispersal. There is also the use of visibility and cultural marking as a spatial tactic, as well as of invisibility and hidden spaces. We also reveal that the spatial practices of the Chinese migrants do not only relate to the strategies of the powerful but are also a response to the competition and threats posed by other subordinate individuals and groupings in society, including other Chinese migrants.

From places to flows? Planning for the new ‘regional world’ in Germany

Recent decades have been dominated by discourses describing a resurgence of regions. Yet despite its prominence the region remains a largely Delphian concept. In the period of new regionalist orthodoxy, for example, while it was recognized that regions take various forms, the normative claim that we were living in a ‘regional world’ became narrowly focused on regions as subnational political units. Nevertheless, the emergence of city-regions, cross-border regions, and European Metropolitan Regions is leading some scholars to suggest the formation in this century of a brave new ‘regional world’. With economic, social and political activity increasingly orchestrated through regional spaces that cross-cut the territorial map that prevailed through much of the twentieth century, the literature is adorned with accounts advancing the theoretical and policy rationale for relational approaches to regions and regionalism. Yet far less has been written on the struggle to construct these spaces politically, thereby neglecting questions of territory and territorial politics. With this in mind, our paper draws on the experience of Germany to consider the political struggle to overcome the contradictions, overlaps, and competing tendencies that result from new regional spaces appearing alongside, rather than replacing, existing forms of state scalar organization. In particular, we observe how the Federal State is using the ambiguity of the regional concept to present territorial and relational approaches as complementary alternatives. The paper concludes by relating these findings to ongoing debates on how we, as ‘regional’ researchers, should approach the analysis of regions and regionalism; speculates on the degree to which they form progressive and effective spatial policies; and asks what lessons can be learnt about contemporary state spatiality more generally.

Territorial Sovereignty Issues in Maritime Disputes: A Jurisdictional Dilemma for Law of the Sea Tribunals

Abstract It is unclear whether Law of the Sea tribunals under the Law of the Sea Convention (LOSC, or the Convention) have jurisdiction to determine maritime boundary disputes involving concurrent land sovereignty issues. The text of the Convention and case law are silent in this respect. The only reference is in LOSC Article 298(1)(a)(i), which allows States to make declarations exempting maritime delimitations from compulsory dispute settlement, excluding concurrent territorial questions even from conciliation. However, it leaves unclear whether concurrent land sovereignty issues are also excluded in the absence of such declarations. There are indications that LOS tribunals may be able to decide ancillary land issues so long as these do not constitute the ‘very subject-matter’ of the dispute, or rely on an alternative jurisdictional basis. The question of competence over mixed disputes may be less extensive in effect than is often believed. States should not avoid initiating proceedings based on the view that LOS tribunals might not ultimately exercise jurisdiction.