Sovereign Claims Research Articles

The DRC–Angola Offshore Oil Dispute: How Regime (In)Security Outweighs Sovereign Claims

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) has a legitimate claim under international law to large areas of oil-rich maritime territory currently held by Angola. Access to this territory would make the DRC the second or third largest oil producer in sub-Saharan Africa. Yet the DRC has repeatedly and consciously avoided making effective claims to this territory and its oil. By analysing the history of the Congolese actions (and inaction) towards this territory, this article demonstrates why this is the case. Primarily, both Kabila regimes became reliant on and indebted to Angola, and, as a consequence, effective and final claims to maritime zones were never made. These claims were, however, not absent: non-regime figures in the DRC kept some claims alive, and the regime has at different times used the dispute as political leverage in order to secure Angolan backing, which would otherwise be uncertain. Within this, we show how an apparent attempt at compromise was both skewed in Angola’s favour and undermined by DRC regime actions. Overall it is demonstrated that the DRC’s concerns about regime security are the primary determinant of outcomes in this dispute, and it has consistently prioritised regime survival and short-term rent-seeking over oil development.

Opportunities for fisheries enforcement cooperation in the South China Sea

Both as a result of economic pressures to expand fishing grounds beyond coastal waters, and the use of maritime law enforcement agencies and fishermen as state proxies for reinforcing sovereign claims, maritime law enforcement and fishing vessels of different South China Sea actors encounter each other regularly in areas of overlapping claims. These encounters have often resulted in incidents at sea and pose a pressing security problem for the region. UNCLOS obliges states to make efforts to reach “provisional arrangements of a practical nature” when a final delimitation is pending. This article examines four examples of fisheries agreements and fisheries enforcement agreements between China and Japan, Japan and Taiwan, the Philippines and Taiwan, and Malaysia and Indonesia in which disputing parties reached provisional arrangements around the enforcement of fisheries in areas of overlapping claims. The articles discusses several elements across the four agreements that are relevant and practical for the South China Sea context, including the adoption of provisions that grant states a degree of flag state control, the establishment of an institutional body for determining management mechanisms and regular consultations, the establishment of communications channels at the operational level, and flexibility around implementation area. The article proposes the establishment of a jointly-managed Provisional Measures Zone within the “donut hole” of the South China Sea that would serve as a starting point for institutionalized cooperation on maritime law enforcement and fisheries issues, accompanied by a set of provisional bilateral and trilateral fisheries enforcement arrangements for individual disputes.

Marginal placeholders: peasants, paddy and ethnic space in Sri Lanka’s post-war frontier

ABSTRACTThis study explores the political significance of peasant identities, rice cultivation and land struggles in the context of civil war. It comprises two agrarian settlements in Sri Lanka's former war zone: a state-sponsored Sinhala settlement colony (Weli Oya) and a village formerly ruled by the Tamil insurgency (Sampur). We conceptualise both communities as ‘marginal placeholders’ positioned in Sri Lanka's embattled Dry Zone frontier. Their contentions, and the elite support for their contentions, make little sense in terms of material gain or agrarian surplus. We therefore argue that they must be understood as territorial struggles over ethnic space, rival sovereign claims, peasant ideology and cultural purification. Marginal placeholders are fielded to secure politically strategic territory, but ironically their marginality is reproduced in the process.

When Sovereigns Stir

Richard Tuck’s recent study of Thomas Hobbes’ famous depiction of the ‘Sleeping Sovereign’ offers a reminder of the 17th century philosopher’s contribution to the political imaginary within which our modern conception of constitutional democracy would later emerge. Central to that imaginary is Hobbes’ distinction between sovereignty and government – anticipating the division between the constitutional ‘rules of the game’ established by the ‘people’ or popular sovereign, and the day-to-day conduct of government under these rules. In these terms, the ‘people’ remain ‘asleep’ except in the event of revolutionary renewal, or, more often, under strict conditions of constitutional amendment. The Hobbesian metaphor, extended to cover the ‘stirring’ of new forms of sovereigntist consciousness and practice, continues to offer a powerful perspective on the strengths and the limitations of a sovereignty-centred approach to the contemporary global political condition. We can illustrate these new stirrings, and how they are related, through the four ‘R’s. The Reassembling of sovereignty refers to how increasingly elaborate and inclusive procedures going beyond the normal menu of amendment techniques are being used today to achieve constitutional settlement or galvanize constitutional change. The Raising of sovereignty refers to new claims or the resurrection of old claims by sub-state or trans-state populations who dispute the present pattern of sovereign authority. The Rationing of sovereignty refers to the process by which certain supra-state entities, such as the EU, seek to split the sovereignty atom amongst overlapping and interacting and so no longer omnicompetent states. Finally, the Reassertion of sovereignty involves the reaffirmation of existing sovereign claims, often in response to and reaction against the challenges associated with reassembling, raising and rationing; and often, too, articulated in populist terms, downplaying many of the protections of political pluralism and individual rights that mark the modern constitutional condition.

Can the South China Sea Tribunal’s Conclusions on Traditional Fishing Rights Lead to Cooperative Fishing Arrangements in the Region?

Disputes over territorial sovereignty have motivated states to take confrontational positions in respect of vessels from other states fishing in areas around disputed features in the South China Sea. This article suggests that the doctrine of traditional fishing rights, as expressed in the South China Sea Arbitral Award, could provide a legal mechanism that allows states to cooperate on fisheries management without compromising their sovereign claims. However the Tribunal’s conclusions on traditional fishing left a number of key questions unresolved that would need to be subject to further negotiation. There are considerable practical obstacles, especially a lack of political will, that would probably prevent such an agreement from coming to fruition. Nevertheless, this article provides an assessment of a potential option that could be used to foster cooperative fishing arrangements in a particularly contested maritime space.

Denouncing Sovereignty: Claims to Liberty in Northeastern Central African Republic

AbstractThis essay focuses on the northeastern borderlands of the Central African Republic (CAR), an area that though formally part of a state is mostly left to its own devices. It has no single sovereign, but many people participate in the sovereign prerogative of enacting violence in such a way as to claim a right to determine how to live. These dynamics are particularly visible in the area's contests over armed conservation, my ethnographic and historical topic here. These sovereign claims take the form of denunciation: rallying people to take extreme measures against another whose egregious acts threaten fundamental values. In northeastern CAR, the value frequently fought for through denunciation is negative liberty—freedom from molestation for those who carve space for themselves by denouncing. In addition to excavating denunciation as a dynamics of sovereignty, this paper shows that the values motivating sovereign struggles can include not just autonomy—whether devoted to a principle of order or anarchy, as others have explored—but can also be devoted to creating exceptions for those who denounce, such that they are able to participate in projects and access terrains that extend beyond their place of residence without having to consistently abide by others’ rules. Denunciation is thus a dynamics of sovereign claim-making that can shape and mobilize solidarities that are in flux, rather than those calcified by the violent, exceptional decision of a unitary sovereign. Denunciation foregrounds relational and processual aspects of sovereignty and in so doing invites new comparisons.

Water Is Life: Ecologies of Writing and Indigeneity

Water Is LifeEcologies of Writing and Indigeneity Christina Boyles (bio) and Hilary E. Wyss (bio) “Water is Life,” the recent rallying cry of the Standing Rock Sioux opposition to the Dakota Access Pipeline, gestures to the urgency of understanding ecological depredations as an attack on life itself. The idea of “water protectors” (as the activists protesting the construction of an oil pipeline under the Missouri River call themselves) emerges from a specific historical moment in relation to #NoDAPL, but this is an apt way to imagine the work of this special issue more generally as a folding together of ecology, indigeneity, and the role of writing in making visible Indigenous ways of engaging with water. While water scarcity is a concern for all living beings, its impact tends to be greater for Indigenous communities. Reservations in particular are sites where government and corporate entities expose “residents to dangerous environmental conditions,” including dangers caused by air pollution, water contamination, dangerous working conditions, and weapons testing (Taylor 47). Although these environmental concerns are long-standing, increasing privatization of water resources, paired with the ongoing effects of climate change, have amplified discussions about Indigenous water rights in US media. Communities of color, particularly Indigenous communities, have always borne the brunt of environmental injustice; however, these issues have become more explicit in the Trump era. Both under the leadership of Scott Pruitt and in the wake of his resignation, the Environmental Protection Agency has rolled back environmental protections for protected federal lands, particularly those deemed to be of value for natural resource production. Although the EPA is charged with promoting and restoring the health of tribal lands, it also has the authority to allow “tribal communities and other stakeholders to pursue future beneficial use or reuse of resources [End Page 1] for economic, environmental, and traditional purposes” (“Cleaning Up”). Often, these “other stakeholders” are given precedence over tribal lands due to intersecting corporate and governmental interests. Such behavior places Indigenous communities at risk in terms of their health and well-being and threatens their sovereign claims to the land. In response, Native communities have developed a series of protests and legal challenges to contest corporate and governmental claims to these lands. Many of these debates center on the sovereignty of tribal nations: What authority do tribes have over their rolls, lands, and resources? How do these rights operate within Western power structures? How should they operate? These questions are not answered simply, but they all have a common concern: state and federal laws stifling Indigenous nations for profit and power. This special issue of SAIL examines the way Indigenous writers have focused on water—its use, the laws that regulate its distribution, and its cultural and ecological value both within and outside Indigenous communities—to generate meaningful dialogue about the relationship between colonialism, water rights, and tribal sovereignty. Varying water laws across the United States force Indigenous communities to structure their arguments within specific legal contexts. In the East, water rights are determined by riparian rights, which permit those whose land abuts a body of water to use and access that water. In the West, water rights are determined by prior appropriation, which grants water rights chronologically based on whoever first put the water to “beneficial use” as determined by state and federal law. In theory, this means that all water in the United States should be the property of Indigenous communities; however, Winters v. United States (1908) complicates this narrative. According to this ruling, Native water rights are determined according to the location and establishment date of reservation lands. Eastern reservations have access to water their federal land abuts, but they do not have exclusive rights or jurisdiction over this water. Western nations are given prior appropriation rights based on the date on which their reservation was established, a decision that significantly disadvantages many Native communities in the West, particularly those using water from the frequently overdrawn Colorado River. Other issues further complicate this framework; for example, non–federally recognized tribes have no legal water rights. Additionally, the Five Tribes—the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole—are [End Page 2] federally recognized tribes that possess fee lands rather than reservation lands...

China’s Foreign Policy: A More Confident and Assertive China Amidst Global Uncertainties

Amidst growing protectionist and anti-globalisation sentiments, China has led the call for a free, open and inclusive multilateral order. It supports a multilateral trading regime, a Free Trade Area of the Asia-Pacific and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership. It has launched the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank where it wields significant veto power. China is pushing for a new regional security architecture. While shaping the international order, China is upholding its sovereign claims over the South China Sea and Taiwan.

Touring in heterotopia: Travel, sovereignty, and exceptional spaces in Taiwan and China

This article uses the case of Chinese tourism to Taiwan to theorize the mutual constitution of tourism mobilities and exceptional spaces of sovereignty. Human flows between China and Taiwan have proliferated despite incompatible sovereign claims. Since 2008, China has sent millions of tourists across the Taiwan Strait even as it points over a thousand missiles in the same direction. Taiwan, itself a “de facto state” and therefore an “exceptional space” in the normative world order of sovereign nation-states, is partly defined by its relations with China. This relationship is being refashioned through cross-Strait tourism. Based on analysis of border-crossing regulations and ethnographies of tourist spaces, particularly at airports and protest sites, conducted between 2012 and 2015, this article argues that tourism mobilities are not only the effect but also the cause of transformations in the performance of sovereignty and territoriality. In other words, such mobilities not only articulate within exceptional spaces, but they can produce and reconfigure such spaces as well.

Fluid Sovereignty: State–Nature Relations in the Hasbani Basin, Southern Lebanon

The concept of fluid sovereignty denotes configurations of state authority in which flows of living and nonliving things, within and across borders, render insecure claims of unconditional territorial control. Loss of monopoly control of the means of violence within a territory conventionally signals weak political sovereignty. Bordering Israel (including the occupied Golan Heights) and Syria, the Hasbani Basin in southern Lebanon seems to exemplify such sovereign failings: Over decades, rival security providers have provoked political instability and conflict in the region. Fluid sovereignty, however, brings to the fore state–nature relations neglected in scholarship on “fragile” or “failing” states. Informed by geographical work on hybrid sovereignties and vital materialism, we show how sovereign claims over the Hasbani Basin extend to (sub)terranean water sources and rainfall-dependent agricultural lands, both of which are deeply securitized. Incomplete centralization and territorialization by Lebanon of the Hasbani Basin evinces fractured state nature—the inability of the state to realize volumetric control of, and authority over, basin waters. This state nature is coproduced by the fluid materiality of the waters themselves, whose hydroclimatic circulation and contingencies are at odds with territorial designs for volumetric control. For rural communities in the Hasbani Basin economically dependent on access to agricultural water, field research reveals a practical experience of fluid sovereignty, both in adapting to water variability and also in navigating use of agricultural borderlands subject to conflict-related dangers. Recent conflict spillovers from the Syrian war have reinforced, for the majority Druze population, the low legitimacy of Lebanese state nature.

Unearthing global natures: Outer space and scalar politics

During the 1960s, the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) worked to develop laws that would regulate activity in outer space. In the treaty that followed, outer space, a resource that encompassed Earth, was to remain outside of existing political borders, free from sovereign claims, and open to use by all states. Because of these stipulations, many have labeled outer space a “global commons” or “global resource.” In most academic analyses of global commons, these laws rejecting sovereign claims are treated as the de facto way that a resource that materially spanned all states would be governed. As debates in and outside of COPUOS indicate, however, the status of outer space as beyond states’ sovereign territorial jurisdiction was not given. Rather, as I demonstrate in this paper, the status of outer space and orbits as beyond sovereign territories is a result of political contestation over the understanding of physical properties of outer space and Earth. I trace the debate in the late 1960s and 1970s over the border between sovereign air space and “global” outer space. This was a debate over how outer space would be incorporated into political–economic relations. By using a production of nature approach that recognizes the importance of physical materialities and scalar politics, I demonstrate the constructedness of outer space as a “global” resource and how its construction as such furthered uneven political–economic processes. Such analysis illuminates how such socionatures beyond and across borders are produced to achieve particular political–economic outcomes.

The Sovereign Claims from Within: The Rhetorical Displacement of Sovereign Bodies in Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl

This article considers the impact of Ernst Kantorowicz’s The King’s Two Bodies for understanding how claims of sovereignty are authorized and legitimated in a secular age devoid of the divine grace that underwrites the sovereignty of the king in medieval times. Through a reading of Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl, 133 S.Ct. 2552 (2013), a case concerning the custody of a child of Cherokee descent, it demonstrates that sovereign bodies are constituted, (dis)placed, and recognized through an appeal to biopolitical logics. This insight is important as it invites a form of rhetorical critique that might account for the conditions in which sovereign claims fashion the terms of political community.

A pragmatic approach to sovereignty on Mars

Rising interest in Mars colonization from both private and public sectors necessitates a renewed discussion about sovereignty in space. The non-appropriation principle of the Outer Space Treaty currently prohibits any sovereign claims to celestial bodies, but it remains unclear how this principle should be applied to the peaceful colonization of Mars. Here we develop a pragmatic approach to guide the settlement of Mars, which is based upon a “bounded first possession” model with mandatory planetary parks. Scientists, experts, and leaders will establish planetary park locations and regulations through worldwide community solicitation in order to protect sites of scientific, aesthetic, historical, cultural, environmental, spiritual value. Colonization parties may occupy limited plots of martian land and may claim exclusive economic rights within this zone, while still refraining from any claims to sovereignty. All colonists remain under the legal jurisdiction of their host nation, with conflicts to be resolved diplomatically or through a temporary tribunal system composed of representatives from other Mars colonies. We also propose the formation of a Mars Secretariat as an administrative body with limited power to facilitate communication among parties. Our model for Mars colonization remains consistent with the Outer Space Treaty, but we also recommend revisiting or amending the non-appropriation and province of mankind principles to resolve the ambiguity of how nations, corporations, and individuals may utilize the resources of space.

Foreign Investments Meet Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) – Whose Sovereignty?

The last decade of the 20th century witnessed the parallel rise in importance of investor protection and indigenous rights. Despite the temporal proximity, both fields developed without any significant consideration for each other. In the field of natural resource development this has the potential to result in a number of conflicts. This is particularly evident in light of the (re-)emergence of sovereign claims by indigenous peoples to ownership and control over natural resources and land which they use and inhabit. In this context, the evolved right to free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) can be seen as an instrument to procedurally implement the right to self-determination of indigenous peoples, but also as bearing potential to defi ne the partnership between indigenous peoples and their home states when it comes to the question who can authorize third parties – e.g. a foreign investor/lender – to engage in resource exploration and exploitation projects on indigenous territory or having an effect thereupon.

Confluent territories and overlapping sovereignties: Britain's nineteenth-century Indian empire in the Kumaon Himalaya

This article provides a locally grounded understanding of how geographies of sovereignty became established and called into question on the external frontiers of British imperial expansion. The empirical case study focuses on the Bhotiyas, trans-Himalayan traders who reside in several high valleys of the Kumaon Himalaya in today's North Indian state of Uttarakhand. When the British East India Company annexed that region in 1815 it was recognized as a so-called Non-Regulation Province. Through a close examination of British interactions with Kumaon's traders, the paper will reveal the frictions that arose from this exceptional legal status. This focus serves to address the broader question of how sovereign claims work through multiple and shifting articulations. The paper first considers the establishment of Kumaon as a Non-Regulation Province by attending to the strategies of British administrators in gaining the loyalty of its trans-Himalayan traders, particularly after the Dogras' invasion of western Tibet in 1841. Subsequently, attention turns toward the negotiations between colonial administrators, Tibetan authorities and the Bhotiyas over taxation, which highlights British efforts to fit this mountainous periphery into the empire's standard grid during the 1890s. The analysis considers a previous call to conceive High Asia as a continuous zone and an agentive site of political action by arguing that confluent territories and overlapping sovereignties are key to understanding imperial frontiers. As such the article contributes to scholarship that deals with the anomalous spaces of Britain's Indian empire, including both the jurisdictional and everyday politics in the margins.

The role of science diplomacy: a historical development and international legal framework of arctic research stations under conditions of climate change, post-cold war geopolitics and globalization/power transition

The Arctic is undergoing transformation, where three important drivers are climate change, post-Cold War geopolitics and globalization/power transition from the rise of China. This transformation defines the nexus between science diplomacy, geopolitics, law and globalization under climate change, which is shaping the future of the Arctic and will bring considerable opportunity at national, regional and global levels. Research infrastructures (research stations both military and non-military, observation and monitoring networks) are opening access and data to new Arctic and non-Arctic players. Additional logistics hubs than those already existing are and should be established. Countries are sustaining and building new research as well as search and rescue bases/stations. Stations can be used as indicator of this transformation as well as their implications to improve cooperation, engage in multilateral rather than unilateral actions to protect the Arctic infrastructures and to improve military capabilities. These actions have started to attract also non-Arctic actors, such as China and the European Union (EU), which are developing new policies. Stations may not be developed and maintained only not only for the purpose of the scientific understanding of climatic and environmental impacts but also for function as entities that legitimize national or sovereign claims. At the nexus are the scientists that utilize the research bases and their international colleagues. Arctic/Northern bases are primarily military for historical reasons and for reasons of logistics and expertise, as historically indicated through the American presence in Alaska. This is not the same as saying that the bases are militarized—or part of some national militarization strategy in the Arctic. New steps to identify the role of stations at national, regional and global levels are needed. In this essay, we explore the implications and opportunities for these stations to act as pivots between scientific and geopolitical issues. We argue that where there is scientific collaboration, there is less risk of military conflict and that the Arctic is not “militarized” based on the international politics and science diplomacy of the Arctic.

Genomic and Viral Sovereignty: Tethering the Materials of Global Biomedicine

Viruses and genomes have become the subjects of sovereign claims in contemporary biomedical research. These claims invest biological materials with geopolitical attachments to both nation-states and continental regions and seek to alter the property regimes that characterize global biological economies. As rhetorical and juridical devices, sovereign claims over viruses and genomes seek to establish new kinds of enclosures to control biological life. The recasting of sovereignty over biological parts, we argue, gains purchase by tethering biological materials to constructed origin points as they travel through global research and commodity networks.

Ecological Chains of Unfreedom: Contours of Black Sovereignty in the Atlantic World

Black sovereignty in the Atlantic world pivots, as in the case of Haiti, from a haunting apparition to a haunting recognition, never quite forming a tangible, and legal, sovereignty unto itself. Haiti's tangled and complicated geopolitical positioning within the Atlantic world gives this spectral state of being meaning. Sovereignty, or, as I will suggest, the processes of recognizing sovereignty and the material shape of its appearance, imbues Haiti's sovereign claims with a specific racialized threshold. Reading along Haiti's racio-national edge also illuminates the tenuous position on the international stage of Liberia and Abyssinia – two nations, along with Haiti, that represented the only nation-states in the Atlantic world by the end of the nineteenth century with a majority black population and independence. Although a small representative group, these sites deserve far more scrutiny within the fields of race and sovereignty studies by legal scholars and scholars of transnational American studies, especially because of the ways the nations battled for recognition and respect amongst other nation-states who may have attached derogatory notions of humanity onto the political work and rights of these self-avowed black nations. Haiti is an important example of this phenomenon.

Językoznawca jako badacz mediów (zarys problematyki)

The author presents the proceedings used by the linguists involved in the media research highlights dominant approaches, distinguishes two hypothetical ones: hegemonic and sovereign, and discusses challenges related to both of them. Hegemonic approach in the media research means the a distinctly defined subject of the study, that is the language of the media, precisely defined subject of analysis, namely the language of the media, and a supremacy of linguistic methods used in the analysis. The linguist as a sovereign prefers an open attitude towards methods applied in the study. Such an approach considers achievements of the media scholarshop as well as other related scientific disciplines. This attitude in the media research means that the linguist analyzes an image of the world in the media, a stylistic differentiation of the media communication, media genres, and the discourse. Furthermore, the linguist as a sovereign claims creating a new linguistic discipline and widens the research field with contrastive issues.

Disrupting Canadian sovereignty? The ‘First Nations & China’ strategy revisited

In response to foreign investors’ growing interest in Canadian natural resources, British Columbia (BC) First Nations created the First Nations Energy and Mining Council (FNEMC) in 2006 in order to foster direct, independent and collaborative relations between indigenous peoples and investors. In 2011, the FNEMC launched the First Nations & China: Transforming Relationships strategy to facilitate two-way investment between First Nations and Chinese businesses, and to represent the interests of BC First Nations in cases in which they perceived the Canadian state and Canadian investors are not adequately representing their interests. This strategy is an interesting case of indigenous self-affirmation because it disrupts the narrative of Canadian state sovereignty. It does so to position BC First Nations as legitimate and central interlocutors for Chinese investors who are interested in resource extraction on traditional indigenous lands. To better understand the strategy’s impact on Canada–China relations, I focus on the spatial dimensions of the First Nations & China strategy. Specifically, I situate the strategy in the context of BC First Nations’ history of political organization, and analyze the discursive practices surrounding the strategy’s launch. I draw from the various spatial dimensions associated with contentious politics – scale, place, network, positionality and mobility – to argue that the First Nations & China strategy opens Canada–China diplomatic relations for participation of BC First Nations by producing a ‘third space of sovereignty’ while also opposing Canada’s sovereign claims and control over territory, resources and diplomacy.