Progress report

Progress in Human Geography

2015, Vol. 39(5) 636646
Political geography II: The Author(s) 2014
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DOI: 10.1177/0309132514560958
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Alison Mountz
Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada

Abstract
This second of two progress reports on the subdiscipline of political geography explores islands and
archipelagos as material sites and political concepts with which to understand spatial ontologies of power.
The piece reviews thematic interests in the interdisciplinary field of island studies as well as those taken up by
political geographers. Areas for future research are also identified.

Keywords
archipelago, imperialism, island, political geography, power, territory

According to The Island Studies Reader,
approximately 10% of the worlds population
some 600 million people live on islands
(Baldacchino, 2007b). The institutionalization
of the field that endeavors to study islanders and
their places is well underway: courses taught,
chairs named, and journals and annual confer-
ences organized.1 Island studies is a well-
established interdisciplinary field, an area of
increasing interest to political geographers, and
the focus of my second report on trends in scho-
larship in the subdiscipline. I begin by exploring
the ways that islands and archipelagos figure
into critical approaches to power and politics
among political geographers. I then review
recent scholarship on islands by political geo-
graphers, noting particular themes and ques-
tions animating the field and subdiscipline.
Finally, I explore areas for expanded research.
What is an island, other than a body of land
surrounded by water? Islands evoke infinite
imaginaries, from dreams of development,
escape, and exoticism to exploitation and impri-
sonment. Islands are unique locations, which
may fuel the tendency toward geographical ima-
ginaries that orientalize an other. For writer
Adam Nicolson (2007: 153), the island is a
place defined by its otherness, thriving on noth-
ing more than its distance and difference from
the mainland to which it is opposed. To many,
islands are simply home. In Edouard Glissants
(1997) writing on the roots of slavery and post-
coloniality in the Antilles, the figures of boat,
island, and archipelago are deeply rooted in the
corporeality of island histories, identities, and
sovereignties.
Given so many imaginaries, how does one
begin to trace the contours of the field of island
studies? Put simply, island studies endeavors to
understand islands on their own terms, a line of
inquiry also called nissology (McCall, 1994).
The field is as varied thematically as the
Corresponding author:
Alison Mountz, Geography and Environmental Studies,
Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON N2L 3C5,
Canada.
Email: amountz@wlu.ca
Mountz
geographic contours and characteristics of
islands themselves. Geographers study islands
with the broad array of approaches in effect in the
discipline, from unique physical and biogeogra-
phies such as climate and endemic species
to cultural and political approaches to the human
dimensions of life on islands. Many geogra-
phers study islands as places imagined as cultu-
rally distinctive, exotic, romantic, or merely
remote (Royle, 2001; Stratford, 2006; Nicholson,
2007; Olwig, 2007a, 2007b; Conkling, 2007;
Lowenthal, 2007; Schalansky, 2009).
The complex structures of power, territorial-
ity, and governance on islands have captured the
attention of political geographers (e.g. Steinberg,
2005; Sidaway, 2010). More than mere physical
form, islands occupy a prominent place in the
geographical imagination of politics. They fre-
quently become sites of territorial conflict for
their occupation of interstitial zones where
power struggles unfold. States have long used
islands as sites of experimentation (Taussig,
2004; Baldacchino and Milne, 2006), attempts
to control or exert influence (Vine, 2009), and
to extract resources or attract profit in other ways
(Baldacchino, 2007a).
Because of histories of occupation and coloni-
zation, many islands become grounds for complex
and unusual forms of jurisdiction and citizenship.
Baldacchino and Milne (2006) proposed subna-
tional island jurisdictions and created a chart to
demonstrate their complex variation. Islands are
also part of larger archipelagoes that fall under the
same jurisdiction, such as the 121 islands that
comprise the archipelago of Taiwan (Baldacchino
and Tsai, 2014). They are assemblages of land,
sea, interstitial territorialities and overlapping dia-
sporas where terrestrial and subterranean shifts
alter governance and claims to sovereignty (Ger-
hardt et al., 2010; McGlashan and Duck, 2011;
Teerling and King, 2012; Steinberg and Chap-
man, 2009; Mullings, 2012).
Islands have also proven to be geostrategic
sites of military intervention where territory is
occupied or invaded, control asserted over
637
regions (Vine, 2009), defensive lines held or
strategic offenses mounted, as in the bombings
of Pearl Harbor and countless others. Islands
also function as test sites for weaponry and are
frequently sites of military bases and associated
environmental degradation and human displa-
cement, as on the Bikini Atoll of the Marshall
Islands where the United States conducted
nuclear testing in the 1940s and 1950s (Nie-
denthal, 1997). For these and other reasons,
islands have prompted sustained attention of
political geographers as both material location
and spatial form that captures shifts in the oper-
ation and contestation of power (Davis, 2011).
I Island and archipelago as political
concepts
While islands themselves are important subjects
of inquiry, islands and archipelagoes recur in
critical thought to spatialize understandings of
power and politics beyond the spaces of islands.
As Ann Stoler (2011) suggests:
Some of the most favored concepts of political
theory acquire their critical force precisely
because they are not considered political concepts
at all, or because they have so long been consid-
ered benign and removed from the domain of con-
temporary politics. We can make their presence
felt retroactively because of what we do with
them: lifting them from the sludge of the una-
dorned nouns by setting out their subliminal
force, gleaning their potency from the veiled fash-
ion in which they craft subjects, requisition
objects, and couch their command. Those that
tend to grab us those that assert themselves as
political, or that we assert as squarely political for
them do so because they offer to help us think
otherwise about what is assigned as common
sense.
Islands must be lifted from the sludge of the
unadorned nouns because of the critical inqui-
ries into power that they evoke, provoke and
sustain: once they have become the focus of
study, everything becomes part of a sprawling
638
archipelago. One encounters islands every-
where. By this I refer not to the literal discovery
that there are many islands in the world, but
rather that the characteristics of islands as polit-
ical spaces operate as a traveling metaphor, with
broad applicability beyond the physical space of
islands. Islands and archipelagoes are powerful,
recurring, and vexing to the spatial imaginary:
highly unique, idiosyncratic, disparate and yet
revealing, offering spatial form, pattern, and
logics that are everywhere reproduced.
This has been the case in my own work.
Research on borders led me to islands as sites
of migration enforcement, which returns me fre-
quently to understand the treatment of migrants
through enforcement on mainland territories as
the mobilization of islands to isolate people
onshore through the interplay of legality, crim-
inality, and detention (Mountz, 2011).
The form of the island can be found in recent
conceptual thought about sovereignty, imperial-
ism, post/colonialism, and the debris of
empire (Moore, 2000; Herman, 2008). In the
resurgence of the subdiscipline post 9/11
(Minca, 2007; Mountz, 2013), the role of islands
has once again come to the fore to understand
new forms of warfare, such as what Gregory
(2011) calls the everywhere war or Vine iden-
tifies as the lily pad strategy of proliferating
smaller US bases globally. Additional examples
are study of rendition flights and black sites in
the war on terror (Paglen and Thompson,
2006, Gregory, 2007). For Gregory (2007:
206) (building on Foucault and Agamben).
These spaces of confinement function as van-
ishing points where biopower and sovereign
power intersect and states use geography to
evade international laws and conventions in
militarized locations such as Guantanamo Bay
(Butler, 2004; Kaplan, 2005; Gregory, 2007)
and Diego Garcia (Vine, 2009; Sidaway, 2010).
The island appears and is reproduced in other
forms: bases, bodies, prisons, all islands of a
kind. The war on terror has raised a highly con-
tested field of geopolitics that involves uses
Progress in Human Geography 39(5)
of territory that allow states to circumvent inter-
national conventions and international law,
from capitalisms work in special economic
zones to the punitive assemblage of commercial
jets, bases, and black sites. As a result, political
geographers and other scholars have been
studying that which is silenced or removed from
the frame: civilian deaths (Butler, 2004; Gregory,
2004), black sites (Gregory, 2007), rendition
(Paglen and Thompson, 2006), and networks of
US bases as colonial past and present (Davis
2011). Still others understand islands as specta-
cular platforms where sovereignty can be
reworked or asserted through its staging (Cut-
titta, 2014).
Much of this silencing and disappearing
involves the production of exceptional states and
spaces through the law (Gregory, 2007). Build-
ing on Agambens (1998) state of exception, geo-
graphers have explored the relationship between
interior and exterior, onshore and off, in recent
work on sovereignty, empire, and imperialism
(Gregory, 2007; Sidaway, 2010). Some examine
the production of exclusion through the law, also
as a basis for the creation of islands in the form of
confinement. In Agambens (1997) terms,
islands parallel the spatial form of the camp, with
the potential to be mobilized and reproduced
anywhere, also representing movement of the
concept of the island beyond the geographic
location of the island. Indeed, Minca (2007:
78, 90) finds in Agamben and Gregorys
(2004) writing a new spatial ontology of
power, with camp and permanent state of
exception a new nomos on global politics.
Is the camp the new island of the 21st century?
And if so, how might the mobilization of the
island as a territorial expression of power over-
come important critiques of Agambens writing
(e.g. Mitchell, 2006)?
The practice of quarantining populations also
revives the spatial form of the island, connect-
ing forms of containment in historical practice
(Bashford and Strange, 2002) to the present.
The 2014 outbreak of the ebola virus in West
Mountz
Africa raises the specter of the island in the form
of quarantine. In August, airlines decided to
cease flights to airports in areas where there had
not yet been outbreaks. In September, authori-
ties in Sierra Leone confined everyone to home
for three days. Within clinics, patients were iso-
lated in high risk units. Controversy erupted as
these decisions made to contain the virus iso-
lated people and the larger region, making it dif-
ficult to provide medical support. The creation
of metaphorical islands through quarantine
practices also resonated historically with the ear-
liest documented use of an island to quarantine,
set up by Venice on Santa Maria di Nazareth in
1423 (Baldacchino, 2010a: 9, citing Gensini
et al., 2004).
The archipelago has also proven a salient
spatial metaphor for political geographers, one
that Foucault suggested in an interview was the
only truly geographical concept (Foucault in
Gordon, 1980: 68). Foucaults (1995 [1978])
carceral archipelago captured the way in sites of experimentation and exception, where
which a form of punitive system is physically
dispersed yet at the same time covers the
entirety of a society (Foucault in Gordon,
1980: 68). The island is reproduced throughout
society, the archipelago often mobilized in
contemporary analyses of power. Hidden pris-
ons have long been identified through this
metaphor, building on Solzhenitsyns (1973)
understanding of Russian prisons as gulag, dis-
persed, and unseen, in the Siberian hinterland.
Gilmore (2007) writes of the California prison
system as a golden gulag. Gregory (2007)
mobilizes the carceral archipelago to under-
stand topological connections between black
sites. For Stoler (2011, 2013), the carceral
archipelago becomes the grounds on which to
map the debris of imperialism and colonialism.
Recent interest in mapping military bases
offers another important example, as in Daviss
(2011) mapping of the UL military base net-
work as contemporary colonialism and Vines
global mapping of US imperialism through its
lily pad: the geostrategic location of some
639
1000 US military bases around the world, with
the growth of forward operating bases for
mobilization of smaller, more flexible move-
ment of troops (Vine, 2012). In my own work
on island detention, the archipelago also func-
tions as spatial metaphor to understand land-
scapes of migration enforcement (Mountz, 2011).
In the thematic review that follows, the
entanglement between the actual materiality of
the island and the uses of island and archipelago
to understand exercises in power and territorial-
ity will be clearer.
II Thematic preoccupations:
The political geography of islands
Islands are frequently shrouded in discourses
and practices of exceptionalism. There is a
debate within nissology about the uniqueness
of islands. Some argue that islands are places
where unusual things happen (Taussig, 2004),
goings-on anathema to those on mainland ter-
ritory transpire (Baldacchino and Milne, 2006:
488). Still others find islands living labs, cen-
tral to understanding what happens subse-
quently on mainland territory. As Depraetere
(2008: 1) writes, Islands are the rule and not the
exception. For Steinberg (2005), for example,
islands are the birthplace of modern forms of
statehood, their early versions developed and
tested on islands.
Islands have lengthy strategic military and
colonial histories that secure their place in the
realm of geopolitics. These histories are at once
highly localized and idiosyncratic in their parti-
cularity, and places that seem to follow patterns.
David Vine (2009) details one such historical
pattern in Island of Shame, wherein he traces the
history of the British Indian Ocean Territory
island of Diego Garcia and the plight of the Cha-
gossian people and their forced dispossession
and displacement from home. The Chagossians
were forcibly removed from the island to make
way for the construction of a US military base
640
significant for its size and role in the region
(Pilger, 2007; Vine, 2009; Jeffery, 2010).
Through a secret agreement, the British govern-
ment leased the island to the United States for
the construction of the large base, which
recently held the greatest concentration of naval
assets in the world (Vine, 2009). The islands
past and present are notoriously sealed off from
the public in secret government documents and
tight security measures that prohibit most civi-
lians including journalists from landing on
the island.
Vine traces this trajectory back to something
called the US strategic island concept, formu-
lated in the 1950s during decolonization, a time
of perceived weakening of US hegemony when
local peoples and the governments of newly
independent nations were increasingly endan-
gering the viability of many of the Navys over-
seas bases (Vine, 2009: 41). The objective was
to place military bases on islands to exert
regional influence. Thus Vine maps a historical
period of base expansion that well predated later
expansion post 9/11. He labels these bases the
bases of empire, or part of the empire of
bases, predicated on the strategic island con-
cept as the invention of a new form of empire
that would effectively replace colonies (Vine,
2009: 186).
Islands often prove grounds for historical
layering and repurposing of forms of territorial
control. Kaplan (2005) traces the history of con-
tinuous forms of exceptionalism that lay the
foundation for contemporary landscapes of
imperial militarism and incarceration in Guan-
tanamo Bay. Mutlus (2010) review of books
by Vine and Sand traces Diego Garcias lengthy
history as a state of exception. Part of the pro-
cess involved the erasure of the Chagossians
historical attachments to the land. Although the
islanders can prove generations of family mem-
bers on the island, they were deemed tempo-
rary and therefore moveable by the British
government. Since their forcible relocation to
Mauritius, Chagossians have struggled to
Progress in Human Geography 39(5)
return. Although a high court ruling affirmed
their right to return, this return has been deemed
impossible due to current uses of the island as
naval base, strategic platform, black site in the
war on terror post 9/11 (Vine, 2009: 9), and pro-
tected marine area declared under UK Prime
Minister Gordon Brown. The fate of the Cha-
gossians is consistent with Stolers (2011) argu-
ment that the colony functions as dynamic
carceral archipelago that shifts to mobilize and
contain populations in different times and
places.
In contrast with what many see as the British
abandonment of its citizens with the removal of
Chagossians from their home on Diego Garcia,
many have noted the contrasting position of the
UK to protect the place of British citizens on the
Falkland Islands. Previously occupied by
French, Spanish, and Argentinians, Argentinian
forces landed on the islands in 1982, leading to
the Falklands/Malvinas War. Then and in the
time since, the UK recaptured and retained con-
trol. Political geographers have studied the role
of geopolitics in popular discourse (Dodds,
1996) and the place of Argentinian nationalism
and national identity in the dispute (Benwell and
Dodds, 2011).
Broader national populations and govern-
ments that imagine islands as exceptional often
support their exploitation under the rubric of
nationalism. Perera (2009) details such uses in
her book on the insular imagination of Australia
as colonial settler state and island nation. She
reconfigures Glissants formulation of archipe-
lago, colonialism, and island identities. Perera
develops the thesis that the topos of the island,
distinguished by the relationship between land
and sea, proves central to the geopolitical order
of western modernity (Perera, 2009: 3). She
historicizes aggressive, contemporary border
enforcement strategies carried out by Australia,
placing them in the context of long-standing
imaginaries, institutions, and technologies that
have produced the logic of insularity (Perera,
2009: 5). In so doing, she links the historical
Mountz
containment of aboriginal Australians onshore
to the contemporary containment of asylum-
seekers on islands offshore, thus effectively
tracing movement between islands as material
stage and spatial concept reproduced onshore
and off. As if to prove Pereras point, in Septem-
ber 2013 Australia expanded marine intercep-
tions (Operation Sovereign Borders) to stop
potential asylum seekers traveling by boat and
to detain them on the island state of Nauru and
on Papua New Guineas Manus Island.
In other ways, islands are not so different
from everywhere else: they are sites of conflict
over territorial control with complex histories of
imperialism, colonization, and empire. Scholars
studying imperialism and colonialism have
explored islands as not only located in the per-
ipheral zones where sovereignty is stretched to
new limits (Steinberg and Chapman, 2009),
or on the edges of empire (Burnett, 2005,
MacDonald, 2006), but alternatively at the
heart of imperial projects (Bastos, 2008) and
American empire (Kaplan, 2005). For Burnett
(2005), for example, the Pacific island of Pal-
myra sits at the edge of US empire as the only
incorporated territory where US constitutional
law applies. In her analysis, these legal border-
lands served as the proving ground for the prin-
ciples of U.S. imperialism (2005: 779) during
US expansion in the 19th century. She details
the obscure Guano Islands Act that empowers
Americans to claim uninhabited and unclaimed
islands containing guano (phosphate rich depos-
its that result from bird droppings). She chal-
lenges conventional ideas about territorial
belonging and argues that the incorporation of
guano islands advances understandings of
imperialism as being not only about expansion
but about setting limits too (Burnett, 2005: 781).
Similarly, Lipman (2012) explores the US
unincorporated territory of Guam as a site where
displaced Vietnamese were contained some-
times violently so en route to resettlement in
the 1970s. She notes that the islands history
demonstrates that contingency also marks the
641
history of American empire, for the U.S. acqui-
sition of territories was neither monolithic nor
all-encompassing but specific and time bound
(Lipman, 2012: 3). Guam is one example of
island histories and their connectivity in the
present, what Stoler (2013: 7) calls the ruination
of imperialism: the active, ongoing process that
allocates imperial debris differentially and ruin
as a violent verb that unites apparently disparate
moments, places, and objects.
As a result of residual colonial struggles,
ongoing geopolitical disputes, and resource-
related conflicts such as oil exploration and
extraction, islands frequently remain contested
territory, even when uninhabited and uninhabi-
table. This is the case in a contemporary and
ongoing dispute between China and Japan over
the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands and the surround-
ing maritime area (Fravel, 2010).
Islands are sites where colonialism and post-
colonialism unfolded. There exists a robust lit-
erature exploring islandness, archipelagoes,
island peoples, and the roots of post/coloniality
in the Caribbean, for example (e.g. Glissant,
1997; Braziel, 2006; Mullings, 2009). Island
studies scholar Godfrey Baldacchino contests
the notion that islands are sites where struggles
for self-governance are to be celebrated by
postcolonial narratives. He suggests instead:
There remains much to be said and understood
about smallish remnants of empire where
populations (and not just elites) cling stub-
bornly to nonsovereignty, and where metropol-
itanterritorial relations may have evolved in
fairly sophisticated ways to exploit the oppor-
tunities of contemporary rampant globaliza-
tion (Baldacchino, 2010b: 189).
States have also long imagined islands as
places where people deemed unruly, undesir-
able, or diseased can be contained, from histor-
ical uses for leprosy colonies (as on Molokai,
Hawaii) to political prisons (such as San Fran-
ciscos Alcatraz and Cape Towns Robben
Island). Islands have complex migration his-
tories of incarceration, containment, isolation,
642
control, and forcible resettlement. In the con-
temporary moment where new efforts to thwart
terrorism and otherwise regulate human mobi-
lity and activity have taken hold, these same his-
torical sites have been repurposed in the present,
for uses ranging from detention to tourism and
often, both in the same place.
Islands function as remote zones of stark con-
trast in all of these projects. They are understood
through contradictions: sites of transit, mobility,
and encounter (Sheller, 2009a, 2009) and simul-
taneous insularity (Olwig, 2007b; Perera, 2009;
Teerling and King, 2012; Royle, 2001); places
to which people make great sojourns (Gillis,
2007; Schalansky, 2009) and where they are
detained (Mountz, 2011; Cuttitta, 2014). As a
result of their interstitial locations, islands feature
rich historical and contemporary landscapes of
mobility, encounter, displacement, and contra-
diction in what many call migration manage-
ment (e.g. Bernardie-Tahier and Schmoll,
2014; Mainwaring, 2014).
There are also important histories of racia-
lized labor and mobility to be written on islands,
as in Beverley Mullings (2009) work in
Jamaica. Many have looked to these histories
as the darker side of globalization, where people
are processed offshore, from the historic use of
American islands such as Ellis and Angel Island
to contemporary sites where human mobility is
processed and thwarted, including Italys Lam-
pedusa and Australias Christmas Island.
While islands may be used for negative, hid-
den activities such as imprisonment, they are
also sites utilized for development, investment,
profit, and dream-making (Baldacchino and
Milne, 2006; Baldacchino, 2007a; Jackson and
Della Dora, 2009). Such development projects
often exploit exceptional status (Baldacchino
and Milne, 2006; Connell, 2007), to carry out
particular kinds of development, as in Exclusive
Economic Zones or offshore banking.
Island spaces also show a tendency toward
the topological reproduction of the form of the
island: bases and prisons on islands become
Progress in Human Geography 39(5)
islands within islands; prisons within bases
become islands within islands within islands;
solitary confinement cells within them islands
within islands within islands within islands.
Those people detained on Guantanamo as a
result of the US-led war on terror were held in
Camp X-Ray, solitary confinement functioning
as an island within an island (the base), leased
land on the island state of Cuba. Those who
were released to third countries (i.e. neither the
United States nor their country of origin) were
sent to small islands, including the independent
Micronesian island state of Palau and the United
Kingdom Overseas Territory of Bermuda.
Yet another area of interest to geographers
and other social and physical scientists involves
the effects of climate change on islands.
Whereas islands have long been subjects of
inquiry among biogeographers who study
unique species, climates and issues pertaining
to sustainability (Gough et al., 2010), they are
increasingly sites under threat of rising sea lev-
els due to global warming. In Pacific and Indian
Ocean regions, for example policy-makers are
debating climate-related migration and are con-
cerned about the future relocation of small
island populations in Kiribati and Tuvalu
(Kelman, 2008; McNamara and Gibson, 2009;
McLeman, 2014). Meanwhile, nearby islands
are used to process those who have fled home,
whether in search of economic livelihood or
protection from persecution at home. These
contrasting, if proximate, projects offer a fasci-
nating juxtaposition for political geographers to
sort through: the desire to resettle populations
on sinking islands whilst thwarting mobility of
others held by force on other islands nearby.
Who will have the power to make decisions
about resettlement and when? What happens
to the identity, citizenship, and governance of
those relocated?
In this section, I reviewed several site-
specific examples where scholars have traced
geopolitical histories of empire, imperialism,
colonialism, extraction, and militarization on
Mountz
islands. Examples included Guam (Herman,
2008; Owen, 2010; Lipman, 2012), Diego
Garcia (Pilger, 2007; Vine, 2009; Jeffery,
2010; Sidaway, 2010), Papua New Guinea,
Nauru, Australia (Perera, 2009), Palmyra
(Burnett, 2005), and Cuba (Kaplan, 2005;
Gregory, 2007; Reid-Henry, 2007). There are
many more such histories to be unearthed and
reclaimed; many places where the exigencies
of the present erase the politics and biogra-
phies of the past, where indigenous struggles
to reclaim the past and alternatives to state
sovereignty come into conflict with imperial
projects.
III Conclusions: Expanding
research on islands
As this report has made clear, there are many
reasons why islands are and should be of grow-
ing interest to geographers. Within the exten-
sive, interdisciplinary literature on islands,
there exist many potential explorations of
unique histories and recurrence of central orga-
nizing themes of political geography related to
territoriality, bordering, sovereignty, empire,
colonialism, and imperialism.
There remains much research to be done on
islands in areas that also happen to be well-
rehearsed topics of study for political geogra-
phers: citizenship, governance, jurisdiction,
bordering, sovereignty, empire, imperialism,
and territorial conflict. They will continue as
crucial sites of study where the impacts of cli-
mate change will be experienced early and dra-
matically. Important social movements for
autonomy, self-governance, and resistance to
militarization have taken and are taking place
in Vieques, Kahoolawe, Guam, and Okinawa,
for example (Davis, 2011).
Certain kinds of islands have, not surpris-
ingly, been more studied by political geogra-
phers than others, a bias reproduced in this
review that favors small, remote locations
with complicated geopolitical histories of
643
militarization and occupation. These islands
are of interest for their precise connection
to empire and imperialism of the past and
present. For this reason, present and former
territories and colonies of Britain and the
United States emerge, time and again, as
clues to understanding political geographies
of hegemony and sovereignty in the imperial
present. Equally important but less studied in
the subdiscipline are large island or archipe-
lago states where islandness may be more
taken for granted (by contemporary political
geographers), such as Britain, Ireland, Japan,
the Philippines, Australia, or New Zealand,
(see, for example, Davies, 1999).
Contemporary rounds of conflict involve ter-
ritorial disputes over the status of islands, from
the Falklands to the status of Taiwan, to the
aforementioned dispute between China and
Japan. Contemporary political struggles demon-
strate that islands remain sites of national anxi-
ety, imperial desire, and conflict over local and
geopolitical struggles for autonomy and territor-
ial control.
Much remains unresolved around islands,
perhaps because of the infinite permutations
in definition and categorization, meaning and
uniqueness. What sorts of places are these?
Are they anathema or unique? How are they
put to work, exploited, and how do islanders
(where they exist) fight back? What struggles
for autonomy and self-governance unfold,
and how do they differ in distinct places?
What claims to indigeneity and resources are
made, and what struggles over dispossession,
erasure, identity, resettlement, political par-
ticipation and representation ensue (Matsuda,
2007; Tedmanson, 2008)?
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Godfrey Baldacchino, Jennifer Hynd-
man, James Sidaway, Beverley Mullings, and Phil
Steinberg for feedback on this report. Many thanks
to Kate Coddington, Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas, and
Ingrid Butler for bibliographic research assistance.
644 Progress in Human Geography 39(5)

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