Geopolitical Manoeuvres: Whose Islands?

Secessionism in some SIDS has suggested a limited degree of political instability where threats to national integrity have been domestic, part of an intermittent politics of identity. Metropolitan powers have long viewed some SIDS as places to control, to support economic and later military interests, especially those close to North America, and in the Pacific, less close to America but dangerously close (at least geographically) to an Asia where first the Soviet Union and then China might challenge and destabilise previous metropolitan interests. In this century, the geopolitics of development in the Pacific SIDS has become highly significant, with Australia and the United States seeking to combat China’s twenty-first-century maritime Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) that challenged the hegemony of the western powers. SIDS have been increasingly affected by geopolitical relations and the uncertainties of global politics and institutions, benefiting from competitive aid programmes (although overall aid has declined and benefited infrastructure rather than services) with multiple treaties linking them more closely to China, Taiwan, Australia and other states, some more formally through ‘free association’. Within the SIDS, security is locally seen as concerning safety, policing, livelihoods, and access to health care, education, employment, improved infrastructure and housing, rather than more militaristic state security.