Maritime politics as discourse in the Indo/Asia-Pacific

Abstract

This paper examines maritime politics across the Indo/Asia-Pacific during the 2010s by drawing on notions of geopolitics as discursive practice through which various actors shape understandings and trajectories of international politics. It first discusses the consequence of the idea that maritime issues in ‘the region’ are of ‘strategic importance’, which is used to justify the discursive and material engagement of both regional and extra-regional powers. It then identifies three broad framings or narratives of maritime politics in the Indo/Asia-Pacific over the last decade: strategic competition, regional order and challenges to a ‘rules-based system’, and collaborative governance, and discusses how discursive contestation is further displayed in recent debates over the concept of ‘Indo-Pacific’. This analysis demonstrates a powerful role for discourse in the maritime politics of the Indo/Asia-Pacific, as the ambiguities inherent in institutions of maritime politics and questions of ‘sovereignty’ over maritime space are discursively manipulated into representations which serve various political purposes and statist agendas. The conclusion places this in the context of some recent literature on China and critical geopolitics.

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