On Wednesday, 28 July 2021, Thammasat University students are cordially invited to join a free Zoom webinar on Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America.
The event is organized by the School of Humanities, Hong Kong University (HKU) and will begin at 1pm Bangkok time.
Students may register to participate at this link:
https://hkuems1.hku.hk/hkuems/ec_regform.aspx?guest=Y&UEID=77011
For further information or with any additional questions, please write to this email address: viceracn@hku.hk
The Thammasat University Library collection includes several books about different aspects of archipelagos.
The noun archipelago, meaning an island chain or island group, derives from Greek words meaning the principal sea, referring to the Aegean Sea which is full of island chains. So archipelago originally meant any sea which contains several islands or the islands themselves.
An archipelagic state means an island country consisting of an archipelago.
The designation is legally defined by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).
The Bahamas, Fiji, Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and the Philippines are the five original sovereign states that obtained approval in the UNCLOS signed in Montego Bay, Jamaica in 1982, qualifying as archipelagic states.
Archipelagic states are composed of groups of islands forming a state as a single unit, with the islands and the waters within the baselines as internal waters.
Among other nations that have claimed archipelagic status include the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, the Lakshadweep Islands, the Galápagos Islands, the Japanese Archipelago, the Maldives, the Balearic Isles, the Aegean Islands, the Hawaiian Islands, the Canary Islands, Malta, the Azores, the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, the British Isles, the islands of the Archipelago Sea, and Shetland.
The TU Library owns books about these countries.
The 28 July HKU webinar will be a book presentation of Borderwaters: Amid the Archipelagic States of America which is available to TU students through the TU Library Interlibrary Loan (ILL) service.
Its author is Professor Brian Russell Roberts, who teaches English at Brigham Young University, Utah, the United States of America.
Although there is no legal basis for identifying the United States as an archipelagic state, Professor Roberts points to literature and visual arts about American land in archipelagos of the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean.
Respondents for the webinar will be other specialists in literature: Associate Professor Brandy Nālani McDougall of the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa; Professor Hsinya Huang of National Sun Yat-sen University; and Assistant Professor Daniel Elam of The University of Hong Kong.
There has been extensive academic research about how nations acquired the status of archipelagic states, for example Indonesia.
As a 2017 article posted online indicated,
One of the distinctive features of contemporary Indonesia is that it is an archipelagic state in which the government exercises sovereignty over the waters between the islands making up the country’s land territory as well as over the islands themselves.
But the nation we now call Indonesia was not born as an archipelagic state. Until the middle of the 1950s nearly all the waters lying between the islands of Indonesia were as open to the ships of all nations as were the waters in the middle of the great oceans. These waters belonged to no state nor did any state claim any form of jurisdiction over them. As a consequence, Indonesia was made up of hundreds of pieces of territory separated from one another by high seas.
Then, suddenly, on 13 December 1957, the cabinet of Prime Minister Djuanda Kartawidjaja declared that the Indonesian government had ‘absolute sovereignty’ over all the waters lying within straight baselines drawn between the outermost islands of Indonesia. These baselines, encompassing as they did all the islands making up the country, formed Indonesia—its lands and the seas over which the government now asserted sovereignty—into a single unified territory for the first time.
During the late colonial period, the Dutch government had made episodic attempts to assert sovereignty over small margins of the seas closely adjacent to landforms. What the Djuanda Declaration asserted was of an entirely different order, claiming sovereignty for the state over vast swathes of sea previously open to all nations.
The declaration alarmed neighbouring states because of the implications it might have for the free movement of ships through the archipelago and access to fishing grounds in the waters now claimed by Indonesia. And it outraged the Western maritime powers. Fearing that it had the potential to restrict the mobility of their naval forces and disrupt international shipping, they condemned it as a gross violation of the freedom of the seas enshrined in international law and announced that they would disregard it.
The Indonesian government appeared to be in no position to overcome a challenge to its claim. It was embroiled in serious and deep-seated domestic political turmoil and its navy was far too weak to enforce any conditions the government might place on foreign warships passing through the archipelago. And yet in 1960 it enacted the declaration of the Djuanda Declaration into national legislation (Law No. 4 of 1960).
Undaunted by the storm of criticism and rejection, the Indonesians pursued and vigorously campaigned their claim though a series of UN conferences and meetings in succeeding decades, and through an equally robust series of discussions and agreements first with their near neighbours, notably Malaysia, Singapore and Australia, and later further afield, which sought to put legal flesh on its claim. As well, its diplomacy involved continuing bilateral negotiations with its major antagonists, particularly the United States, and constant and successful efforts to attract support from the ‘Third World’ group of nations in such a way as to press the maritime powers to accept the inevitability of their claim.
In all these talks, Indonesian delegations aimed to clarify thorny and agonisingly intricate problems of definition—for instance, just what is an archipelago?—and, more important, the nature of the jurisdiction that an archipelagic state might exercise over its claimed archipelagic waters. In particular, under what regime might foreign warships be allowed to pass through archipelagic waters? Would they be subjected to the innocent passage regime or would it be necessary to craft a new passage regime that, for example, allowed submarines to pass through archipelagic waters while submerged?…
In September 2015, The Manila Times published an article on The Philippines as an archipelagic state: advantages and challenges.
More formal studies in international law have also addressed the issue.
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)