This paper explores Indigenous (im)mobilities in the Anthropocene, and their relationship to Pacific Islands climate activism. In a context where Indigenous peoples and perspectives are poorly represented in global climate politics, it is important to understand how Pacific people represent their own interests and imagine their own futures as pressures to move due to climate change take hold. We examine political action outside of formal governance spaces and processes, in order to understand how Indigenous people are challenging state-centric approaches to climate change adaptation. We do so by studying the works of Pacific activists and artists who engage with climate change. We find that *banua – an expansive concept, inclusive of people and their place, attentive to both mobility and immobility, and distributed across the Pacific Islands region – is essential for the existential security of Pacific people and central to contemporary climate activism. We find that Pacific activists/artists are challenging the status quo by invoking *banua. In doing so, they are politicising (im)mobility. These mobilisations are coalescing into an Oceanic cosmopolitanism that confronts two mutually reinforcing features of contemporary global climate politics: the subordination of Indigenous peoples, perspectives and worldviews; and the marginalisation of (im)mobility concerns within the global climate agenda.
While mobilities research is cognisant of the need to theorise the politics of mobility, the extent to which a political theory of movement has been developed is debateable. In this paper, I develop a more substantive theorisation of movement as a constitutive political relation in light of the empirical advances generated by mobilities research. This account of kinetic politics is an important conceptual development that holds promise for the closer alignment of mobilities research with critical security studies, which in turn raises the possibility of a fuller understanding of movement in global politics.
This study interrogates the geopolitical nature of China's Xisha tourism, and unravels the territorial politics played out in tourism, while examining the complex interplay between tourism and territorialisation. It demonstrates that Xisha tourism is inherently geopolitical and integral to China's comprehensive territorialisation strategy in the South China Sea (SCS). It reveals that Xisha tourism is politically oriented, highly regimented, and performatively constituted. Tourism and territorialisation are found to be mutually constituted and interdependent. The main argument of this study is that tourism should be conceptualised as a constitutive dimension of geopolitical restructuring processes in the SCS, and an essential part of the performative and discursive assemblage that sustains the state's will to claim territorial possession of the SCS.
Throughout the Asia-Pacific, migratory shorebirds are being threatened by human encroachments into their coastal habitats. In this short visual essay, we unravel the entanglements that bind the Far Eastern Curlew with a range of mobilities in one of its key landing sites, Meanjin – Brisbane. These entanglements raise critical questions about how we humans conceptualise and pursue mobility justice. We suggest that paying attention to how mobilities intersect in more-than-human ways demands that our Western, anthropocentric narratives and framings of watery places, multispecies mobilities, and the rights to movement more broadly, must change. These considerations of mobility justice need to account for, and take heed of, the persisting existences with which ‘we’ cohabitate.
Airports and seaports inhabit multiple geographies that dictate global mobility across political, economic, social, and environmental borders. In Australia and across the Asia-Pacific, large-scale mobility developments are being undertaken to connect local businesses and industries with global markets. However, these projects are proceeding without regard for the impacts that these mobility hubs will have on local and global ecologies. This is certainly the case across the Asia-Pacific region, where industry is impacting on the routes of migratory shorebirds along the 'East Asian-Australasian Flyway', which spans 18 countries and carries over 50 million migratory birds each year. Key sites that make up the Flyway are established and prolific hubs for these nonhuman mobilities, yet encroaching land reclamation practices are resulting in considerable avian population declines. This paper explores how more-than-human conceptualisation of the EAA Flyway and the "borders" it instigates through global conservation and nation-state governance are inadequately protecting the migratory shorebirds. We examine the recent and contested developments in Moreton Bay, in Brisbane, Australia, and the many bordering practices that take shape in this local place along the EAA Flyway. We argue that the multi-sited path that compose these global Flyways challenge our all-too-human-centric conceptions of space, borders, and movement.
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