Philip E. Steinberg

Wet Ontologies, Fluid Spaces: Giving Depth to Volume through Oceanic Thinking

This paper expands on recent attempts to destabilise the static, bordered, and linear framings that typify human geographical studies of place, territory, and time. In a world conceptualised as open, immanent, and ever-becoming, scholars have turned away from notions of fixity towards fluidity and flow, and, in so doing, have developed networked, ‘flat’ ontologies. Recent attempts have gone further, challenging the horizontalism inherent in such approaches by opening up a vertical world of volume. In this paper we contend that such approaches are still somewhat lacking. The vertical element of volume is all too often abstract and dematerialised; the emphasis on materiality that is typically used to rectify this excess of abstraction tends to reproduce a sense of matter as fixed and grounded; and the temporality that is employed to reintroduce ‘motion’ to matter has the unintended effect of signalling a periodised sense of time that minimises the chaotic underpinnings and experiences of place. We argue that the ocean is an ideal spatial foundation for addressing these challenges since it is indisputably voluminous, stubbornly material, and unmistakably undergoing continual reformation, and that a ‘wet ontology’ can reinvigorate, redirect, and reshape debates that are all too often restricted by terrestrial limits.

Of other seas: metaphors and materialities in maritime regions

Abstract Even as ocean-region-based studies gain popularity, they all too often fail to engage the aqueous center that lies at the heart of every maritime community. Studies that seek to highlight political–economic connections across ocean basins tend to ignore the sea altogether, while those that highlight it as a site for challenging modernist notions of identity and subjectivity tend to treat the ocean solely as a metaphor. In contrast, this article argues that in order for ocean-region-based studies to reach their potential, the ocean must be engaged as a material space characterized by movement and continual reformation across all of its dimensions. Drawing on a range of theories, from conceptualizations of more-than-human assemblages to the oceanographic modeling techniques of Lagrangian fluid dynamics, this article proposes a perspective that highlights the liquidity of the ocean, so that the sea is seen not just as a space that facilitates movement between a regions nodes but as one that, through its essential, dynamic mobility and continual reformation, gives us a new perspective from which to encounter a world increasingly characterized by connections and flows.

Sovereignty, Territory, and the Mapping of Mobility: A View from the Outside

Theorists within and beyond the discipline of geography increasingly realize that boundaries are not simply lines that enclose and define territories. Boundaries also regulate and are reproduced by acts of movement. Movement, beyond and across, as well as within a bounded territory, serves to reproduce the territory that is being bounded. It follows that to understand the history of a territorial entity one must go beyond tracing the spatially fixed activities that occur within that territory or the discursive strategies through which the territory is made to appear natural. One must also trace the acts of movement that occur within, across, and outside the territorys boundaries and the designation of specific spaces of movement as beyond territorial control. In short, one cannot understand the construction of “inside” space as a series of territories of fixity, society, modernization, and development without simultaneously understanding the construction of “outside” space as an arena of mobility that is deemed unsuitable for territorial control. In this article, this perspective is applied to the preeminent normative territory of modernity—the sovereign state—and attention is directed specifically to the designation of the world-ocean as a space of mobility outside the boundaries of the state-society units that purportedly constitute the modern world. Through an analysis of representations of marine space on 591 world maps printed in Europe and the Americas between 1501 and 1800, this article traces the construction of the ocean as an external space of mobility, antithetical to the norm of the territorial state that also was emerging during this era.

Insularity, Sovereignty and Statehood: The Representation of Islands on Portolan Charts and The Construction of The Territorial State

Abstract This article investigates the cartographic origins of the idea that the territorial state is a unified, bounded, homogeneous and naturally occurring entity, in a world of equivalent but unique entities. It is noted that this image of the territorial state closely resembles the representation of islands on sixteenth‐century portolan charts, and this suggests a historical link between the Renaissance‐era imagination of islands and the modern imagination of states. The article posits that the concept of territorial unity and boundedness, which appeared on portolan charts to signify islands as obstacles amidst maritime routes of movement, migrated in the late sixteenth‐century to form the basis for representing the emergent concept of the territorial state. It is suggested that the conceptual and aesthetic links between these representations of islands and states has led to an ongoing dilemma for those who seek to comprehend (or cartographically represent) islands that are divided between multiple states.

Contested Sovereignty in a Changing Arctic

Climate change is challenging the notions of permanency and stability on which the ideal of the sovereign, territorial state historically has rested. Nowhere is this challenge more pressing than in the Arctic. As states expand their sovereignty claims northward in pursuit of potential opportunities (in many cases made possible by climate change), these same states are being confronted with the regions increasing territorial indeterminacy (which also is exacerbated by climate change). To investigate how climate change is challenging the territorial imaginaries around which notions of sovereignty historically have been based, we turn to three debates in the contemporary Arctic: the question of sovereignty in the Northwest Passage, conflicts over territorial control in the Arctic Ocean, and the potential for enhanced multilateral governance. Through our study of these debates we engage the Arctic both as a region that is undergoing climate changes most extreme impacts and as a laboratory for understanding how these and similar impacts might modify the spatial organization of political authority across the world.

Navigating to Multiple Horizons: Toward a Geography of Ocean-Space

While the ocean traditionally has attracted little attention within geography, we are now entering an era when marine research is increasingly technologically feasible and, at the same time, human interactions with ocean-space are ever more intense and complex. In response to these changes, a number of geographers ranging from critical development theorists to scholars of global environmental change to biogeographers have turned their attention to the study of marine areas. This article (and the articles that follow in this focus section) brings the ocean to the attention of human and physical geographers, both as an object of study in its own right and as a space for interpreting global social and physical processes and developing geographic techniques that span the land-sea divide.

The Maritime Mystique: Sustainable Development, Capital Mobility, and Nostalgia in the World Ocean

Three images of ocean space are becoming increasingly prevalent in policy and planning circles and popular culture: The image of the ocean as an empty void to be annihilated by hypermobile capital; as a resource-rich but fragile space requiring rational management for sustainable development; and as a source of consumable spectacles. In this paper I locate the emergence of these three apparently contradictory images of the ocean within structural contradictions in the spatiality of capitalism, which, in turn, are precipitating a crisis in marine regulation. To analyze these contradictions, I begin with a historical study of industrial-era marine uses, regulations, and representations. This is followed by an analysis of the present crisis and its associated representational discourses. I conclude with a call for analyses of ocean space that probe beneath marine imagery so as to explore the regulatory crises and social conflicts that underlie marine-policy debates and that reveal the oceans potential as a site of social transformation.

Mutiny on the bandwidth: the semiotics of statehood in the internet domain name registries of Pitcairn Island and Niue

The internet has evolved to have a complex top-level domain name system, in which generic top-level domains such as .com and .org coexist with country-code top-level domains such as .UK and .JP. In this article, the history and significance of this hybrid naming system is examined, with specific attention directed to the manner in which it simultaneously reproduces claims to globalism, state sovereignty, and the presumption of United States hegemony. It is found that the domain name system affirms the centrality of the sovereign state while concurrently challenging its underlying basis in an idealized nexus of nation, government, and territory. These themes are explored through case studies of two Pacific island microstate domains: .PN (Pitcairn Island) and .NU (Niue).

Contesting the Arctic: Politics and Imaginaries in the Circumpolar North

As climate change makes the Arctic a region of key political interest, so questions of sovereignty are once more drawing international attention. The promise of new sources of mineral wealth and energy, and of new transportation routes, has seen countries expand their sovereignty claims. Increasingly, interested parties from both within and beyond the region, including states, indigenous groups, corporate organizations, and NGOs and are pursuing their visions for the Arctic. What form of political organization should prevail? Contesting the Arctic provides a map of potential governance options for the Arctic and addresses and evaluates the ways in which Arctic stakeholders throughout the region are seeking to pursue them.

The Arctic Council after Kiruna

This note considers the latest iterations to the Arctic Council following the May 2013 ministerial meeting in Kiruna, Sweden. While new state observers including China and Japan were admitted, the European Unions application was deferred and the entire list of non-governmental and intergovernmental organisation applicants was rejected without consideration. Although time-based pressures may have been a factor, the failure to consider the non-state entities’ applications has the effect of reinforcing the impression that the Arctic Council is and will remain a state-centric body.