The Palk Bay Fishing Dispute Revisited

This article takes issue with approaches to the dispute between Sri Lanka and India over fishing rights in the Palk Bay which couch the issues in terms of ‘legal pluralism’. It argues that in this context the concept of legal pluralism as dangerously anodyne, effectively marginalising issues of power. In this and in the wider context of South Indian fisheries legal pluralism presents specific narrow claims as if they were wider systems, and falsely reifies ‘tradition’ and ‘custom’. More generally, this article suggests that the focus on ‘fishing’ is misleading in two related senses. First, it equates two rather different forms of activity – small scale artisanal fishing where the owner and the operator are usually the same person, and capital-intensive trawler fishing where there is a distinction between the owner and the workers. Second, it falsely isolates fishing per se from other forms of economic life and fails to understand that the drivers which determine the ways in which maritime resources are exploited must be understood within that wider political economy.