Unsettled Sovereignty and the Sea: Mobilities and More-Than-Territorial Configurations of State Power

How do mobilities associated with oceans and the resources inside of them shape the spatial and temporal dimensions of state sovereignty? As an entry point into this question, this article explores the fifty-year, multistate struggle over access to, and control over, highly migratory tuna stocks in the Pacific Ocean, focusing on the historical relationship among Pacific Island states, the United States, and the United States–flagged tuna fishing fleet. The analysis corroborates scholarship in resource geography and political geography that demonstrates that sovereignty is neither inherently territorial nor exclusively organized on a state-by-state basis, enhancing it to show that the lively nature of oceans and mobile global capital extracting resources from them create a wide range of political possibilities for state influence. The findings reveal that to gain control over, or access to, mobile ocean resources, states construct and express sovereignty in relation to each other and the interests of global capital. At times, multiple and conflicting legal institutions and definitions of sovereignty over the same set of resources can simultaneously be in play. The result is temporally and spatially dynamic sovereignty that is continuously negotiated among “foreign” and “national” interests forced together by fluid ocean materialities and the mobile nature of transnational fishing capital vying for extraction privileges. This analysis reveals mobilities as generative of more-than-territorial institutional innovations that continuously remake the spatial contours of state sovereignty over resources.