Contesting the Boundaries of International Justice: State Countermapping and Offshore Resource Struggles Between East Timor and Australia

The ongoing struggle between East Timor and Australia over access to and control of the oil and natural gas resources contained within the seabed between the two countries is manifest in the form of contested boundaries. Each side attempts to buttress its claim through, among other means, competing cartographic representations. In examining this case study, this article asserts that what has come to be known as countermapping is not limited to the activities of nonstate actors and social movements that are struggling over resources and territory within a particular nation-state. Relatively weak states also can and do engage in such activities in challenging other states. Given the nature of power relations within the realm of international affairs and the weakness of international judicial mechanisms, however, countermapping as a resource-claiming device and tactic of relatively marginal states can be only one tool in a larger strategy that resists and/or challenges the status quo. The results of the strategy are thus contingent not merely on the authoritativeness of alternative maps and the rightness of the position on which these maps are based, but, what is more important, on the use of social power and the concomitant ability to determine the scope and scales of the conflict, as well as the larger context in which the struggle unfolds. By highlighting the importance of social power, scale, and scope, the case study presented here provides analytical, strategic, and tactical tools for those who are engaged in or are examining countermapping-type struggles of both the social-movement and state sorts.