Individual Paper
2. From Oceanic Crossroads: Empires, Networks and Histories
What has come to be known as the “Indo-Pacific region” has been defined in various and often conflicting ways. This new geographical term, which refers to the conceptual and political merging of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, has become a prominent reference in both policy and scholarly rhetoric, thereby overshadowing previous conceptualisations of Asia. Despite the region’s diverse socio-historical and epistemological backgrounds, Indo-Pacific advocates have repeatedly reduced the region to its potential for conflict, primarily framed in relation with the antagonistic competition between the United States and China, and imbued its meaning with a sense of temporal novelty that inaccurately reflects its long regional history. This paper aims to address these issues by unpacking the genealogical backgrounds of the Indo-Pacific. First, it seeks to expose the reification of the Indo-Pacific's territories and waterways as a neutral cartographic exercise. Secondly, it subjects the prevalence of geopolitical discourses in framing the Indo-Pacific as a novel maritime regional space and geopolitical territory, to political critique. It will ask whether we can speak of an Indo-Pacific regional place, and challenge some of the explicit theoretical positions and implicit methodological assumptions contributing to the emergence of this geographical category. This will be done by drawing upon tenets of Political Geography, International Relations theory (IR), and Philosophy. Doing so, this paper hopes to contribute to reflections on the epistemological origins, and implications of contemporary (re)production of meta-geographies, thereby enriching debates on regional knowledge and broader politics of spatiality.
Marie Kwon
Chair Geopolitics of Risk, France