1On the morning of Saturday 29^th June 2019, Fiji Airways had to cancel its scheduled flight from Suva to Funafuti, the capital of Tuvalu. In an unprecedented event, a group of protestors had blocked the Sir Toaripi Lauti International Airport by parking two heavy trucks on the airstrip. Despite the intervention of law enforcement units, the vehicles could not be removed until the evening. This action had been announced on the previous day, in a note delivered to the director of the Tuvalu Aviation and to the Tuvalu Travel Center. The anonymous author of the document, who was writing as a representative of “the Funafuti Land Trust Board (fnltb) and the landowners of the Funafuti airfield”, concluded the letter with an intimidating statement:

• 1 “Closing of the Funafuti International Airport by the Funafuti Landowners commencing at 4pm today t (...)

“I give you this notification so that you can make arrangements as deem proper from your end and in the spirit that you will quietly remove yourself from our lands immediately today. Take note that we are also closing the airfield for any incoming plane commencing from today.”1

2This sudden and unexpected act of force, an exception in a context usually pictured as peaceful and consensual, came as the culmination of a long-running dispute that had seen the indigenous landowners and the national government (photo 1) contending over the rent due for the public occupation of native land. By sabotaging a key national infrastructure, members of the indigenous community, or fenua, of Funafuti threatened to reclaim the lands their families had owned for generations, and explicitly questioned the lawfulness of the public occupation of native land. By calling into question the legitimacy of the central government and its position with respect to the eight fenua, they exposed a point of structural fragility in Tuvalu’s institutional architecture. Furthermore, by evoking the virtual – and yet plausible – scenario of an evicted the state’s eviction they were challenging the very place of the state in the archipelago.

3At that time, I was on the island of Vaitupu, which was set to be the main field site of my ethnographic research on Tuvalu, sovereignty and climate change. As the country was getting ready to host the 50^th Pacific Islands Forum (pif) a few weeks later – an appointment considered of paramount importance, on which the government of then Prime Minister Enele Sopoaga had staked a large share of its political capital – the news of the protest and the many reactions in the region propagated quickly. Gossip – a major vector of the country’s politics, as Besnier (2009) has brilliantly shown – started spreading. A low-quality photo of the above-cited letter quickly circulated on social media, and the radio reported that a number of pif member countries were questioning Tuvalu’s ability to meet the logistical challenge. Allegedly, some even ventilated the hypothesis of withdrawing their delegation. This event and its political aftermath (which I was able to follow from Vaitupu and then to observe more directly in Funafuti when I moved there to attend the pif) suddenly brought to my attention the latent conflict between Tuvalu’s central government and its island communities and made me realize the urgency of redirecting my research to more thoroughly consider the unique role the state plays – and the peculiar “place” it occupies – in the country’s domestic politics.

5With these questions in mind, this article takes the 2019 airport blockade as an opportunity to shed new lights on this issue. While studies directly concerned with the threat of sea level rise (Yamamoto & Esteban, 2013; Torres Camprubí, 2016; Farran, 2022) focus primarily on what the jargon of political scientists labels as the “external sovereignty” of the country (its ability to stand and act as a united actor on the international scene), I take into account the “internal” dimension of sovereignty in Tuvalu (the relationship between the archipelago and its institutional form). I thus frame the conflict between the indigenous population of Funafuti and the national government as the contingent actualization of a latent tension that, from both a historical and an institutional point of view, is intrinsic to the unity of the Tuvaluan nation.

Sovereignty, internal and external

6With 26 km² of land surface and a population of 11,000, Tuvalu is today one of the smallest and least populated countries in the world (Falefou, 2017: 30). Despite being a member of the un Small Island Developing States (sids), the country is perhaps best described as a “large ocean state” – a term that has gained broader circulation in the past few years, after being originally proposed by the President of Palau in 2016 (e.g., Chan, 2018): with an Exclusive Economic Zone of almost 750,000 km², in fact, it has the highest sea-to-land ratio in the world (Casati & Gurchani, 2023: 109). The archipelago groups nine islands: Nanumea, Nanumaga, Niutao, Nui, Nukufetau, Vaitupu, Funafuti, Nukulaelae and Niulakita. From both a cultural and an administrative point of view, it comprises eight island communities, or fenua, as the small island of Niulakita (0.42 km²), historically uninhabited, falls under the jurisdiction of Niutao and is only populated by a few families. The word fenua, the Tuvaluan version of a widespread Austronesian term, deserves clarification, as a somewhat kaleidoscopic term. Depending on the context, fenua can alternatively refer to an island, the community of its inhabitants, or a country. As such, it embodies a very nuanced Tuvaluan notion of place and the multiple and dynamic sources of attachment available to Tuvaluans. Moreover, as it often happens in other Polynesian languages, the proximity with the term used for “placenta” (fanua) outlines a semantic continuity between birth and place (Falefou, 2017: 144-146). Due to this richness, the word fenua has proved useful for interesting speculations on the affective geographies of global warming-induced migration among Tuvaluans (e.g., Stratford, Farbotko & Lazrus, 2013). In this text, however, I employ it to refer to the indigenous communities inhabiting each of the eight islands of Tuvalu.

7In 1970, Ivan Brady described the archipelago – then under British Colonial rule and known as the Ellice Islands – as follows:

“In the short span of one hundred years, the Ellice Islands have been transformed from a series of petty chiefdoms into an incipient nation state while pivoting on the axioms of what were once a foreign Church and an imported Administration.” (Brady, 1970: 45)

“the focus on loss of territory as the indicator of a State’s ‘disappearance’ may be misplaced, since these countries are likely to become uninhabitable as a result of diminished water supplies long before they physically disappear.” (McAdam, 2012: 124)

10Consequently, and perhaps contrary to what one might expect, it is the requirement of a permanent population that seems to be most urgently jeopardised by current ecological transformations. However, as there are no antecedents, it is impossible to know what will happen when the reality of Tuvalu or another low-lying island country will no longer match the prescriptions of the Montevideo Convention. It is also difficult to predict when such a scenario will take place, and which actors will be involved in deciding the legal and political consequences of such occurrence. It comes as no surprise, then, that legal scholars are divided on the issue. Some affirm that if a country’s territory becomes uninhabitable and the population is forced to leave, then the polity’s claim of statehood is doomed to fail (on Tuvalu specifically with this angle, see Rayfuse [2009]). Others – among whom notably Crawford (2007) – on the contrary, contend that “the idea of extinction of the international legal personality of a State following the loss of its material elements cannot be automatically inferred” (Torres Camprubí, 2016: 8).

12But the ecological threat is not a good reason for restricting one’s gaze to an impoverished understanding of the legalities of statehood. Rather, it is necessary to enlarge the perspective to encompass the broader cultural, political, and economic stakes of sovereignty. For instance, scholars have effectively pointed out how focussing exclusively on sovereign entities as political subjects, especially in Oceania’s “sea of islands” (Hau‘ofa, 1994), can pollute the discourse on conservation (cf. Mawyer & Jacka, 2018) – while simultaneously suggesting that Oceanian notions and practices of sovereignty have decisive implications for environmental governance (Bambridge et al., 2021). Similarly, it can be argued that reducing Tuvalu to its ecologically-jeopardised borders leads to overlooking the complex dynamics that concur to compose the country’s political arena and the many divisions within the alleged homogeneity of a sovereign space. Most importantly, however, these approaches only consider the issue of Tuvaluan sovereignty from the outside, solely concerned with the possibility that the country may cease to exist. As such, they tend to naturalize the historical contingency that led the population of eight tiny islands scattered on a vast surface of ocean to become the people of a nation state.

Disputing the land

13The occupation of the Funafuti airstrip by landowners in June 2019 made the news in the region and inflamed the political climate of the country, as it was preparing to host political leaders from the whole region to attend the pif. It provoked a harsh reaction on the part of the government, and was later to result in a High Court case and an order – in actual fact never enforced – to arrest the culprits (rnz, 2019). In his provisional judgement, Chief Justice Charles Sweeney spoke of “significant sovereign risk” with relation to the events, and wrote:

“These flights are an essential national lifeline for Tuvalu, which lies a three days sea voyage 1070 kms north of Suva. The deliberate obstruction of air traffic attacks the wellbeing of all Tuvalu’s citizens, attacks the ability of the government and the civil service to perform their duties as custodians of the public interest and attacks the economy of Tuvalu. It also attacks the amenity of life of its citizens. It sends a message to airlines that flights to Tuvalu are attended by commercial and possibly safety risks which might well render those flights uncommercial.” (Pareti, 2019)

15Oral accounts collected in Funafuti between August and October 2019, combined with the documents produced by the World Bank (e.g. Kaly, 2015), enabled me to reconstruct the events that led to the airport blockade as follows. The vicissitudes that came to a peak in 2019 had begun in 2011, when the Government approached the World Bank with a project aimed at improving Funafuti International Airport (photo 2) and the national aviation sector. The Tuvalu Aviation Investment Project (tvaip) was approved in December 2011 and funded with an initial sum of 11.83m usd. However, it was not until 2014 that the issue turned problematic, when a court case led to the unexpected discovery that the lease agreements concerning the airfield had expired in 2009 – a circumstance which until then had gone unnoticed by both parties to the agreement. As soon as the legal void was highlighted, a Compulsory Crown Acquisition of Land order was issued by the government on 19^th December 2014, with the goal of keeping the air link between Tuvalu and the rest of the world effective – an issue deemed of public interest by the government. However, due to delays in notification and legal technicalities, the order ended up becoming void. It nonetheless irritated the landowners, who felt treated without due respect. The government responded with a more consensual approach: on 2^nd April 2015, a Memorandum of Understanding (mou) was signed with the airfield’s landowners agreeing on a two-year interim term during which the parties were to negotiate a new agreement.

16This mou was followed by a study funded by the World Bank to document the legal history of the airfield, which found there was “a lot of confusion around leasing arrangements” (Kaly, 2015: 24). The situation concerned the airport as well as other facilities: many landowners “were not sure what arrangements were in place, suggesting that even for road [sic] (where an arrangement exists) they do not have a leasing document in hand” (ibid.). During the consultation process,

“Significant issues were raised by the Matai [i.e. heads of the land-owning families: cf. infra] in loss of trust of the government regarding land issues. People felt that government was violating their rights to the land, that they were not properly informed, and in some cases that they had lost confidence in the process and did not feel safe.” (Kaly, 2015: 24)

17But the scope of the dispute was to widen, and a much more disruptive conflict was ready to unfold: concomitantly, in fact, it was found that all the leasing agreements between the government and private landowners would expire in 2017 – like the mou that had just been signed. From the sole airfield, the land dispute spread to the whole government lease, and from the exclusive concern of the indigenous population of Funafuti it turned into a national affair.

18As of September 2017, when the two-year period set by the 2015 mou lapsed, the parties were not able to find an agreement. At the time, the lease rate was 3,000 aud/acre per annum. The mou was thus renewed for a further two years, but the tone of the quarrel turned harsher. To convince the landowners, the government unilaterally raised the rate to 3,500 aud/acre per annum. On their part, and with the aim of being more effective in their lobbying, the landowners decided to collectively refuse to withdraw the government payments from the bank. Meanwhile, the negotiations came to involve the whole country – that is, representatives of landowning families from all the islands of Tuvalu. The government set up an inquiry across the archipelago to collect their requests for the new lease rate negotiations, and concomitantly asked for a technical advisor to look into the issue. Different island communities had rather diverging demands, all deemed too high by the Government.

19At the beginning of 2019, the parties had still not managed to reach an agreement. The problem was not merely economic. Landowners were irritated by the approach of the government, who seemed not to treat the issue with proper respect and with the care that Tuvaluan protocols prescribe. On 28^th of June, things came to a head. The landowners had obtained an informal commitment from the government to sign a further mou and agree on a temporary increase of the rate to 4,000 aud/acre per annum until the organisation of the next general election, scheduled for September, thus postponing the issue for the new government to deal with. It was in response to the perceived government’s inaction that they decided to occupy the runway with two trucks. The action produced immediate effects: on the same day, Maatia Toafa, acting pm in the absence of Sopoaga, who was overseas on an official visit, signed the mou, thus raising the rate to 4,000 aud/acre per annum retroactively from 2017.

Balancing power, locating sovereignty

20Symbolically, this was the Funafuti indigenous community claiming back land allegedly usurped by the government. As argued in the introduction, however, this conflict highlights a structural fragility in the country’s architecture. Tuvalu is a rare case of a non-partisan parliamentary democracy: the 16 members of parliament are elected by island-based constituencies, and a majority is formed in the aftermath of elections on the basis of personal ties, common political interests, or previous agreement. Formally the sovereign of Tuvalu is Charles III of England, represented in loco by a Governor General. Typical Western political institutions co-exist with others, bearing the heritage of the longer history of the archipelago and most often labelled as “traditional”. While an appeal to tradition and continuity with a deeper past is certainly what legitimizes them, those institutions could be equally described as local: they arrange island affairs and defend the interests of the fenua, sometimes entering in a conflictual relation with the central administration.

23Prior to 1997, the traditional chiefly structure had an acknowledged customary value, but was not officially recognized by state power (Kerley, Liddle & Dunning, 2018). With the Falekaupule Act, not only was the Falekaupule acknowledged as an official body of the state, it also became the founding institution of the country. Later amendments pushed this tendency further, to the point that in 2019 it was established that “a Falekaupule may by resolution decide to elect and terminate its Kaupule members directly” (Government of Tuvalu, 2019: 5). What matters most, though, is that the Falekaupule Act reversed the institutional structure of the Tuvaluan state: once pyramidal and based on the colonially-inherited centrality of the national government, Tuvalu became the quasi-federal state Goldsmith (2005) speaks about – to such extent that, from the perspective of Tuvaluan political philosophy, it could be argued that the Falekaupule is the ultimate source of sovereignty in the country. Today, in fact, the power of the Falekaupule is not clearly defined, and hardly restricted by the law. For instance, in a court case that gained international resonance and set an important precedent in the field, the Falekaupule of Nanumaga was recognized as having the power to choose local traditional values over internationally-sanctioned human rights (cf. Olowu, 2005). This gives rise to a paradox: on the one hand, the Falekaupule was instituted by national legislation; on the other, however, the relationship between the Falekaupule and the law remains a complicated one – and there rests its power. The authority of the Falekaupule, in fact, is recalcitrant to any formal delimitation, and cannot be fully constitutionalized: no normative intervention can simply resolve or stabilize the complex relation between the Falekaupule and its legal context in a plain topology or a neat division of powers and competences.

Communities against the state

29This is the broader spectrum of issues that the 2019 airport blockade ended up concerning. The somewhat uncertain place of the state within the archipelago of Tuvalu was exposed. The public authorities were reminded of their provisional status, and faced with a potential scenario of eviction. Part of what happened has to do with the specific place that Funafuti holds in both the history and the political geography of the country. However, the conflict also highlighted a paradox that lies at the heart of Tuvaluan sovereignty. On the one hand, the state – and the government as its main agent – is what makes Tuvalu one, weaving the jurisdictions of the eights communities together and playing a logistic role both in guaranteeing the inter-island circulation of goods and people and in coordinating the social and economic life of the archipelago. On the other, however, the material conditions of its existence continuously need to be cautiously renegotiated. In other words, the relationship between the eight fenua and the central government harbors the potential to erupt when an issue becomes problematic. In the case of Funafuti, this relation is forced within the boundaries of the same island, shared out between overlapping jurisdictions that have to periodically renegotiate the conditions of their coexistence. In the capital, land is the source of a contention of typically post-colonial kind between an original authority, linked with the indigenous possession of land, and an occupying power whose legitimacy is in perennial need of careful maintenance, and always open to dispute.

30Two parallel and yet distinct axes can be identified as the fundamental political vectors in Tuvalu: one that has the centre and periphery as its opposite poles and another in which “traditional” powers face “modern” institutions. They are the result of the encounter between two worldviews: one, pre-colonial, relating to a time when each fenua was sovereign, and stood at the centre of a political project; and another, of colonial origin, which considers each individual island as the peripheral outpost of a centralized – albeit archipelagic – political space. Analytically, the two axes must be distinguished: one appeals to a historical criterion (modernity vs. tradition), the other to a spatial one (centre vs. periphery). In concrete terms, however, they happen to coincide: traditional instances and local interests are defended by the same institutions – the Falekaupule and the Kaupule. But this coincidence is contingent and historical, and, as such, open for reconsideration.

Conclusion

31The Funafuti landowners who blocked the national airport in June 2019 resented the government for procrastinating over the signing of a new agreement concerning the rate due for the public occupation of native lands. However, the dispute grew into a conflict of greater magnitude, and culminated in an unprecedented act of force. To explain this, this article focused on the domestic structure of the sovereignty of Tuvalu.

32The topology of the Tuvaluan state has the individual islands as the keepers of ancient customs and traditions and the central state as the representative of a bureaucratic power of Western origin. As such, it embodies and reproduces the contingent encounter of the eight island communities, and the vicissitudes that promoted their political unity and their becoming a state. History and structure intertwine: the contingency of past events translates into the precariousness of the state’s position within the archipelago. The state is indeed always at risk of being treated as a foreign institution, sometimes accused by members of the fenua of being a usurper of their land. Tuvaluans keep the state in a position of strangerhood, thus evoking a past in which each Tuvaluan fenua was an independent polity of its own and enforced a sort of island sovereignty that protected them from the expansive aims of the central government. It is by keeping the state at a distance that Tuvaluans can enjoy the benefits of sovereignty. Such domestic complexity should be kept in mind when the sovereignty of Tuvalu is discussed in the light of the risk that global warming casts upon it. While Tuvalu undoubtedly exhibits the distinctive traits of a cohesive nation, the country’s sovereignty is – perhaps paradoxically – founded on the contingent nature of its current arrangement. How future changes in the geomorphology of the archipelago will interact with such contingency cannot be foreseen.

33Two final remarks deserve consideration. The first concerns my use of the notion of state. In this article, I have spoken of the Tuvaluan state as a quasi-virtual entity, highlighting the fact that it has to rent its place in the archipelago and has no solid anchorage within its very territory. However, in an apparent paradox, the Tuvaluan state could be equally described as an inextricable bundle of relations: in the context of the country, the state is embodied by people who have family and political bonds to one or more specific fenua. And yet, their action is legitimized by reference to different contexts depending on whether they are acting in the name of their function or on their own behalf. If according to the Medieval political theology famously reconstructed by Ernst Kantorowicz (1957), the British king was thought of as having two bodies, it could be half-seriously said that members of the Tuvaluan Government have three: to their living body (in itself quite a complex one, embedded in family networks whose density and relevance to political affairs are in no way inferior to those of British royal family), they add a public persona that is itself dual, caught in the tension between the central state on whose behalf they act and the island community they were elected by. The issue of how statehood is embodied in its representatives adds a further layer of complexity to the role and place of statehood in Tuvalu, which, although relevant to the subject of this article, cannot be further delved into here.

34Secondly, the distinctive dynamics of Tuvaluan sovereignty that I have underlined in this article can be related to counter-hegemonic narratives that have developed in the Pacific region in the past 30 years, and that have been further reinforced by the awareness of the existential risk that the ecological crisis poses to the region. On the occasion of the above mentioned 50^th pif, hosted by Tuvalu, regional leaders decided to develop a “2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent” (Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, 2019). The idea of Oceania as a “Blue Continent” draws from Epeli Hau‘ofa’s description of the region as an essentially relational space, shaped by the legacy of a time “when boundaries were not imaginary lines in the ocean, but rather points of entry that were constantly negotiated and even contested” (Hau‘ofa, 1994: 154-155). According to the Tongan anthropologist and writer, the ocean, which the colonial gaze saw as a water barrier between scattered islands, represents instead a space of connection that enabled Pacific societies to keep in communication for centuries. Beyond the Westphalian grid of states and territories that was superimposed on the world of Oceania, an older set of relations – both friendly and conflictual – survives and keeps shaping political and ecological presents. It is towards that half-submerged world that this article has turned to, highlighting Tuvaluan political dynamics that escape mainstream understandings of sovereignty, with the purpose of showing – in ethnographic fashion – that statehood, an institutional setting of European origin and colonial heritage, was not passively received in Oceania, but rather appropriated and strategically reshaped.

35These observations show the dense knot of implications that the specific case of Tuvaluan sovereignty presents, as well as the many vectors along which its relevance can be generalized. Political theory, even in its critical approaches, has not fully comprised the Pacific region and its variegated political space, which has been often reduced to a naturalistic imaginary or relegated to the role of a repository for exotic exceptions to the norm and prophetic unforeseen scenarios. For this reason, the institutional setting of Oceania lies largely unstudied. The purpose of this article is to show that, while global warming does pose a largely unprecedented and potentially existential threat to the region and its inhabitants, this cannot be understood but in the context of Oceania’s unique institutional and political landscape. If it is to escape the risk of epistemic vagueness and political vacuity, the debate on the ecological crisis in the Pacific and its political consequences need solid ethnographic groundings and attentive care for the specificity of local contexts.