Samuel Lee

This article examines China's artificial island-building in the South China Sea as a form of ‘un-islandic’ violence that undermines ecological and relational principles central to archipelagic thinking. Drawing on Carl Schmitt's theory of nomos and land appropriation, it analyses how Chinese political theorists and state planners have embraced Schmittian concepts to justify territorial expansion and sovereign authority. It argues that the transformation of coral reefs into militarised landforms, framed as ‘green engineering’, exemplifies a technocratic logic of green colonialism rather than environmental stewardship. Contrasting this with the relational ontology advanced by islandic thinking – particularly in the works of David Chandler and Jonathan Pugh – the article shows how China's island-making disrupts multi-species ecologies and dispossesses existing social relations, thereby enacting a form of spatial violence rooted in statist modernity, calling for a shift away from land-centric paradigms towards a more ecologically attuned politics of space.

This special issue aims to illustrate how the emerging approach of archipelagic thinking can contribute to political theory and international relations theory, and it attempts to grapple with the geopolitical and ontological complexities of the South China Sea and Western Pacific. Archipelagic thinking is an emerging interdisciplinary approach in island studies, political anthropology and political ecology. The interest of archipelagic thinking for political theorising rests on the following considerations: (1) it builds on the legacy of global anti-colonial and postcolonial movements that gained traction from the 1960s onwards and led to the development of decolonial and postcolonial critiques, subaltern studies and political ecology (Braverman and Johnson 2020); (2) it challenges dominant configurations of sovereignty over the state, population and territory, and reimagines political subjectivity and the possibilities of relationality (Espejo 2020; Youatt 2020). Third, it overlaps with, and is theoretically informed by, the advent of ‘geophilosophy’ (Povinelli 2016), posthumanism (Braidotti 2013; Haraway 2016) and the political ecology based on science and technology studies, or STS (Latour 2017; Liboiron 2021).