Self-Determination Meets Environmental Protection: Pacific Visions of a Conservational International Community

The advancement of decolonization in the mid-twentieth century catalysed the burgeoning of alternative visions of the international order. As highlighted by intellectual historians including Adom Getachew, postcolonial thinkers and leaders from newly independent countries developed egalitarian international projects to challenge the existing world system entrenched in imperial legacies. This movement found expression in the works of African and Caribbean intellectuals, such as George Padmore, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Julius Nyerere, Eric Williams and Michael Manley, who tended to emphasize the reform of formal institutions—exemplified by the creation of a regional federation—to protect the autonomy of their nations. The scholarship on the topic, however, has largely overlooked non-institutional and deterritorialized visions of an international community that emerged in the South Pacific during its decolonization period. This paper shows how a range of Pacific indigenous intellectuals and local scholars, including Epeli Hau‘ofa, developed their distinctive accounts of a fluid oceanic community that reconciled Pacific islanders’ sovereignty, collective identity and extraterritorial life. Key here was the nexus between the notion of self-determination and environmental protection. Rather than urging the industrial utilization of natural resources, these intellectuals and scholars stressed the necessity to preserve the surrounding environment, including landscapes, seascapes and biota, in addition to material resources. The paper argues that in their visions of a Pacific international community, such protection was ontologically imperative. It underpinned the reclamation of islanders’ history, identity and autonomy. Therefore, ‘guardianship of the Pacific Ocean’ became one of their watchwords.