Description
Analyses of international relations often deploy ‘home’ in both description and analysis but rarely interrogate what home means or does within these contexts. The ontological and epistemological marriage of much of IR to the state form cements the map of the international as drawn by state borders, forgetting the existence of other maps. However, attempts to remember or retrieve these forgotten mappings through the idea of home have become internationally pertinent; the Tuvaluans use it to contest the loss of their island to rising sea levels, and to transform ideas of sovereign spatiality by moving their nation ‘online’; the Chagossians use it to contest both British and Mauritian sovereignty over their islands, positioning themselves as subjects in the legal (and moral) battle over the islands that does not consider them to have a sovereign claim; and the Hawai’ians who mobilise an idea of home against both the US colonisation of the islands, and against the very ontology of the spatialised state as such. Each of the three cases will be examined to show that island mobilisations of 'home' through and against the sovereign state are a key site for disrupting hegemonic imaginaries of the global, and for introducing new ones.
