Description
‘Who are they building it for - us or them?’ Faizan, a Maldivian marine biologist and activist, asked me as we stood by the Sinamalé Bridge, a Chinese-funded structure connecting Malé to the island where he grew up. His question captured the ambivalence that threads through the politics of development in small South Asian states suspended between India and China. In his words, ‘us’ and ‘them’ collapse into overlapping categories - citizens and elites, hosts and donors, islanders and cosmopolitans - revealing sovereignty not as autonomous but relational, staged, and lived.
This paper situates sovereignty at the intersection of Political Geography, International Relations, and Anthropology, and draws on ethnographic fieldwork in the Maldives and Sri Lanka. It rethinks sovereignty from geopolitical and sensory margins, challenging the Westphalian model that defines it as exclusive territorial control and full autonomy. By juxtaposing ‘aesthetic sovereignty’ in Sri Lanka, where elites aestheticise dependency through infrastructural grandeur, with ‘terrestrial sovereignty’ in the Maldives, where land reclamation materialises power on sinking ground, I show how elites transform asymmetry into opportunity, turning great power rivalry into a theatre for the spatialisation of sovereignty.
In this paper, bridges, ports, towers, and reclaimed land become performative arenas where sovereignty is produced and felt through materials, bodies, and desires. These spectacles anchor classed and sensory politics of belonging, revealing how elites convert dependence itself into the substance of rule while citizens re-inhabit and sometimes contest these sensory infrastructures. Sovereignty thus emerges not as a fixed legal category but as a discursive, material, and affective practice that links the geopolitics of the Indian Ocean to the everyday textures of life. Ultimately, this paper argues that to study sovereignty from the margins of the Indian Ocean is to trace how power is spatialised and then sensed, moving through infrastructures and bodies.
