Description
In 2025, France still ‘possesses’ over 12 ‘non-sovereign territories’, i.e. ongoing colonies. New Caledonia/ Kanaky is one of them: this archipelago, invaded by representatives of the French state from 1853, is an ongoing settler colony. In this paper, I propose to examine New Caledonia/ Kanaky as a ‘military landscape’ (Woodward, 2014), far from the ‘exotic’ fantasies of paradise associated to this Oceanic archipelago. Instead, this frame enables us to read it is a space whose lack of formal sovereignty is (re)produced through military practices made unseen by the colonial ‘state’. In this paper, I argue that ‘official’ sites of memory (such as war monuments and museums) legitimize colonial sovereignty and ‘possession’ while pretending a form of neutrality/ truth. I conduct my analysis through ethnographic observations and critical discourse analysis over a specific period of immersive research (November 2025- March 2026), informed by my personal experience of growing up in New Caledonia/ Kanaky. This paper encourages IR scholars to practice their curiosity to explore the discursive/ ‘innocent’ mechanisms (Sabaratnam, 2023) sustaining the coloniality of global order(s).
