ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Artificial Islands and Sovereignty in the Law of the Sea

• In Event: Governing the Seas: Ocean Science, International Law, and the Contested Politics of the Post-War Ocean (1 of 2)

English Abstract

This paper traces the twentieth-century formation of “artificial islands” as a legal-technical category in the law of the sea. For centuries, states built structures in the sea— forts on shoals, reclaimed coasts, causeways, and later offshore platforms—and treated them as extensions of territorial authority. Yet twentieth–century codification introduced a new distinction: UNCLOS Article 11 incorporates permanent harbor works into the coast, while Article 60(8) denies “artificial islands” island status and bars them from generating a territorial sea or EEZ. How and why did certain man-made structures come to be classified as incapable of producing maritime entitlements, even as others were jurisdictionally unquestioned?

I approach this question by reading pre-UNCLOS debates—including the 1930 Hague Codification Conference, postwar definitions of offshore installations, and the 1958 Continental Shelf Convention—juxtaposed with three cases of material practice: nineteenth-century sea forts built on banks and managed as territorial outposts; colonial harbor reclamations in Hong Kong and Bombay starting in the 1860s; and postwar offshore installations and late-twentieth-century ‘micronations’ such as Rose Island and Minerva. These sites collectively illustrate how built structures at sea generated specific anxieties in the postwar Global North about how sovereignty was claimed, especially by decolonizing nations, culminating in UNCLOS ultimately narrowing those claims. In doing so, I argue that UNCLOS developed internally contradictory ideas of the “natural” and the “artificial,” as well as of the “attached” and the “detached,” that irrevocably shaped contemporary disputes.

Author

• Kamil Ahsan, Yale University