In this issue; Guest Editorial: Islands and ocean: Public law and international legal ordering in Oceania; 10 good reads 2022
In this issue
In his Guest Editorial, which readers will find directly after this section, Guy Fiti Sinclair, member of the ICON•S 2023 organizing committee, explores some of the themes of the forthcoming ICON•S conference on “Islands and Oceans: Public Law in a Plural World.”
Our annual Honor Roll of Reviewers lists the many colleagues who acted as peer reviewers for ICON in 2022. The Editorial Team is grateful to these colleagues who generously devoted their time and efforts to ensure the excellent scholarly standards of the Journal.
The Articles section includes five contributions. Virgilio Afonso da Silva investigates the role of the necessity test in applying the principle of proportionality. While it is often underestimated, the necessity test has strengths, especially as it relates to to politics, knowledge from other areas, time, and technological development. Da Silva argues that shedding light on these strengths has important implications for several ongoing debates around proportionality.
Amichai Cohen and Yuval Shany focus on Israel’s High Court of Justice (HCJ) and its transition from occupation law to human rights law. They argue that this shift constitutes a potentially important step towards confronting the systematic discrimination against Palestinians, which the occupation law paradigm failed to prevent.
Stéphanie Hennette Vauchez analyzes the routinization of emergency powers, with specific reference to France. She shows that, rather than derogating from or suspending the legal order, contemporary emergency powers are intensely juridical, and their exercise is often supported by the claim that they are fully compatible with the rule of law. Precisely this justification, as well as the use of forms and language of the rule of law, make the contemporary exercise of emergency powers more dangerous as they subvert the model’s meaning and sense from the inside.
The article by Bell E. Yosef deals with dialogic judicial review. The author argues that, on the one hand, the dialectic interaction between supreme courts and legislatures regarding the constitutionality of legislation has much value from an institutional and instrumental point of view. On the other hand, however, constitutional dialogue can also have a negative influence on petitioners and similar groups, as their rights are being trampled under a “dialogic veil.” She concludes that constitutional dialogue can and sometimes must be restricted to avoid hindering human rights, and she sketches a doctrine designed to prevent impairing human rights in the name of dialogic interaction.
Finally, Timothy Endicott poses the question whether the law should prohibit all injustices and give recourse against them—he gives the name “the rule of justice” to the imaginary state of affairs in which it does so. Ultimately he argues that the justification for legal measures should instead be grounded in a political principle, i.e. that the law ought to make the political community a good one.
The Symposium section features a set of articles on Pluralizing Constitutional Interpretation, which aims to expand the analysis of constitutional interpretation beyond court rulings and legal materials to provide a more complete understanding of constitutional engagement between different institutions and actors. The symposium opens with an Introduction by Maartje De Visser and Jaclyn L. Neo, the symposium conveners. They discuss three directions for pluralizing constitutional interpretation: pluralization of actors; methodological and disciplinary pluralization; and pluralization of orientation, characterized by intersecting viewpoints and sites of interpretation.
The second article of the symposium, also authored by Maartje De Visser and Jaclyn L. Neo, addresses the question what a pluralist institutional approach to constitutional interpretation should look like. They suggest an approach that goes beyond the court-centricity that characterized much of the earlier work on constitutional interpretation to include the role of other actors including executives, agencies and social actors, in constructing the meaning of the constitutional text.
Andrew Harding’s article then focuses on “practical interpretations”—that is, constitutional interpretations given by the executive or legislative branch. It does so principally in relation to constitutional conventions in Westminster-type systems, which are normally not subject to judicial review. He underscores that these practical interpretations are at least equally as important as judicial interpretations and that more scholarly attention should be devoted to understanding them.
Lynette J. Chua moves “out of the courts and onto the ground”: her article emphasizes the relevance of the study of legal consciousness, particularly that of ordinary people, to constitutional interpretation.
In the last article in this section, Kevin Y.L. Tan investigates the question of when and how historical facts are used in constitutional interpretation. He shows inter alia that history may be used to restrict rather than promote liberties and can be abused to introduce unwritten customary constitutional law.
The Critical Review of Governance section offers an article by Franz Xavier Barrios-Suvelza on the concept of coup d´état. Taking as a case study the resignation of Bolivian President Morales in 2019, the article proposes a new conceptualization of the coup d´état: a coup must not only be illegal but must also break the partial legal order. The author proposes this different notion of regime restoration for all those cases in which the partial legal order underlying the regime has already been broken by the overthrown ruler prior to her/his anomalous exit.
In our Critical Review of Jurisprudence section, Maurits Helmich addresses criticism targeting the United Kingdom Supreme Court’s legitimacy and its tendency to enter the domain of “politics.” Taking the 2019 Miller/Cherry “prorogation” judgment as a case study, he analyzes the tension underpinning this criticism. He concludes that attempts to distinguish the judicial domain from the domain of politics are themselves rooted in ideologically deeply colored definitions and acts of political stance-taking.
The ICON: Debate!section hosts an exchange between Antoine Vauchez and Frank Vibert on independence in Europe. Vauchez explains how the European Union has been a laboratory for the notion of independence. Indeed, it promoted a shift from a notion of independence as a negative institutional device (independence from) to that of a broad empowering technology of supranational government linked to notions of general interest, professional expertise and discretionary powers (independence for). The objective is to frame a more robust and democratically open notion of independence to which European and national policymakers can be held accountable. Vibert’sreply to Vauchez deploys a constitutional perspective to analyze independence, and argues that far from being a benign “proxy” for Europe’s constitutional evolution, “independence” obscures the real issues and the costs to the EU of prioritizing functional objectives over democratization.
This issue includes six book reviews that examine books covering different jurisdictions and topics. Christoph Schönberger’s review of Authoritarian Liberalism and the Transformation of Modern Europe by Michael Wilkinson scrutinizes the transformation and reconfiguration of Europe after the Second World War. Ching-Fang Hsu analyzes the legal complex in Myanmar and its interaction with political elites in her review of Rule of Law Intermediaries by Kristina Simion. In his review of Key Ideas in Law by Jack Beatson, Brian Christopher Jones revisits some of the oldest yet unsolved puzzles in the realm of law. Kriszta Kovács and Gábor Attila Tóth advance a different viewpoint on the notion of democracy, among other things, in their review of Ruling by Cheating by András Sajó. Andrej Lang’s review of Local Meanings of Proportionality by Afroditi Marketou reveals that a contextual understanding is crucially important in understanding proportionality. Finally, in his review of The Gun, the Ship, and the Pen by Linda Colley, Yasuo Hasebe aptly points out that reverence for the Emperor was not an entrenched tradition in Japan but a new invention.
EM
Guest Editorial: Islands and ocean: Public law and international legal ordering in Oceania
We invited Guy Fiti Sinclair, member of the ICON•S 2023 organizing committee, to contribute a Guest Editorial.
This year’s annual conference of the International Society of Public Law (ICON•S) has the capacious theme of “Islands and Oceans: Public Law in a Plural World”. Hosted by Victoria University of Wellington and the New Zealand Centre for Public Law, it will be the first ICON•S conference held in Oceania.[1] Aside from Australia, this is a region that has received relatively little notice in the pages of this Journal.[2] Philipp Dann recently issued a welcome call for a Global South “turn” in comparative constitutional law.[3] Extending that argument, this Guest Editorial argues that public law in the small island states and territories of the Pacific should be understood as deeply shaped by colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial encounters, which continue to inform projects of international legal and political ordering both from without and from within the region.[4] In doing so, it sketches some possibilities for greater scholarly engagement with public law issues, both domestic and international, in this often-overlooked part of the world.
1. (Post)colonial public laws in the Pacific
Some readers of I•CON may doubt whether any further attention to Pacific island states and territories is warranted, given their relatively small populations and economies, and thus presumptively marginal public law jurisprudences. Consider, however, that the Pacific Ocean covers roughly a third of the earth’s surface, encompassing untold natural resources, including islands that are home to approximately one‑third of the world’s languages and cultures. These include legal cultures which have been objects of interest to European anthropologists from Malinowski onwards.[5] Indeed, the great diversity of island states in Oceania—notwithstanding certain historical and cultural links across its expanse—and their varied encounters with European imperialism have resulted in a fascinating array of (ongoing) experiments and challenges in combining Indigenous customary law, judge-made law, statute, and international law.[6] In the settler colonies of Aotearoa New Zealand and Australia, similarly, a number of innovative approaches have been attempted and proposed to enhance Indigenous rights and self-governance, with significant public law implications.[7]
Two excellent, recent books suggest opportunities for further exploration of colonial legacies in public law in Oceania, from a range of perspectives. Writing in a comparative constitutional law idiom familiar to I•CON’s readership, Anna Dziedzic’s Foreign Judges in the Pacific examines the unusually heavy reliance on foreign judges in courts of constitutional jurisdiction in Pacific states.[8] Skillfully deploying both socio-legal and doctrinal methods to analyze and evaluate this phenomenon in nine Pacific states, Dziedzic reveals some of the lasting impacts of colonialism in a region that experienced formal decolonization relatively late, and where a dozen or so territories remain de jure or de facto colonies. In doing so, she also demonstrates that “the constitutional experiences of the Pacific islands are worthy of close attention in and of themselves, as single country as well as regional comparative studies”.[9] The timeliness of Dziedzic’s study became apparent last year, when the government of Kiribati suspended several foreign judges serving on its High Court and Court of Appeal.[10]
Cait Storr’s International Status in the Shadow of Empire approaches colonial legacies in Oceania through a critical history of Nauru’s changing status in public international law.[11] Consisting of a single island of 21 square kilometers, Nauru is the third smallest state in the world, though for a time it was one of the wealthiest due to phosphate mining. Storr traces the administrative practices involved in Nauru’s governance as a German protectorate to a League of Nations Mandate, a United Nations Trust Territory, and eventually to independence in 1968. Crucially, Storr also shows how Nauru’s shifting status relates to continuities in imperial exploitation of Nauru, its people and natural environment, up to and including the establishment on the island of an offshore immigration detention facility for the Australian government and a new deep-sea mining venture. Storr offers a compelling account of “Nauru as symptom” of the international legal order,[12] disclosing the lasting impacts of the latter on Nauru’s domestic legal and political system. Equally illuminating studies could be constructed from the experiences of other Pacific states, linking international and domestic public law through distinct experiences of colonialism, decolonization, and postcolonial state-making.
2. International ordering from without
As these examples indicate, Oceania—whether imagined as the “South Seas,” “South Pacific,” “Pacific islands,” or simply “the Pacific”—has long been shaped by projects of international ordering by external actors. Indeed, recent events confirm that Oceania remains a region of strategic importance for “great power” rivalries and activity. In April of 2022, when much of the world’s attention was fixed on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China signed a secret security agreement with the government of the Solomon Islands, a country of around 700,000 people and over 900 islands, positioned west of Papua New Guinea and northeast of Australia. A leaked draft of the agreement appeared to authorize China to make regular warship visits to the island nation and raised the possibility of it acquiring its first military base in Oceania.[13] The following month, China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi began an unprecedented tour of eight Pacific Island countries, with the aim of persuading these countries to sign up to a multilateral development and security agreement that would secure China’s position in the region.[14]
Though that overarching aim was not achieved immediately, China’s success in concluding bilateral agreements with ten Pacific Island states set alarm bells ringing in Washington, DC, Canberra, and the capitals of other states around the Pacific rim. These countries in turn launched new diplomatic initiatives to win back the allegiance of Pacific Island states. In July 2022, Vice President Kamala Harris addressed the Pacific Islands Forum via video link, pledging the United States’ renewed commitment to the region and announcing that new US embassies would be opened in two Pacific states, in addition to one in the Solomon Islands.[15] Two months later, the Biden administration hosted the first US-Pacific Island Country Summit at the White House, issued a “Pacific Partnership Strategy” and a joint “Declaration on US-Pacific Partnership” with 14 Pacific Island nations—again including the Solomon Islands—and pledged over $810 million in new aid to the region.[16]
These events took place against the background of at least a decade of growing concerns about the rising influence of China, from the Obama administration’s “rebalance to Asia and the Pacific,” Australia’s “Pacific step up,” and New Zealand’s “Pacific re-set.” Since then, the geopolitical imaginary of the “Indo-Pacific” has been firmly established as a broad counter-strategy to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), largely displacing the earlier mental map of “Asia-Pacific.” The “Indo-Pacific” framework shapes policy statements produced by multiple states—the United States, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Canada, France, Germany, and the Netherlands, among others—as well as international organizations, such as the European Union (EU) and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). It also informs security arrangements, such as the trilateral pact between Australia, the UK, and the US (AUKUS), the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue between Australia, India, Japan, and the US (the Quad), and even NATO.[17]
Despite comprising half of both terms, the Pacific remains as much a secondary player (or perhaps afterthought) in the “Indo-Pacific” as it was in the “Asia Pacific.” In the new Indo-Pacific strategies—the EU’s is a useful example here[18]—Oceania is largely objectified as a source of valuable natural resources, as a medium of international trade, or as an arena for strategic competition and, potentially, conflict. At best, it is depicted as a region in need of outside aid and assistance. In other words, Pacific peoples, governments and intergovernmental organizations are granted very little agency in these new efforts to re-order the Pacific region. For all the talk of “partnership” that runs through such documents, they tend to contain only passing reference to Pacific regional organizations, scant acknowledgement of the efforts being made by Pacific states to address the issues that concern them, and certainly no mention of the role of Indigenous knowledge and practices in solving problems of global significance.[19] Other “megaregional” arrangements, such as the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) exclude Pacific states, other than Australia and New Zealand, almost completely.
3. International ordering from within
Yet students of public law in Oceania would be well advised not to ignore arrangements for regional international ordering of a more home-grown provenance. During the 1970s and 1980s, Pacific states worked together through regional bodies centered on the South Pacific Forum (renamed the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) in 1999)—including the Forum Fisheries Agency and the Pacific Islands Development Program—to advance their shared priorities and vision for the region. Supported by a burgeoning civil society, the goals pursued through these agencies met with considerable success, even when these conflicted with the interests of powerful states: decolonization, development, a nuclear-free Pacific (including opposition to both French nuclear tests and Japanese dumping of nuclear waste), environmental protection (ending Japanese driftnet fishing and opposing US incineration of chemical weapons on Johnston Atoll), and establishing the archipelagic principle in the UN Law of the Sea.[20] The ongoing significance of these institutions was underscored last year when Pacific states insisted that China’s proposed multilateral security pact be considered by the Forum, as the region’s premier security body, which has traditionally operated by consensus.[21]
In the past decade or so, a more complex “patchwork” of overlapping and interacting institutions has sought to advance Pacific island states’ interests in Oceania and globally.[22] In addition to the Forum-centered bodies described above, this patchwork incorporates reinvigorated subregional organizations, such as the Melanesian Spearhead Group, which successfully pushed for the reinscription of New Caledonia on the UN’s list of Non-Self-Governing Territories, and groupings such as the Parties to the Nauru Agreement, which has been very effective in securing higher incomes for tuna states.[23] It also includes agencies created to negotiate trade agreements on behalf of Pacific island states, such as the Office of the Chief Trade Adviser, which negotiated with Australia and New Zealand over PACER Plus, and the African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States, which is attempting to negotiate a new post-Cotonou partnership with the EU. And it encompassed the creation of a new international organization, the Pacific Islands Development Forum (PIDF); the rise of the Pacific Small Island Developing States Group (PSIDS) at the UN; and greater involvement of Pacific states in Global South and non-aligned groupings.[24]
The fortunes of these various forms of international legal ordering have been—and no doubt will continue to be—entangled with domestic law and politics, and fundamentally shaped by colonial, postcolonial, and neocolonial dynamics.[25] Some of the more assertive postures and practices associated with the “new Pacific diplomacy” thus emerge from the more activist foreign policy adopted by Fiji following its suspension from PIF, in the wake of a constitutional crisis in 2009.[26] Those events in turn can be traced back to a series of coups as Fijian law and politics have struggled to resolve ethnic divisions between Indigenous Fijians and a large Indo-Fijian population, descended from indentured laborers brought to the country to work on colonial sugar plantations.[27] On the other hand, PIF’s prestige was significantly damaged last year when Kiribati became the first member to withdraw from it. While the ostensible reason for Kiribati’s withdrawal was a dispute over the selection of PIF’s Secretary-General, domestic opposition forces have accused the government of bending to influence from China.[28]
4. Climate change and the “Blue Continent”
One of the main drivers of the “new Pacific diplomacy” was a deep dissatisfaction with existing regional institutions which, dominated by Australia and New Zealand, were insufficiently responsive to Pacific island states’ concerns about climate change. Indeed, the interrelated threats of climate change, rising sea levels, and biodiversity loss have galvanized political and legal action in Oceania to a degree not witnessed since the heyday of the movement for a Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific. PIDF and the PSIDS grouping at the UN, in particular, became key catalysts and mouthpieces of Pacific states’ climate diplomacy. Other actions have been led by individual states, such as the Vanuatu-led campaign seeking an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on obligations of states in relation to climate change and environmental protection.[29] As in previous eras, new civil society groups, many of them led by young people, such as the Pacific Climate Warriors,[30] have coalesced around climate-related issues.
All this suggests the need for closer scholarly attention to international legal ordering “from below” in Oceania. As the Tongan anthropologist Epeli Hau‘ofa argued thirty years ago, the common (colonial, economistic) view of Oceania—as small and isolated islands, with tiny and impoverished populations—belittles its peoples and potentialities. To the contrary, the history of seafaring, exploration, and interaction across the vast Pacific ocean supports a more expansive, holistic and empowering imaginary of pan-Oceanic solidarity, substituting “islands in a far sea” with “a sea of islands.”[31] Inspired by a similar conception, Pacific regional organizations have adopted strategies that center on the “Blue Pacific Continent,”[32] seek new models of “Green/Blue Pacific Economies,”[33] and are replacing the language of “small island states” with “large ocean states.”[34] Only time will tell whether these strategies are successful, what positive and negative effects they have, to what extent they are taken up sincerely or coopted by other interests. In the meantime, surely they deserve our attention as scholars, if not our wholehearted support as citizens of the world. Given the Pacific Ocean’s importance to the future of human life on this planet, perhaps we all can aspire toward realizing Hau‘ofa’s vision:[35]
Oceania is vast, Oceania is expanding, Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the depths of brine and fire deeper still, Oceania is us.
Guy Fiti Sinclair
Associate Professor and Associate Dean (Pasifika), Auckland Law School,
University of Auckland, New Zealand,
and Senior Research Fellow of the New Zealand Centre for Public Law (NZCPL), Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
10 good reads 2022
[Editor’s Note: Professor Weiler’s list of 10 good reads for 2022 was previously published by ICONnect here.]
[1] Two earlier conferences were held in cities on the Pacific rim: Hong Kong in 2018 and Santiago, Chile, in 2019.
[2] A few notable exceptions are Abrak Saati, Participatory Constitution-building in Fiji: A Comparison of the 1993–1997 and the 2012–2013 Processes, 18 International Journal of Constitutional Law (Int. J. Const. L.) (2020) 260; Yash Ghai and Jill Cottrell, A Tale of Three Constitutions: Ethnicity and Politics in Fiji, 5 Int. J. Const. L.639 (2007); and Claudia Geiringer, Cheryl Saunders, and Adrienne Stone(eds), Symposium on Australasian Constitutionalism, 14 Int. J. Const. L.54 (2016).
[3] Phillipp Dann, Liberal Constitutionalism and Postcolonialism in the South and Beyond: On Liberalism as an Open Source and the Insights of Decolonial Critiques, 20 Int. J. Const. L.1 (2022). See also Philipp Dann, Michael Riegner, and Maxim Bönnemann (eds), The Global South and Comparative Constitutional Law (2020); Lena Salaymeh and Ralf Michaels, Decolonial Comparative Law: A Conceptual Beginning, 86 Rabel J. Comp. and Int’l Priv. L. 166 (2022).
[4] This essay uses “Oceania” and “the Pacific region” interchangeably.
[5] Bronislaw Malinowski, Crime and Custom in a Savage Society (1926). More recent legal anthropological studies in the region include Sally Engle Merry, Colonizing Hawai’i: The Cultural Power of Law (2000); and Annelise Riles, The Network Inside Out (2000).
[6] See Jennifer Corrin and A. H. Angelo (eds), Legal Systems of the Pacific (2021).
[7] See, e.g., Carwyn Jones, New Treaty, New Tradition: Reconciling New Zealand and Māori Law (2016); Megan Davis and George Williams, Everything you Need to Know about the Uluru Statement from the Heart (2021); Sarah Maddison and Sana Nakata (eds), Questioning Indigenous-Settler Relations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (2020).
[8] Anna Dziedzic, Foreign Judges in the Pacific(2021).
[9] Id. at 9.
[10] Yan Zhuang, This Country’s Top Judges Were All Foreigners. Now They’re Gone, N. Y. Times (Nov. 26, 2022), available at https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/26/world/asia/foreign-judges-kiribati-pacific.html (last visited Jan. 12, 2023).
[11] Cait Storr, International Status in the Shadow of Empire: Nauru and the Histories of International Law (2020).
[12] Id. at 12. See also Antony Anghie, The Heart of My Home: Colonialism, Environmental Damage, and the Nauru Case, 34 Harvard Int’l L. J. 445 (1993).
[13] Kate Lyons and Dorothy Wickham, The Deal that Shocked the World: Inside the China-Solomons Security Pact, The Guardian (April 20 2022), available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/apr/20/the-deal-that-shocked-the-world-inside-the-china-solomons-security-pact (last visited Jan. 12, 2023).
[14] Kate Lyons, A Pivotal Moment: Pacific Faces a Choice over China that Will Shape It for Decades, The Guardian (May 27 2022), available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/may/28/a-pivotal-moment-pacific-faces-a-choice-over-china-that-will-shape-it-for-decades (last visited Jan. 12, 2023).
[15] The White House, Remarks by Vice President Harris at the Pacific Islands Forum, July 12, 2022, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2022/07/12/remarks-by-vice-president-harris-at-the-pacific-islands-forum/ (last visited Jan. 12, 2023).
[16] The White House, Declaration on U.S.-Pacific Partnership, Sept. 29 2022, available at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2022/09/29/declaration-on-u-s-pacific-partnership/ (last visited Jan. 12, 2023).
[17] NATO, 2022 Strategic Concept, available at https://www.nato.int/strategic-concept/ (last visited Jan. 12, 2023).
[18] European Commission and High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, The EU Strategy for Cooperation in the Indo-Pacific, Sept. 16, 2021.
[19] See, e.g., Jenny Bryant-Tokalau, Indigenous Pacific Approaches to Climate Change (2018).
[20] See generally Greg Fry, Framing the Islands: Power and Diplomatic Agency in Pacific Regionalism (2019).
[21] Lucy Craymer, Pacific Islands Forum Should Consider China Security Ties, Samoa’s Prime Minister Says, Reuters, June 14, 2022, available at https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/pacific-islands-forum-should-consider-china-security-ties-samoa-pm-2022-06-14/ (last visited Jan 12, 2023).
[22] Matthew Dornan and Tess Newton Cain, Regional Service Delivery among Pacific Island Countries: An Assessment, 1 Asia & the Pacific Pol. Stud. 541, 555 (2014).
[23] Transform Aqorau, How Tuna is Shaping Regional Diplomacy, in The New Pacific Diplomacy, 223 (ch 18) (Greg Fry and Sandra Tarte, eds, 2015).
[24] See generally Fry and Tarte (eds), supra note 23.
[25] See generally Steven Ratuva, Contested Terrain: Reconceptualising Security in the Pacific (2019).
[26] Greg Fry and Sandra Tarte, The “New Pacific Diplomacy”: An Introduction, in Fry and Tarte (eds), supra note 23, 3 (ch 1).
[27] See Ghai and Cottrell, supra note 2.
[28] Rimon Rimon, China Influenced Kiribati Exit from Pacific Islands Forum, MP Claims, The Guardian, July 12 2022, available at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/12/china-influenced-kiribati-exit-from-pacific-islands-forum-mp-claims (last visited Jan. 12, 2023).
[29] See Vanuatu ICJ Initiative, available at https://www.vanuatuicj.com/ (last visited Jan 12, 2023).
[30] See The Pacific Climate Warriors at https://world.350.org/pacificwarriors/ (last visited Jan. 12, 2023); Hannah Fair, Their Sea of Islands? Pacific Climate Warriors, Oceanic Identities, and World Enlargement, 32 The Contemporary Pacific 341 (2020).
[31] Epeli Hau‘ofa, Our Sea of Islands, 6 The Contemporary Pacific 148, 152 (1994).
[32] Pacific Islands Forum Secretariat, 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent (Suva, 2022); Pacific Community, Strategic Plan 2022–2031 (2022).
[33] Pacific Islands Development Forum, Strategic Profile, available at https://www.pidf.int/strategic-profile/ (last visited Jan. 12, 2023). See generally Philippa Louey, The Pacific Blue Economy: An Instrument of Political Maneuver, 135 Marine Policy (2022).
[34] Tarcisius Kabutaulaka, Mapping the Blue Pacific in a Changing Regional Order, in The China Alternative: Changing Regional Order in the Pacific Islands, 41 (ch 1), 51 (Graeme Smith and Terence Wesley-Smith, eds, 2021).
[35] Hau‘ofa, supra note 31, at 160.
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