Closing the Gap: Australian–Indonesian Relations, the ‘Perilous Moment’ and the Maritime Boundary Zone

Abstract

Australia and Indonesia are two vastly different countries that share a common sea border in the Timor and Arafura Seas. Yet economically, culturally and diplomatically, Australia and Indonesia have been moving much closer together over the last 20 years. In March 1997, the ®nal portion of the seabed border was ®nally delineated, shortly before the onset of the serious economic crisis. This paper focuses on the changing political and economic relations between the two countries and links this with a discussion of border issues, speci®cally UNCLOS III, ®sh and hydrocarbon resources, the Timor Gap Zone of Cooperation and the still unresolved East Timor question.

Political geography: globalization, metapolitical geographies and everyday life

“…Such analyses require a breadth of theoretical frameworks, including the psychology of human agents (van Houtum, 1999), postmodern views (Albert, 1998) and regulation theory (Scott, 1999). The significance of border studies is their relationship to issues of sovereignty and governance (Church and Reid, 1999;Perkmann, 1999), and seeing borders as institutions is the most productive way of using borderlands to investigate how new spaces of power are managed and controlled (Hudson, 1998;Lustik, 1999;Mercer, 1999;Steinberg, 1999).…”