Unbuilt Anxieties: Infrastructure Projects, Transnational Conflict in the South China/East Sea, and Vietnamese Statehood

Abstract

The conflicts shaping territorial claims and counter-claims to overlapping areas of the South China Sea threatens to significantly damage Sino-Vietnamese relations, destabilize regional security arrangements, and alter the geopolitical status quo. The governments of both countries routinely invoke historical documents, commission scientific studies, and cite legal principles to justify their competing claims in the maritime region and the resources contained therein. The role different types of energy infrastructure play in the state-level disputes have received little attention, however. This essay addresses this oversight. In it, I foreground the complex ways not yet built infrastructure affect Sino-Vietnamese relations as well as our theoretical understanding of "the state", especially with regard to Vietnam. Not yet built infrastructure refers to more than the assemblage of things that will be built in the future to power the economy, such as oil rigs, natural gas pipelines, and refineries. The concept also includes the ideological positions that presuppose the materialization of blueprint plans in physical form, i.e., the broader goals such infrastructure is meant to achieve. Towards this end, the article focuses on how state actors and their proxies conceptualize the likely impacts not yet built infrastructure will have upon their respective interests once construction is completed. The case study highlights how the need for energy security strengthens national security at some moments, weakens it at others, and both at still others.

Navigating Seas, Markets, and Sovereignties: Fishers and Occupational Slippage in the South China Sea

“…Labeling fishers' activities at sea "flexible fishing," Jennifer Gaynor (2010) called our attention to changing patterns of labor in fishing communities in eastern Indonesia caused by the marginalization of small-scale fisheries and the expansion of commercial fisheries. However, we also need to pay attention to the issue of how the present "maritime territorialization" (Roszko 2015, MacLean 2016, as embodied in its most globalized form in the EEZ regime, interacts with pre-nation-state patterns of mobility to produce new opportunities, new constraints, and configurations of navigational mobility among fishers who may also operate under the radar of sovereign state control. The 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) established a legal regime whereby a coastal nation has full authority over its "territorial waters," which extend 12 nautical miles out from the coast.…”

“…I examine the phenomena that are being represented by scholars and policy makers under the new "fisheries crime" rubric, which-in line with a view of modern fishing industries as necessarily mono-occupational-views all kinds of "illegal" fishing operations and related activities as part of transnational organized criminal networks. Such criminalization cannot be separated from state border regimes that generate fishers' everyday "illegality" (van Schendel and Abraham 2005, De Genova 2013, Hoàng Cầm 2011 against the backdrop of "maritime territorialization" (Roszko 2015, MacLean 2016. Connecting history and ethnography in his historical analysis of the China-Vietnam borderland, Bradley Davis (2017) shows that the border plays a central role in producing "illegal" trade and networks that do not fade over time, but reinvent themselves along with changing borderland regimes (see also van Schendel and Abraham 2005).…”