Islands Militarization and the Claiming for Sovereignty and Dignity Rights

The post-Yalta hegemonies fostered military installations in the Mediterranean, legitimizing the interventions as the modernization of poor and backward societies. Notably, islands are territories subject to colonization that are considered economically marginal but strategic platforms from a geo-military view. From this perspective, the islands exemplify the ideal subaltern object to apply institutional technicalities to ease military settlements, build infrastructure, and conduct military testing and training, epitomizing the prototype of coloniality (McCusker and Soares, 2011).

Based on empirical research on the militarization of the Mediterranean Islands, this proposal aims to reflect the intersectionality of coloniality, secrecy, and uncertainty in environmental risk assessment. We reflect on how the island’s militarization, from the Mediterranean to the Pacific Sea, was a global phenomenon long before the globalization theory. The postcolonial approach helps to review how social exclusion, resource exploitation, and denying full sovereignty in the name of national security are common paths, highlighting how subalternity and coloniality are at the core of the continental discourse on otherness and the availability of the Islands to be militarized. From a military point of view, islands are terra nullius, where activities are conducted free of any control, and thus related to secrecy and discretion, or silent domination (Chamoiseau 1997).

The imposition of militarization and colonial practices on islands inevitably sparked resistance, leading to strong identities and movements opposing extractivism and advocating self-determination and environmental justice. Protest and resistance to military island exploitation face creeping institutional strategy in manufacturing uncertainty (Frickel, 2014) by adopting secrecy, denial, silence, and invisibility (Latour, 1992), socially constructed agnotology, and ignoring protest content to any form of resistance. We reflect on how anti-base movement issues are connected in a global protest that drives the global justice movement toward the right to sovereignty and dignity.