Unruly Waters. Mobility and Fisheries Development in the Celebes Sea

A small segment of the Western Pacific, the Celebes Sea constitutes today the maritime border between Eastern Indonesia and the Philippines. Despite centuries-old attempts at domesticating the frontier between the two territories, the maritime region remains porous to legal and illegal trespassing of people and goods. In recent years, these liminal waters have been the subject of more forceful discourses and government practices that have tried to curb circulation and economic activities occurring outside of extant legal frameworks, particularly in conjunction with Indonesia’s swelling tunafish economy. Governmental initiatives and industrial plans have been of particular consequence to the communities on both sides of the border. While the hardening of national boundaries had produced ethno-identity shifts in the course of the 20^th century, the recent infrastructural developments have also altered in dramatic ways the economic lives and the demographic make-up of the region, especially on the Indonesian side of the Celebes Sea.

The paper aims at underlying the multiple ways in which the historically mobile coastal communities today gravitating around Bitung (Indonesia) navigate the conditions of precarity and illegality issued amidst blueprints of economic development based on fisheries extractivism. It points at the wider socio-economic changes occurring in the region at the core and at the margins of the industrial projects mushrooming in the coastal areas of the southern Celebes Sea and what worldmaking means in their shadow.