South Atlantic universals: science, sovereignty and self-determination in the Falkland Islands (Malvinas)

Abstract

Decades after a violent war that re-established British control over the Falkland Islands (Malvinas in Spanish), commercial fishing regimes and offshore oil discoveries have led Argentina and the United Kingdom to reassert their respective sovereignty claims through scientific advances. Scholarly literature on the South Atlantic archipelago focuses almost exclusively on the 1982 military conflict. However, the remote island chain has been a British imperial frontier of scientific knowledge production since Darwin’s 1833 visit aboard the Beagle, and overlapping maritime claims have now made the colonial holdout a key node for the contemporary use of science to spatialize and materialize desirable geopolitical visions of the future. Marine ecologists and geographers curate data on the South Atlantic to represent contrasting imaginaries: (1) Argentina’s oceanic assertion of territorial integrity through the government’s Pampa Azul campaign on the one hand; and (2) British channeling of the Islanders’ self-determination claim through the Falklands-based South Atlantic Environmental Research Institute (SAERI) on the other. Building on Trouillot, I argue that through these clashing imaginaries, sovereignty, self-determination and particular scientific practices become mobilized as “South Atlantic universals,” prescribed worldviews that project transhistorical power from the global periphery (Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Global Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan).