Indian Ocean Small Islands Along the Postcolonial Trajectory: Chagos and the Maldives

In 2009, Robert Kaplan defined the Indian Ocean Region (IOR) as “the central internship for the challenges of the twenty-first century”. For Bouchard and Crumplin (2010), the issues now playing out in the Indian Ocean mean that it can be “neglected no longer” within world geopolitics. The crucial historic transition underway in the area is being driven by the network of relations among the “big players” on the regional chessboard: the USA, China, and India. Both the geographical nodes at which these relations unfold and new narratives shaping the geographical imaginary of the region are key to understanding these contemporary historical processes. In this essay, we examine the main historic and geographic processes that laid the ground for the current period of transition: the renewed centrality of the Indian Ocean, Sino-Indian rivalry (Brewster 2015) and the geopolitics of environmental crisis. We focus here on two archipelagos (the Chagos Islands and the Maldives) that have been described as “unsinkable aircraft carriers” within this scenario. In recent decades, Chagos and the Maldives have become key nodes in the new geopolitical cartography. In 1971, the US Navy built a military base on Diego Garcia and, since the beginning of the “Indian Ocean Cold War”, the Maldives have been situated at the fringe between Indian military supremacy and China’s influence on the economies of peripheral counties. This focus allows us to investigate contemporary transitions and to propose an alternative reading of the conflict for hegemony currently underway between the “big global players”.