Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean: towards an archipelagic countermapping of maritime mobilities

This research paper problematizes the dominant logics of antagonistic representation that characterize geopolitical and International Relations (IR) discourse, particularly in relation to emergent transregional infrastructural connectivity in the Indian Ocean. It argues that cartographic depictions and discourses of geopolitics are guilty of representing transnational and transregional political relations through rigid, binaristic categories and frameworks that foreclose the possibility of more relational perspectives. By zoning in on the case of Sri Lanka, frequently rendered passive or peripheral in IR-centering narratives, it challenges rigid, securitized representations of oceanic space and territoriality. Methodologically, it comprises a countermapping of vessel mobilities around Sri Lanka, since the rollout of China’s Belt and Road Initiative and Maritime Silk Road in 2018. Drawing on Edouard Glissant’s (1997) archipelagic relationality, it foregrounds alternative means of framing and representing geopolitical relations, as opposed to its dominant registers of antagonism and tension. Its theoretical framework centers fluidity, dynamic relationality, and historical layering as alternatives to linear, colonial logics of mapping and power. By applying archipelagic relations through countermapping and analysis, this research contributes possibilities for more relational framings of geopolitical discourse attuned to fluidity, interconnection and the multiplicity of oceanic narratives.