ABSTRACT
Recent geopolitical tensions between the world’s most powerful countries have fuelled competition for control and influence over countries and their territory within the South Pacific. One of the reasons for this is that the South Pacific is seen to be possessing an untapped potential of both terrestrial and marine mineral resources. The confluence of these environmental, geopolitical, and economic forces in the South Pacific are explored in a case study of an ongoing iron sands mining project in the province of Ba, Fiji. The area being mined is largely coastline and falls under a large local community’s qoliqoli or inshore fishing rights. The governance of these fishing rights is ambivalent, and the lack of a clear legal framework on the qoliqoli has lent itself to a process that has been coined as coastal grabbing. Drawing on the concept of ‘terraqueous territoriality’, where transnational capitalist forces attempt to transcend the distinction between land and sea in the accumulation and extraction of resources, this chapter explains how this re-territorialization of space creates tensions and conflicts between mining companies, the state and Indigenous landowners.
