International Relations Scholarship and Islands of the Indian Ocean Region: Balancing Global, Regional, and National Levels with Perspectives from the Global South and Beyond

After relative neglect in international relations (IR) scholarship, the Indian Ocean region is more salient as the result of global and regional power shifts, as well as ongoing concern about climate change. Yet, the degree to which this newfound attention addresses issues of democratic governance and also originates from and thus embodies perspectives of the Global South itself remains uncertain. This panel therefore invites papers on Global South perspectives regarding geostrategic and ecological importance, as well as global and regional perspective and country-level analyses of democratic governance in this changing context and the relationship among these phenomena.
The region’s Small Island Developing States (SIDS) – Comoros, the Maldives, Mauritius, Seychelles, and the French departments of Reunion and Mayotte—hold geostrategic influence disproportionate to their populations; yet their perspectives remain under-represented in mainstream IR. This panel invites Global South epistemologies, along with comparative insights from small-state theory, ocean governance, postcolonial IR, and critical approaches to great-power competition. The larger island states of Madagascar and Sri Lanka play vital roles as key actors in commercial shipping and energy supply. Thus, this panel also addresses their critical positions with respect to waterways linking the Indian Ocean to the rest of the world.
The panel invites papers on the region as highly vulnerable to climate change. For example, the Maldives is the world’s lowest lying country, with 80% of its land situated less than one meter above sea level. Moreover, the Indian Ocean is warming more quickly than other major oceans, underscoring not only an ecological crisis but also related impacts on aforementioned energy and commerce.
Regarding democracy in the region, Mauritius stands out as a key example of sustained democracy, followed by The Seychelles. The Maldives and Sri Lanka show promise with newer democratic governance. While the Comoros and Madagascar are officially democratic, their institutions are fragile and their democratic practices questionable. This great variation in democratic governance signals the need for country-level analyses, and especially for papers that link those analyses to the aforementioned regional and global levels, with a view to understanding the relationship of global forces to the future of democracy.