Island State Agency as ‘Project Enactment’: The Regional Maritime Security Architecture of the Western Indian Ocean

Attention to Indian Ocean island states and questions around their ‘agency’ have grown recently, in tandem with renewed policy and scholarly interest in the Indian Ocean as a site of strategic competition. A challenge, however, is to move beyond framing island states only in relation to the great or major powers who seek political influence, territorial footholds, and unimpeded flows of goods and energy across this maritime space. In this article, I theorise agency as ‘the pursuit of projects’ to situate island state agency within local categories of value, rather than relationally, within terms set by the dominant interests of great or major powers. Focusing on cooperative, sub-regional responses to maritime security threats, I examine the island state-led initiatives through and with the Indian Ocean Commission that have culminated in the design, establishment and development of the Regional Maritime Security Architecture of the Western Indian Ocean (RMSA). Drawing on fieldwork research and interactions with regional and national officials spanning 7 years, I highlight purposeful projects of regional cooperation in the pursuit of safer seas and visibilise how key actors conceptualise and leverage alternative bases of collective and spatialised island state power. These ‘projects and powers of their own’ present a broader domain, literally and figuratively, for visibilising and understanding island state agency, even amidst complex relations of regional power asymmetry.