Tatsuki Kohatsu's Dissertation Defense
December 03, 2025, 11:00 AM - 1:00 PM
Saunders 443 or Zoom
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Please join us for Tatsuki Kohatsu's Dissertation Defense, on Wednesday, December 3rd at 11am in Saunders, 443 or on Zoom!
Over the past decade and a half, US and Chinese military forces, infrastructures, and their allies have proliferated through the Pacific region. Scholars of critical geopolitics demonstrate how representations and discourses mediate geopolitical practices. To date, the majority of this scholarship has focused on continental geopolitics. However, islands represent a significant but undertheorized space of geopolitical discourse and practice. This dissertation fills this lacuna by contesting popular continental and metropolitan imaginings of islands as insular, empty, and marginal, with a focus on the Ryukyu Islands. In this dissertation, I argue that a relational perspective on territory unsettles how the boundary-making of continental and metropolitan states perpetuates islands, such as the Ryukyu Islands, as strategic island borders and reproduces the coloniality of power in the geopolitics of the Pacific. Drawing on ethnographic and archival materials, this dissertation reveals the everyday experiences of people in the Ryukyu Islands with boundary-making in and through the islands. Since the 1940s, a wide range of practices, including peace-making, military operations, border defense, and development agendas, have constituted territorial (re)enforcement practices aimed at maintaining the islands as Japan’s strategic border alongside the United States. The case of the Ryukyu Islands illustrates that the dominant continental and metropolitan perspectives on territorial (re)enforcement practices dictate how the island space and concurrent changes can be understood. These dominant views on territorial (re)enforcement shape what can be accounted for and states’ accountability for their geopolitical practices. In doing so, the boundary-making process obscures alternative island imaginaries and people’s experiences of the adverse impacts of geopolitical maneuvering. In this way, this dissertation illustrates that the geopolitics of the Pacific is not only about making island space legible through territorial delineation, but also about how concurrent changes can be accounted for and what boundary-making obscures. In this respect, it also captures how island residents in the Ryukyu Islands contest the territorial (re)enforcement and obscuration by accounting for their experiences, livelihoods, and social and spatial relations beyond Japan’s current borders. With the case of the Ryukyu Islands, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of a relational perspective on territory and the dynamics of legibility and obscuration to critically examine the role of boundary-making. Neglecting the under-examined aspect of boundary-making perpetuates the coloniality of power in analyzing the geopolitics of the Pacific. Given the limited critical engagement with boundary-making in (post)colonial island contexts beyond dominant continental and metropolitan perspectives, this study contributes to the emerging scholarship on the political geography of islands and everyday geopolitics in the Pacific.
Zoom Link: https://hawaii.zoom.us/
Dissertation Committee:Mary Mostafanezhad, Department of Geography & Environment, UHM (Chair)
Reece Jones, Department of Geography & Environment, UHM
Laurel Mei-Singh, Department of Geography & Environment, UHM & Department of American Studies, UT, Austin
Masato Ishida, Department of Philosophy, UHM (University Rep)
Takashi Yamazaki, Department of Geography, Osaka Metropolitan University
Vernadette Gonzalez, Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley
Contact
Mary Mostafanezhad - mostafan@hawaii.edu