Technological advances have challenged numerous social and political domains over recent decades, including the materialities and imaginaries of islands and islandness in Oceania. Since the early 2000s, a plurality of schemes, discourses, politics, anxieties, and hopes have coalesced around the possible construction of artificial islands, referred to as floating islands, floating nations, floating cities, or seasteads, depending on the new islands’ imagined purposes and peoples. If achieved, these new, de novo, islands will contribute to an ongoing regional geopolitical remaking that requires urgent attention. However, in examining floating islands as boundary objects, this article suggests that, even if never realized, they are exceptional points of focus for perceiving and reflecting on the uncanny, disruptive character of capital at work in the contemporary Pacific Islands in tension with multi-state regional policy initiatives for collective governance and sustainable ocean management. Moreover, this article argues that floating islands are not the only “artificial islands” producing tensions between communities, states, and international ocean governance frameworks. Deep-sea concessions for mineral exploitation, the spatialization of high-seas fishing rights, and large- and small-scale conservation zones similarly raise issues of the fixity or fluidity of territoriality, sovereignty, rights of access and restriction to common or uncommon marine spaces and their resources, as well as conflicting imaginaries and ideologies around the ocean and Oceania as an open frontier.

中文翻译：

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大洋洲未来边缘的浮岛、边境和其他边界物体

近几十年来，技术进步对许多社会和政治领域提出了挑战，包括大洋洲岛屿和岛屿的物质性和想象。自 2000 年代初以来，多种计划、话语、政治、焦虑和希望围绕着可能建造的人工岛屿聚集在一起，这些人工岛屿被称为浮岛、浮国、浮城或海上基地，这取决于新岛屿的想象。目的和人民。如果实现，这些新的、从头的岛屿将有助于正在进行的需要紧急关注的区域地缘政治重塑。然而，在将浮岛视为边界对象时，本文提出，即使从未意识到，它们也是感知和反思离奇事物的特殊焦点，当代太平洋岛屿资本的破坏性特征与多国区域政策倡议的集体治理和可持续海洋管理产生了紧张关系。此外，本文认为，浮岛并不是唯一在社区、国家和国际海洋治理框架之间产生紧张关系的“人造岛屿”。用于矿产开采的深海特许权、公海捕鱼权的空间化以及大小规模的保护区同样引发了领土、主权、进入权以及对共同或非共同海洋空间的限制的固定性或流动性问题及其资源，以及围绕海洋和大洋洲作为开放边界的相互冲突的想象和意识形态。