Making sense of securitised water bodies and borders through the lens of Glissant’s archipelagic thinking

This paper explores the conceptual and methodological potential of Édouard Glissant’s ‘archipelagic thinking’ for studying securitized water bodies and borders. Its aim is to reimagine their social and political relations from an aquatic, relational perspective—in sites shaped by histories of conflict and contemporary processes of militarization, environmental scrutiny, and border enforcement. We mobilise archipelagic thinking to deconstruct and challenge the top-down, dichotomous epistemologies that dominate strategic and geopolitical studies. Their influential discourses often rely on threatening metaphors of water—emphasizing fear, instability, and control—that inform the marginalization or criminalization of coastal and riverine communities and overlook water’s agentive, relational, life-sustaining, and identity-forming qualities, limiting our understanding of what it means to live with securitized waters. Drawing on empirical material from Trincomalee in Sri Lanka, the Isthmus of Panama, and southern Philippines, we highlight how communities continue to live with and through water in ways that resist and reconfigure linear, state-centric, territorially driven logics and regimes. Dominant security perspectives either ignore, criminalize or fragment people’s lives. Archipelagic thinking enables us to see connection (Relation), fluidity and multiplicity in both the material and imaginary, and thus understand the ambiguous outcomes we witness in how people’s lives are entangled with securitised waters, mimicking their rhythms.