Oceania includes sovereign states as well as overseas territories of metropolitan powers. In both cases, contemporary geopolitical borders are legacies of colonialism. As in many (de)colonised places, materialisations of spatially anchored social imaginaries and practices of self and otherness, play a role in the everyday politics of Oceania's communities and states. Notably, cultural intimacies (Herzfeld, 2016) in this region are also shaped by tensions between islands in an archipelagic unit. Characterised by plural identities, Oceania's communities must navigate solidarities within the colonial borders of unitary sovereign states or non-sovereign island territories. Given this context, we ask whether spatially anchored identities within archipelagic contexts are politically engaged, playing a role in the politics of state (dis)cohesion across the region. This paper presents findings from 73 interviews across four pairs of Pacific islands -Wallis-Futuna, Tahiti-Mangareva, Rarotonga-Manihiki, Pohnpei-Chuukexploring how communities define their own identities and the identity of those on 'the other island'. We find both sides in agreement on six complementary and rather respectful identities. We therefore suggest that while political tensions and calls for secession in archipelagos are real, it is unlikely that identity politics at this point in time inflames political break ups.

Wallis and Futuna are a French overseas collectivity in Oceania. In 1969, the French state formally ceded responsibility for the territory's primary education to the Catholic mission and reimburses related expenses. Against this backdrop, this article uses the negotiations about primary education between these two nonsovereign island territories and their colonial metropole to explore islanders' views of the relationship. We conducted interviews with eight representatives of local institutions associated with primary education and we analyzed relevant official agreements. Our analysis suggests that, from the islanders' perspective, the negotiations with metropolitan France about policies and funding for primary education are driven by different identities located within a shared national identity. We find these identities are not merely different, but complementary in a non-hierarchical fashion. We also find that these identities seem to be mutually constituted between metropolitans and islanders through negotiations that are often adversarial and-from the islanders' view-predicated on detailed knowledge of the history of these negotiations. In addition, the resulting education policies regularly see primary schools receiving unequal treatment in comparison to schools in metropolitan France. However, in counterweight, islanders can also succeed in giving unequal treatment to metropolitan regulations by bending them to suit local interests or values.

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