Geographical Connections: Law, Islands, and Remoteness

Abstract

The paper introduces a special issue dedicated to cross-disciplinary research on insular condition and insularity. Situated at the crossroads of legal and geographical studies, it explores the intriguing topic of "Island-ness" by placing emphasis on how physical, legal, and imaginative remoteness articulates a variety of geographical connections. These reflect several issues, such as territorial (and maritime) localisation, insular ontology, colonial and post-colonial imaginaries. The special issue delivers both a synthetic view of these questions and opens up further perspectives for reflection. The papers examine how geographical connections trigger different legal, as well as constitutional, frameworks suitable for geographically distant islands, which, evidently, depend on how remote these islands actually are. The contributions survey various topics and adopt different approaches in order to ascertain how geographical connections and remoteness intertwine. Beyond this richness of inputs, the essays reveal some common features of islands and remoteness as objects of geographical and legal representation. Besides organising society, the law arranges geographical connections so as to act as a bridge linking the reality of remoteness to an imagined alternative able of securing the governance of the abovementioned remote societal contexts. Keywords Island • Remoteness • Interdisciplinarity research • Isolation • EU cohesion policies • Greek archipelagos • British overseas territories • American territoriesThis article and the special issue pertain to the activities of the IEL (innovative education laboratory) GEOLawB, which is part of the research excellence project "Law, Changes and Technology" -Ministry of Education and carried out by the Law School of the University of Verona.

Islandness and Appreciating the Importance of the Rule of Law in a 21st Century Island Context: The Case of the Isle of Man

“…However, whilst acknowledging that there are many other valuable conceptual debates on the meaning of islandness, (e.g. Baldacchino, 2008;Grydehøj, 2017;Nicolini & Perrin, 2021), this article relies on a broader definition of islandness which "refers to qualities of islands katherineshaw@btinternet.com; corresponding author that distinguish them from the continent," (Tsampi, 2023, p. 249) in addition to literature which has explained how islands frequently have unique characteristics which help to underpin both a strong and palpable sense of island identity amongst islanders (Conkling, 2007).…”