Sealiving: Recognition and Governance in International Waters

Despite the well-established normative and empirical evidence that citizenship is important for relationships between individuals, societies and institutions, some individuals and communities view citizenship as a harm – and refuse it. Also referred to as withdrawal, exodus, disappearance, defection, desertion, flight, and disengagement, refusal as a “rhetoric of exit” (Cassegard 2008), is action both in thought and in practice, and has been theorised as more than resistance, as an indication that a structural limit has been reached and that an alternative political future is both necessary and possible (McGranahan 2016). This paper explores the theoretical and practical implications of refusing citizenship to live in international waters. Perhaps most widely recognised in lawless pirates across the ages looting from port to port, sealiving is a function of environmental, economic, and political circumstances and has been a consistent site of resistance to state injustice (Graeber 2019; Linebaugh and Rediker 2000). Contemporary sea living is similar in goal but different in method, now in the form of stationary structures designed to sustain and protect small communities. The Principality of Sealand, Rose Island, the Ocean Living Project, and popup sea societies funded by wealthy libertarians evidence a contemporary trend towards innovative membership and governance schemes outside the state, and the state system altogether. In this paper I ask, what does it mean to live in international waters in theoretical matters concerning recognition and in practical matters of governance? Through a survey of recent sealiving initiatives including The Seasteading Institute and Blue Frontiers which see in sealiving the promise of “more scientific and technological progress that is too heavily regulated by the heavy hand of our existing state” (Urbina 2022), I explore the possibility that democratic ideals, mechanisms of recognition, and governance instruments can be implemented and sustained in the absence of terra firma. Drawing from theories of membership and recognition, I critique the extent to which the refusal to live within (all) state territory is a refusal of citizenship, and whether living in international waters – where the void of authority presents opportunities to build political communities anew – is an anti/political act.