Kon Kam King J. (2024). Trac(k)ing fishe(r)s in the south Pacific : surveillances in and of a more-than-human ocean.
Montpellier (FRA) ; Brême : Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III ; Université de Brême, 581 p. multigr. Th. Géogr. Améngmt de l'Espace, Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III. 2024/12/17.
Source
Montpellier (FRA) ; Brême : Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III ; Université de Brême, 2024,
581 p. multigr.
This research examines the politics and practices of tuna fisheries surveillance in the South Pacific region in relation to the territorialisation of the oceans. The thesis provides a socio-historical analysis of surveillance and territory-making modalities in offshore spaces, characterised as vast, distant, hardly accessible, labile and more-than-human environments. At the crossroads of environmental humanities, science and technology studies and surveillance studies, this work revisits notions of surveillance and territory from an oceanic stance. It draws on a qualitative and multi-sited investigation combining archive analysis, interviews and observations relating to Fiji and New Caledonia's tuna fishing industries and their surveillance and management at the territorial, national and regional levels. This research understands surveillance as a set of data-collecting and calculative practices to manage uncertainties. This definition comprehends the surveillance of both the social and natural dimensions of fisheries and various forms of surveillance concerned with marine ecosystem study, natural resource management, biodiversity conservation, market development or maritime security. The thesis first retraces the establishment, from the 1950s, of some main tuna fisheries surveillance apparatuses: the collection of fishers' logsheets, onboard fisheries observer programmes, tuna tagging programmes and maritime patrols. It then examines the main infrastructures underlying surveillance, starting with those that condition physical and cognitive access to offshore worlds, i.e. the fishing, oceanographic and military vessels. It analyses the associated practices of collecting, processing and circulating surveillance information that permits and constrains offshore surveillance. The thesis shows the pivotal influence of surveillance as an instrument of territorialisation at sea. It describes offshore environmental surveillance as opportunistic, distributed, and partly delegated to surveillance subjects. Offshore surveillance hinges on pre-existing infrastructures and assembles multipotent boundary apparatuses that support plural and sometimes antagonistic scientific, regulatory, protective, coercive and commercial purposes. These apparatuses are shared and dependent on the involvement of actors subjected to multiple binds and variously interested and invested in the oceans and their surveillance. This fluid approach consists of a pragmatic strategy to make the surveillance of elusive offshore worlds possible by rationalising limited surveillance capacities and circumventing infrastructures' rigidity. However, it simultaneously induces friction, which refracts territorialisation processes when these are projected over offshore spaces and produces specific lock-ins and forms of ignorance and inaction. This study contributes to contemporary research on humans-oceans relations, territorialisation processes, surveillance and informational governance with a reflection on infrastructure governance.
