Emotions impact Pacific diplomacy, causing ripples and rifts in regional geopolitics and climate security. Islands, and atolls in particular, are often constructed by Western science as locations of vulnerability. Sinking islands have become a fatalistic visage that looms over Pacific islands in diplomacy and climate governance, informing dystopian imaginaries of ecological doom.  But Pacific leaders are not passive in this discourse; instead, they are fighting, not sinking. This article traces the synergy among Tuvaluan leaders, their careful staging of the 50th Pacific Island Forum, and their adept diplomatic practices to show how a particularly emotionally charged Pacific Island Leaders Forum, held in Tuvalu in 2019, produced important regional climate change and geopolitical outcomes. 

To produce this paper, I conducted twenty detailed interviews with key Pacific Island leaders, Pacific Island Forum Secretariat actors and key negotiators of the Forum Communiqué. Each participant was asked to reflect on specific aspects of the politics of emotions and the diplomacy mobilised by the Tuvalu leadership at the Forum meeting. These interviews were supplemented by my own participant observation, autoethnography and visual ethnography, undertaken in real time before and during the Forum in my role as the lead drafting negotiator for Vanuatu at the Forum meeting.  This paper demonstrates how the agency of leading Pacific actors unfolds alongside various colonial and neo-colonial discourses of sinking islands that still pervade contemporary geopolitical narratives of the Pacific region. In this paper, I therefore reimagine the Pacific islands beyond a topos of doomed vulnerability and consider the role that the Tuvalu leadership pursued, as Chair of the Pacific Island Forum, in shaping the destiny of their own nation state, and the Pacific region, amidst the increasing challenges posed to their future climate security.

Dr Siobhan McDonnell is an Associate Professor at the Crawford School of Public Policy at The Australian National University. Siobhan is a lawyer and anthropologist who has over twenty-five years of experience working with Indigenous people in Australia and the Pacific. Since 2019 she has been a lead negotiator on climate change for various Pacific governments (on loss and damage, just transitions and mitigation). Her commitment to decolonial practice also means she has run land cases for Indigenous groups, and in 2014 supported the Vanuatu government by delivering land reforms to support better Indigenous land rights. Dr McDonnell’s commitment to the practice of engaged anthropology means that she produces research that contributes to high-impact policy and legal outcomes in the areas of: improved Indigenous land rights, improved natural resource management, consideration of climate change and resettlement issues, improved disaster management, innovative land reform in the space of legal pluralism and recognition of customary institutions, and legal outcomes that improve gender equity.
 

In-person: H.C Coombs Building, Room 1.309 (northern hexagon) 

Zoom link: https://anu.zoom.us/j/82431454032?pwd=owA39nWqTYm2TGOcC0sWa9bEDVangD.1