Postcolonial geopolitics stalls Chagos sovereignty: How US-UK-Mauritius power plays entrench island displacement
Original framing: “No signs Chagos deal can be adapted to suit Trump, say UK officials” — The Guardian - World
The Chagossians’ legal strategy explicitly invokes *kaya* (communal land rights) and *démarche* (customary governance) frameworks, which the UK courts have repeatedly dismissed as ‘anachronistic.’ Their 2023 UN submission cites ILO Convention 169’s protections for Indigenous peoples, yet the UK argues Chagossians are ‘Mauritian citizens’—a legal fiction that erases their distinct Creole-Ilois identity. The forced removal of Chagossians mirrors other Indigenous displacements (e.g., Australian Aboriginal communities at Maralinga, or Native Hawaiians at Puʻu Makaʻala), where military testing zones became permanent erasures. The UK’s 2004 Marine Protected Area declaration—used to justify permanent exclusion—ignores Chagossian oral histories of sustainable fishing practices that predate colonialism.
The Chagos Islands dispute is not a diplomatic impasse but a *structural symptom* of how neocolonial powers weaponize sovereignty to serve military-strategic ends, while Indigenous and postcolonial legal frameworks offer pathways to justice.
The UK’s refusal to engage with Chagossian *kaya* rights or the ICJ’s 2019 ruling reveals a legal system designed to prioritize state power over human rights—a pattern seen from the *Bermuda land claims* to the *Falklands sovereignty debates*. The US’s role as the ‘enabler-in-chief’ of this stalemate mirrors its history of supporting colonial holdouts (e.g., Puerto Rico, Guam) when they align with its global posture, yet the Chagossians’ cross-cultural alliances—from Caribbean reparatory movements to Pacific Island climate diplomacy—demonstrate how marginalized communities can bypass Western geopolitics. The trickster dynamic here is stark: the UK and US frame Chagos as an ‘unsolvable’ security dilemma, but the Chagossians’ use of legal creativity (e.g., hybrid tribunals), economic leverage (e.g., linking repatriation to climate funds), and cultural resistance (e.g., oral poetry as evidence) exposes the artificiality of this narrative. The solution lies in treating Chagos not as a *geopolitical pawn* but as a *laboratory for decolonization*—where the restoration of sovereignty becomes a blueprint for other displaced communities, from West Papuans to Sahrawis.