Introduction
There are two sets of legal disputes in the South China Sea: disputes about the “islands”
themselves and disputes about the spaces in between the islands. Looming over both are
geopolitical contests about which state (or states) will set the rules in East and Southeast Asia.
Then, within states, there are disputes about what constitutes the “national interest” and how best to achieve it. Finally, and least importantly, there are further disagreements about how best to characterize and describe all of the above.
The South China Sea has become the perfect sandpit for theoreticians to develop their
ideas about how the world does, and should, work. Are humans, and the states they create, simply anarchic individuals who rampage over the land and sea until others of similar ilk bring them to heel? Or are we social beings who form communities and alliances and moderate our dealings with one another in the interests of collective well-being? Are we ego, or superego?
Much like the sea itself, the academic sandpit is an environment where rival ideas can coexist until some development forces them into collision.
The first academic discipline to pay attention to the South China Sea disputes was
international law, following the 1974 Battle of the Paracel Islands. International relations entered the sandpit soon after. Sadly, debates on the South China Sea within those disciplines have taken place in academic silos, isolated from insights elsewhere. As I have argued elsewhere, writing on the South China Sea within those disciplines has been predicated on poor evidence bases and a flawed historical narrative of Chinese origin that emerged from the Spratly Island annexation crisis of 1933 (Hayton 2017, 2018).
International relations was founded as a discipline to enable societies to better understand
problems such as the South China Sea disputes and to help decision makers resolve them. But it is not clear to this writer that it has the analytical tools necessary to do so without a better engagement with the critical insights available from historians and geographers, among others.
More information: Bill Hayton, Chatham House (2017), “Disputes about Disputes: Understanding the South China Sea”, Cross-Currents: East Asian History and Culture Review E-Journal No. 25 (December 2017) • (http://cross-currents.berkeley.edu/e-journal/issue-25)
