The U.K. has agreed to hand sovereignty of the Chagos Islands, an archipelago in the Indian Ocean, over to Mauritius. The islands had been separated from Mauritius to make way for a U.K.-U.S. military base several years before Mauritius gained independence from the U.K. in 1968. The agreement will allow for thousands of Chagossians, who were forcibly displaced by the U.K. in the 1960s and 1970s, to return to the islands, although the U.K. will retain sovereignty over Diego Garcia, the island where the airbase is situated. (The Guardian)
The deal announced today is important symbolically as well as geopolitically. At a time when the movement calling for postcolonial justice is gaining momentum across the globe, and in particular the Global South, the Chagos Islands—considered the U.K.’s last African colony—are a reminder that some parts of the world are not even postcolonial. It also signals that there are pathways, through international law and pressure, to achieve the movement’s goals.
But the issue of sovereignty over the Chagos Islands has also carried important diplomatic implications. In 2019, the International Court of Justice ruled that the U.K. had unlawfully carved out the Chagos Islands from Mauritius in the 1960s and that its continued administration of the islands was a wrongful act, issuing an advisory opinion that the U.K. was under an obligation to surrender control of the islands.
The U.K. initially rejected the opinion, arguing that the ruling was nonbinding. But that decision led to charges of hypocrisy, as the U.K. purports to be a supporter of the rules-based international order. As a result, continuing to exercise sovereignty over the Chagos Islands came with a reputational cost for the U.K., especially in the Global South.
The deal announced today, then, is a belated remedy, but also not a total one. The U.K. will retain sovereign rights to Diego Garcia, the site of the joint military base primarily operated by the United States. That points to the strategic importance of that base, a reminder that even at a time when technological advances have made the world feel smaller, geographic presence is still a crucial element of projecting power and influence. That’s even more the case for a global power like the U.S., for which the base on Diego Garcia serves as a key logistics hub connecting assets in the all-important theaters of the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific.
Still, the reluctance on the part of the U.K. and U.S. to give up the entire archipelago suggests that some traces of the colonial mindset—in which strategic benefits outweigh legal and moral costs—are still present among U.K. and U.S. policymakers.
For more: Read about the ICJ’s ruling in this Q&A with Marko Milanovic from 2019, and the reputational cost for the U.K. of ignoring that ruling in this briefing by Stephen Allen in 2020.
