Carrying the fenua in law : Pacific relational sovereignty, descent-based nationality, and lessons from the Cook Islands and Niue for climate-threatened statehood

Abstract

International law increasingly accepts that legal personality can survive territorial loss. The open question is institutional: how is it maintained once territory and population are externalised? This article suggests that an answer lies in the Cook Islands and Niue, polities in free association with New Zealand, which conclude treaties and join organisations while externalising defence, fiscal stability and even citizenship. The claim is modest: a domestically controlled, descent-based nationality regime is a necessary and unilaterally securable condition for sustaining a dispersed demos. The analytical turn is to read such regimes with Pacific relational thought rather than against it. Through Hauʻofa’s “sea of islands” and the Tuvaluan concept of fenua, they codify an Oceanic belonging never confined to land. It closes on the honest limit: nationality law can carry relational membership, but not the lived, embodied relationship to reef and lagoon that inundation threatens.