The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) contained a specific section for “Archipelagic States” (Part IV) which are given many rights under the archipelagic regime including, if desired, to designate archipelagic sea lanes (ASLs) through their archipelagic waters. While desig...

"Through the close analysis of musical performance and tradition, the scholarly contributiors to Island Songs provide a global review of how island songs, their lyrics, and their singers engage with the challenges of modernity, migration , and social change uncovering common patterns despite th...

Sand has become such a powerful visual, emotive and experiential component of tourism. This essay ventures an ontological explanation for the Western world’s acquired and now gripping fascination with this particularly mundane material, and its robust current connection with the tourism industry. ...

The article reviews several books including “The Britannic Vision: Historians and the Making of the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1907-48," by W. David Mclntyre, "Christian Realism and the New Realities," by Robin W. Lovin, and "Going to War," by Philip Towle.

A European Union initiative is seeking ways of determining the development
potential of Europe’s lagging regions, which include various islands. On the basis of the
policy review, methodology and data collected by the ongoing EUROISLANDS project, this
paper present Kökar (population: ...

Most subnational (and mainly island) jurisdictions around the world today are actively conspiring in the dogged pursuit of protracted and extended colonial relationships—what is referred to as “upside down decolonization”—rather than aspiring to full independence. Various metropolitan powers...

This article first considers the significance of historical experience in academic studies, including postcolonial studies, concluding with Jane M. Jacobs that “the structures of power that gave rise to empire live on in a more disorganised fashion.” They live on in an organized way, too, in tha...

How well do the brands and branding exercises of specific 'island products' connect with the brand of 'the Island' on which they are based? This paper adopts a sweeping 'island studies' global perspective in addressing this question. Given that they are already heavily themed places, we should n...

A global review of islands and their connections with astronomy throughout
history up to the contemporary times suggests eight compelling, distinct yet interlocking
reasons why islands have been and remain so important to astronomy and astronomers.
Islands constitute favourable locations...

This paper explores the latent power of Maltese trade unions
in the private sector by reviewing the presence of collective agreements
in force in 2008. The study adopts a similar methodology to one
published in Bank of Valletta Review in 1996, based on 1995 data. Over
this 13-year pe...

Studying mobile actor networks of moving people, objects, images, and
discourses, in conjunction with changing time-spaces, offers a unique opportunity to
understand important, and yet relatively neglected, “relational material” dynamics of
mobility. A key example of this phenomenon ...