Sovereignty and the Sea: How Indonesia Became an Archipelagic State.

• Jurisdiction: Singapore
• Author: Bernard, Leonardo
• Date: 01 December 2017

Sovereignty and the Sea: How Indonesia Became an Archipelagic State. By John G. Butcher and R.E Elson. Singapore: NUS Press, 2017. Hardcover: 527pp.

Whenever an international law dispute arises between a developing (or non-Western) country and a Western country, one dogma that occasionally emerges is the claim that international law was created by the West and forced upon developing countries. This is also the case for Law of the Sea disputes, where similar arguments are also made on how the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was drafted. This is a tired argument and the wonderful book Sovereignty and the Sea, by John G. Butcher and R.E. Elson, shows the fallacy of this argument.

The book provides a detailed account of Indonesia's struggle to be recognized as an "archipelagic state" by the international community. The authors do an excellent job of describing how the people in nineteenth-century Indonesia, as well as the Dutch--who colonized the islands that would later become Indonesia--viewed their authority over the waters surrounding the islands (pp. 34-43). After achieving independence in 1945, the Indonesian government began to debate the question of how to define Indonesia's territory, and whether it should include the seas and...