Crisis Citizenship and Legal Indeterminacy in South Pacific Small Island States: Cash-for-passport schemes and floating islands between corona lock-downs and the desire for individual global mobility

This presentation seeks to provide some legal perspective pertaining to social experiments that include the direct sale of membership entitlements in Vanuatu or the Solomon Islands, as well as planned sea steading communities adjacent to French Polynesia. Facing restrictions through the Covid-19 pandemic and other disasters such as global climate change or regional cyclones, it appears to be in the interest of globally mobile individuals as well as small island states to somewhat incorporate the very notion of crisis in the legal narratives for alternative and
flexible membership. Responding to 'corona-waves', heightened health-related travel requirements, economic and social upheaval on the mainland, small island community membership experiments effectively require policy planners to rethink statehood and the bordered paradigm, with global market- and contractual logic becoming further settled within the fabric of the state, despite or precisely because of the bordered paradigm and the need for crisis induced mobility. With passport purchasers naturalizing -if ever- at their own will and pace within re-created legal-political spaces, and floating islands effectively constructing
jurisdictions around their select few members, it may be argued that legal innovation as well as indeterminacy are utilized to answer to and to leave behind mainland crisis.