State and peripheries: the political geography of the Maldives between uniformity and segregation

Abstract

The Republic of the Maldives during the last decades, at least since the Nineties, has been involved by a complex body of transformative forces due to some factors: the increasing foreign investments in the tourism market; the dependency on oil producing Countries; and the introduction of new consumption models. The literature focused on a “culturalist” approach to these transformations. We aim at proposing an alternative analysis based on two pivotal concepts of Political Geography: the CenterPeriphery Model and the idea of “Political Landscape”, according to Reynaud and Lacoste. The contribution stresses how the central State, during the last decades, has imposed a control on local communities, how such control can be read through these two interpretive models, and how the political geography of the Maldives can be understood by adopting the spatial categories of segregation and uniformity. In this paper we develop our analysis both by reading two political acts, and by observing a specific local context, Faaf-Magoodhoo, an island where the authors carry out researches on environmental and social geography hosted by the MaRHE Center of the University of MilanoBicocca.