Islands and insularity: between law, geography, and fiction

Within the cross-disciplinary research on “Law, Changes and Technology”, this essay introduces the focus on “Islands and insularity: between law, geography, and fiction”. The intriguing and enthralling topic of “Island-ness” places emphasis on the manifold intersections between law, geographic studies, political power, and the humanities. These intersections reflect several issues, such as territorial localisation, environmental crises, colonial imaginaries, as well as the insular societal contexts in which they are imbricated. The focus delivers both a synthetic view of these questions and opens up further perspectives for reflection. The contributions engage various topics and adopt different approaches. Beyond this richness of inputs, the essays reveal some common characteristics of islands and insularity as objects and subjects of human imagination, social organisation, and scientific reflection. In particular, two main issues of islands and insularity can be identified, i.e. dialectics and metaphor.