To Know is to Empower: Chagos Institute of Environmental Humanities Chen Chu Advisor: Miho Mazereeuw Readers: Nasser Rabbat, Delia Wendel Chagos Archipelago was sanitized in the 1970s for a US
by the planetary-scale military-colonial network. Of all
military base on Diego Garcia, following a secret “ex-
the denounced legal ammunition, the Chagos Marine
change of notes” that escaped legislative approval. 1500
Protected Area (MPA), along with its fiction of terra nul-
Chagossian evictees, “dumped” in Mauritius and Sey-
lius, commits dual violence in legitimizing environmen-
chelles, have since become surplus population dwarfed
tal fortification and denying 200 years of Chagossian inhabitation. The assemblage of the military, security and scientific institutions, by defining the Chagos MPA as an “organic rationality,” deploys a generalized and abstracted sense of ecological insecurity in aspiration for global environmental administration and in opposition to traditional bodies of government. How can design rearticulate a relationship to land and ecology that is diverse, specific and un-generalizable to counter this militarized environmentalism? This thesis proposes the Chagos Institute of Environmental Humanities that is duplicitous in function. While staging apparent conformity to restrictions and regulations imposed by the UK-US alliance, the Institute quietly supports an undercover subversive project of decolonization. This involves not only strategic building and reconstruction that affirm Chagossians’ right of abode and that assist future resettlement but, more unsettling, the decolonization of environmental science, shifting from a romanticized pristine ecology to an inhabited landscape as a source of knowledge, vitality and livability. This is 8
