摘要：In 2016, the Trump International Golf Links and Hotel in southwest Ireland sought permission
to erect a boulder wall along the entire length of a beach to protect its golf course
from erosion. This beach happens to be home to a good-quality surf break and, accordingly,
local and international surfers quickly mobilised resistance to the plan. This paper
investigates how Irish surfers’ relationship with different water flows have been (re)producing
and transforming these political narratives, both in relation to this dispute and in
the State more generally in the 2014-2018 period. Through their politicised associations
with waves, Irish surfers enact “saltwater citizenship”, a political status that grounds its
legitimacy not only on its relationship with state power but also (and primarily) with
ocean power. I explore how this specific form of citizenship has three defining features:
1) It multiplies authorities of political legitimation; 2) its struggles against Irish state-corporate
entanglements take place predominantly as right-of-access and right-of-ownership
disputes; 3) because it is based on surf-specific notions of belonging and relies on contemporary
global flows of information and people, it disarticulates and reconfigures elements
of citizenship (territoriality and entitlements, for instance) in ways that complicate
traditional distinctions between localism and cosmopolitanism.
