Abstract

Presentation abstract: On April 24, 2025, US President Donald Trump signed an executive order entitled “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources”. This order called for the exploration and extraction of deep sea minerals from the US’s Exclusive Economic Zone and in Areas Beyond National Jurisdiction. In response to President Trump’s announcement, The Metals Company, headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, has applied for two licences to explore and one to extract, in an imputed attempt to circumvent ongoing multilateral negotiations and enable it to mine in “the Area”. The order comes at a time of growing global interest in the potential for deep sea mining (DSM). In the face of accelerating attention on DSM as a political economic reality, this talk engages with the ways in which the state and its relationship with the oceanic abyss might be theorised. This talk draws on the case of Canada to theorise the DSM state, engaging with oceanic extractivisms and the limits of territorial sovereignty. It argues that the DSM state is more than a simple aqueous substitute for the ‘terra centric’ resource state and its narratives of geopolitical mineral security. Throughout, this work builds on volumetric thinking as well as recognising how the sovereignty of Canada, as a settler-colonial state, is being challenged from within. In response to DSM interests, First Nations are increasingly drawing on spatialies, solidarities and relations that circumvent state borders and Imperial imaginations of land sea binaries.