Heritage-Making, Habit-Forming: The Role of Sunken Warships in Fostering Cooperation and Collaboration in Contested Waters

Abstract

More than 2000 State and merchant vessels lie on the seabed of maritime Southeast Asia, the material legacy of the Second World War. This article asks whether such wrecks can serve to form habits of cooperation, and what might be gained by doing so. Drawing on the concept of heritage diplomacy and focusing on seven Allied wrecks lost in the waters of Indonesia, Malaysia and Timor-Leste, it identifies three dimensions through which sunken military heritage can foster cooperation: affect, the capacity of wrecks to mobilize public and political attention; necessity, the environmental and ethical pressures that compel engagement; and function, the mechanisms that convert engagement into sustained cooperation. It finds that cooperation is most durably realized below the level of the state, that affect and necessity rarely produce cooperation unless relational infrastructure is already in place, and that these relationships generate commemoration far more readily than they do custodianship. Heritage is present in the region’s security architecture, but is rarely used deliberately. The article concludes by arguing that sunken warships are an under-utilized, low-threshold instrument of diplomacy in the contested space of maritime Southeast Asia.