Chagos Claim

Maldivian Claims to the Chagos Archipelago: Historical and Legal Perspectives. This is not just a paper – it’s a strategic correction of colonial mythmaking.

While the world debates the Chagos question through the smoke of 20th-century decolonisation, this work cuts straight to the historical bone: European powers, as early as the 16th century, recognised the Chagos Archipelago as part of the Maldivian sphere, not through speculation, but through documentation. The Portuguese themselves, brutal as they were, knew what lay beneath their boots.

This paper brings the pre-colonial truth to the courtroom of international legitimacy, tracing the geographic logic, cultural continuity, and sovereign assertions of Maldivian rulers, supported by historical records, inscriptions, and navigational realities.

In doing so, it undermines the prevailing narrative that the Chagos only began to matter when empires started to quarrel over it.

Strategically, the argument is airtight:

The European recognition of Maldivian control validates indigenous claims from the outside in.
The colonial detachment of the Chagos Islands from the Maldives wasn’t only illegal, but also an act of geopolitical vandalism.

The principle of self-determination was violated not once, but twice: first through detachment, and again through silence.

Legally, the document establishes the case for sovereignty through precedent, proximity, and prior possession, the three pillars of a territorial claim. Politically, it calls out the selective blindness of international actors who speak of decolonisation while ignoring who bled for those islands before colonisation even began.

This is not a nostalgic lament. It is a strategic intervention, a roadmap for reasserting Maldivian dignity, legality, and rightful domain in a region carved up by force and forgotten by design.