The island’s expansion has been a colossal undertaking. It is not merely a matter of coastal reclamation: Singapore is growing vertically as well as horizontally. This means that the nation’s market needs fine river sand—used for beaches and concrete—as well as coarse sea sand to create new ground. And the ground must be solid, as the lion’s share of Singapore’s architecture is high-rise. Foreign sand and aggregate, along with foreign labor, are essential in replicating the island’s ground in the sky. Both supply a burgeoning condo market and the ongoing rollout of a public housing program that serves more than 80 percent of the population.

For Singapore’s government, sand security is a safeguard of the state’s right to development. It is a precondition of fiscal and political survival. Sand, like money, must remain liquid for the economy to keep moving. The vulnerability of the island, its entropic tendency toward general decline, has long been imagined as a byproduct of its physical limits. The ruling People’s Action Party, which lays claim to the success of the housing initiative, has asserted time and again that the endurance of the nation depends upon a continual expansion of its market and its population. Both require Lebensraum. For this reason, sand and aggregate are stored in vast stockpiles in the areas of Seletar and Tampines, and are sold to contractors when regional disputes threaten the availability of the material. Paradoxically, the management of coastal risk comes to greatly affect the territory’s interior. The large tracts of land dedicated to storing sand and gravel aggregate become securitized sites—their area is taken “off the map.” The interior is leveraged such that the coast may grow.

The need for sand, then, is a kind of original debt: for the territorial state to survive, land must continually be introduced. Milton notes that .6 miles of new ground requires 37.5 million cubic meters of fill—around 1.4 million dump trucks’ worth. This translates into a de facto transfer of territory from other countries. Despite the accepted terminology, earth cannot be “reclaimed” from the ocean by the magic of sovereign right; it needs to be brought from somewhere.

Unsurprisingly, this process of expansion has become a regional sore point—whetting old tensions between the island republic and its neighbors. The geopolitical narrative is that Singapore, in an undiscriminating fever of consumption, has begun to absorb surrounding territory. In a climate of heated diplomatic exchanges, fewer options for legal imports remain. Malaysia ceased shipments of sand to Singapore as early as 1997; Indonesia instituted a similar ban after claims that several of its Riau Islands had vanished, only to reappear as part of the Singapore coastline; and Vietnam suspended dredging in 2009. In turn, Myanmar and the Philippines have become principal sources. Cambodia also announced a freeze on river sand in 2009, but so much continued to disappear that locals joked of traveling to Singapore to plant the Cambodian flag.

Recently, nationalistic outrage has been joined by environmental concern, most pointedly the loss of fragile coastal habitat and sea-grass colonies. Many accusations allege ongoing smuggling from embargoed nations, as well as dredging at both seaside and river locations. Singapore, in keeping with its policy of transparency, has replied that it pursues its imports through lawful channels.

The island nation is hardly alone in its addiction. Sand has been called the “most wanted raw material on the planet.”3 Not only is it essential for construction, it is a key ingredient in the microprocessors and memory chips used in nearly all computer technology. Its legal trade is estimated at $70 billion per year. Environmental consultant Kiran Pereira figures the global annual sand consumption to be in excess of 15 billion tons.4 Even Dubai imports sand for construction, as do most other regions that build chiefly in concrete. Many of the nations that export sand to Singapore also require immense quantities for their own domestic projects. Diplomacy is thus burdened with negotiating the flow of sand, and territory, at multiple sites and scales.

To make matters more turbid, the nightmare of coastal reclamation occupies an imaginary and regulatory space created by several misunderstandings about territory itself. These become urgent against both the backdrop of our “oceanic” moment and the apparent dissolution of that idyll of 19th- and 20th-century geopolitical thought, the grounded state.

First among these misconceptions is that territory is a finite and intransigent thing. A longstanding myth of the state, propagated by realist and idealist schools of international relations alike, is the solidity of physical boundaries. In these traditions, the geo-body of the developed nation is thought to be, in the words of geographers John Agnew and Stuart Corbridge, a “set or fixed units of sovereign space.”5 Its peoples and economies were thought to be discrete and independent, its form and extents unchanging. Stranger still, cultures and countries were considered naturally isomorphic. At its conceptual extreme, this involved the conflation, on maps and in cartoons, of the shape of the nation with cultural icons or founding fathers. In Thailand, it was the person of the king, fending off rapacious foreigners.6 In Italy, it was Garibaldi with a sword. This ignored an untidy fact: that the form of the state has been highly fluid, its edges in particular. Since its invention, the borders of the global map have been continually redrawn. This is clearest, perhaps, in postcolonial contexts such as Singapore, where the reapportioning of territory, and the development of the coastline, had much to do with the play of regional geopolitical strategies.7