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Afanasy Nikitin Seamount & the Struggle for Resources in South Asia

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Punsara Amarasinghe is a post-doctoral researcher affiliated with Scuola Superiore Sant Anna, Pisa. He is a PhD holder in Public International Law from the Institute of Law, Politics and Development at Scuola Superiore Sant Anna (Sant Anna School for Advanced Studies) in Pisa, Italy. He holds LL.M. from the South Asian University, New Delhi, and completed his undergraduate studies in law at the Faculty of Law, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

He completed another master's degree in international relations from the HSE, Moscow.  He has held two visiting research fellowships at the Global Legal Studies Centre at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and Sciences PO, Paris. He was affiliated with the Minerva Center for Strategic Studies at Hebrew University, Jerusalem for a brief period in 2019.

The currents of the law of the sea remain volatile depending on the geopolitical trajectories that it faces. When Grotius crafted the term Mare Liberum to legitimize the rights to navigation of the Dutch, it certainly equated with the complex trade aspirations of the Dutch East India Company to increase their profit. The whole gamut of international law is more or less driven by the realities stemming from the political sphere, and this reality stands as a perennial truth. It is in this context that we should look at ongoing legal entanglement for the Afanasy Nikitin seamount in the Central Indian Ocean, as it discloses the blatant geopolitical realities that Sri Lanka cannot vanquish.

Geographically, the Afanasy Nikitin seamount is a structural feature in the central Indian Ocean, located nearly 3000 km away from the Indian subcontinent. It is named after the Russian merchant who visited India in........

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