Sebesi Island provides an illuminating context for exploring mobility, resilience and livelihoods on small islands. Despite its remote location in the heart of the Sunda Strait and its exposure to environmental hazards—including volcanic eruptions from Mount Anak Krakatau, earthquakes, tsunamis, and illegal sand mining—the Sebesi community has cultivated adaptive livelihood strategies and demonstrated enduring resilience. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, archival research, and oral histories, this study situates Sebesi within the growing discourse of Islandness and mobility, framing mobility not simply as movement but as a relational, transformative, and place-anchored strategy of survival. The findings reveal that Sebesian mobility—expressed through inter- island farming, trade, motorcycle workshops, junk businesses, harbor portering, and community lending—enables livelihood diversification and economic resilience. Rather than seeking displacement, residents choose to remain and adapt, continuing to live their lives, where movement becomes a response to structural marginalisation and environmental precarity. Furthermore, Sebesians succeed in retaining place-based identity while navigating systemic constraints. By integrating global island scholarship with localised knowledge from Sebesi Island, this paper bridges a critical gap in small-island research, offering a bottom-up perspective on how mobility fosters resilience and sustainable livelihoods. Ultimately, it argues that remoteness catalyses—not curtails—entrepreneurial adaptation, positioning mobility as a central strategy for island communities to survive and thrive.

Mobilitymigrationlivelihood diversificationSebesi Island