Maritime security is a major international concern with the Gulf of Guinea recognised as one of the global hotspots of blue crime, such as piracy, kidnap for ransom, trafficking of narcotics, human and arms, and illegal fishing. The complex and complicated challenge of maritime security, a wicked problem, calls for inter-agency coordination, synergy of efforts and scaling up of responses. Given the complexity of maritime security threats, no single organisation has the institutional muscle to single-handedly deal with it. Drawing on evidence from Ghana, where the arrival of maritime security as a concept triggered a shift from single to a multi-agency approach to dealing with maritime issues, the article examines the potential of and challenges associated with inter-agency coordination. In line with recent international developments, African nations like Ghana aim to apply the concept of inter-agency coordination to tackle maritime insecurity in its waters. The paper assesses how inter-agency coordination could be used in an African maritime security governance context, while examining power imbalance, strife for agency autonomy and other obstacles that have to be addressed to ensure that the promises associated with the concept are fulfilled.
Maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea is a challenge that straddles multiple players and sectors, and crimes like piracy cause disruptions to international trade and shipping. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the global shipping industry tried to keep maritime security on the agenda, while advocating for global security assemblages, specifically, transnational policing initiatives as part of the maritime security governance. Using the notion of narratives and assemblage thinking, it is argued that although global shipping and Ghanaian state agents agree on the problem, they differ on which maritime security governance infrastructure to deploy, resulting in tensions between the two parties.
The Gulf of Guinea (GoG) region is a vast maritime area off West and Central Africa, and an area of interest to numerous external actors for a range of different reasons including historical relations, trade, oil and fishery. This maritime space is characterised not only by legitimate actors’ presence at sea but also by various types of maritime criminality, with piracy currently being high on the agenda of external actors. Indeed, in 2020, 95% of all maritime kidnappings globally happened in the GoG. Through the application of a specific theoretical lens, namely the politics of piracy numbers, this chapter offers a regional case study of piracy in the GoG. Through this lens, the chapter for example explores how, though being the most counted type of maritime insecurity, piracy is only one aspect of a much broader complex of maritime insecurities. Attending also to the politics of missing numbers, the chapter also explores how far less attention is devoted to counting various onshore dimension of GoG-piracy.
It is widely acknowledged that maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea is a highly complex phenomenon involving a variety of issues (legal deficiencies, inadequate military equipment, and challenges like corruption, political unrest and youth unemployment) as well as a multiplicity of external responders. To make sense of the impact that external actors have when they address this complex problem through various maritime capacity building endeavours, this article argues that there is a need to understand the attractiveness of capacity building vis-à-vis the widely acknowledged need for a comprehensive approach, as well as the difficulties of translating the potential for comprehensiveness into practice (as important aspects of the problem remain largely unaddressed). Further, it is argued that it is important to appreciate that even if these gaps – i.e. the aspects that maritime capacity building currently leaves unaddressed – represent a ‘failure’ to deliver a comprehensive response, they are at the same time illustrative of how the maritime capacity building activities of various external actors also ‘succeed’ in having an impact on this regional security landscape – for instance, by influencing how certain aspects of this multifaceted problem are prioritised, whilst others are only marginally addressed, if at all.