This paper explores the ways in which maritime labor, maritime risk, and seafarers’ survival are embedded in the financial logics and practices of the global shipping industry. By employing the notion of “existential arbitrage,” the ethnography moves through the pursuit of global profit to the value of labor as a commodity, human and financial risk, and ultimately the value of human lives, all of which are arbitraged. Arbitrage is a profit strategy that is based on a belief in the equalizing power of the market yet is predicated on and creates difference among commodities in order to create opportunities to generate profit. Existential arbitrage brings anthropological studies of security and conflict and trade and finance together. By taking the interdependence of these subfields seriously and showing how the relationship between them manifests itself in practice, the notion of existential arbitrage uncovers a brutal financial trading strategy that requires and forces the oscillation between notions of valuable life and the valuation of labor commodities in a competitive global market.
Current practice for maritime search and rescue (MSAR) adheres to predetermined full-coverage patterns for finding targets. These do not account for key success factors for MSAR missions such as the dynamic location of targets, updates on situational awareness during mission execution, and search vehicle kinematics. Consequently, current practice cannot incorporate realistic MSAR operational conditions into path-finding, increasing the likelihood of mission failure. To address this issue, a novel, flexible path-finding framework is proposed for generating a path while dynamically updating the probability of a target based on the path's trajectories. The solution approach implements the A* algorithm, which can accommodate the dynamics of a vehicle and guarantees the optimality of the final path with respect to the target objective function. Experiments show that a more than 50% improvement in the time needed to guarantee a certain probability of finding a target is exhibited compared to the parallel sweep coverage path-finding approach.
The power to regulate on-board protection of merchant vessels lies with the flag state. However, the national models of regulation are not developed in a unilateral vacuum. In fact, the whole concept of flag state jurisdiction and legislative power has to be understood and exercised on the national level in close relation with the general regime of the international law of the sea. The aim of the article is therefore two-fold: first, it aims to provide a background for the country reports in this special issue by giving a brief insight into the problem of piracy in the twenty-first century and the international approaches towards this problem. Here the article also provides an insight into the legal background by presenting the concept of piracy in the law of the sea and connected law enforcement powers. Thus, this part of the article provides the overall context in which the discussions concerning on-board protection and the development of national regulations have occurred. Second, the article analyses the issue of on-board protection from the perspective of the legal framework in international law, as well as relevant international soft-law instruments, influencing the development on the national level. On-board protection of vessels as such is not regulated in the international law; however, international law provides a form of general legal setting, in which flags states navigate. Thus, this article aims to draw a picture of the international context in which flags states develop their specific legal approach.
The core function of UNCLOS is to provide a legal order for the oceans and their peaceful uses. This includes providing a legal framework for upholding law and order at sea, as this is a precondition for peaceful use. Part One of this volume deals with different perspectives of upholding law and order at sea; and Chapter 2 creates a backdrop for the following chapters dealing with these various issues. The chapter presents some perspectives on the system of law and order at sea and sets the following chapters in context with themes such as the scope of UNCLOS and its limitations, the adaptability of the convention to new developments, the role of the zonal system created under the convention and the influence of state practice on the system of upholding law and order at sea. By doing so, Chapter 2 also creates a line to the following parts of this volume; and some of the perspectives raised in Chapter 2 will be revisited in the final part (Part Four) of this volume, dealing with UNCLOS as a system of regulation and connected methodologies.
This edited volume examines the continued viability of international human rights law in the context of growing transnational law enforcement. With states increasingly making use of global governance modes, core exercises of public authority such as migration control, surveillance, detention and policing, are increasingly conducted extraterritorially, outsourced to foreign governments or delegated to non-state actors.
New forms of cooperation raise difficult questions about divided, shared and joint responsibility under international human rights law. At the same time, some governments engage in transnational law enforcement exactly to avoid such responsibilities, creatively seeking to navigate the complex, overlapping and sometimes unclear bodies of international law. As such, this volume argues that this area represents a particular dark side of globalisation, requiring both scholars and practitioners to revisit basic assumptions and legal strategies.
The volume will be of great interest to students, scholars and practitioners of international relations, human rights and public international law.
The oceans are increasingly understood as a security space. Does the new maritime security agenda lead to new spatial configurations? This chapter introduces the concept of ‘pragmatic spaces’ to explore spatial configurations produced in responses to maritime security. Four exemplary spaces are discussed: how counter-piracy led to the development of high risk areas, how maritime security capacity building produced new regions constructed through codes of conduct, how the identification of smuggling routes established new forms of international partnerships, and how maritime domain awareness systems advance new transnational spaces of surveillance. These new spatial configurations were introduced to manage maritime security issues and enable transnational forms of governance.
Maritime security is one of the latest buzzwords of international relations. Major actors have started to include maritime security in their mandate or reframed their work in such terms. Maritime security is a term that draws attention to new challenges and rallies support for tackling these. Yet, no international consensus over the definition of maritime security has emerged. Buzzwords allow for the international coordination of actions, in the absence of consensus. These, however, also face the constant risk that disagreements and political conflict are camouflaged. Since there are little prospects of defining maritime security once and for all, frameworks by which one can identify commonalities and disagreements are needed. This article proposes three of such frameworks. Maritime security can first be understood in a matrix of its relation to other concepts, such as marine safety, seapower, blue economy and resilience. Second, the securitization framework allows to study how maritime threats are made and which divergent political claims these entail in order to uncover political interests and divergent ideologies. Third, security practice theory enables the study of what actors actually do when they claim to enhance maritime security. Together these frameworks allow for the mapping of maritime security.
Transnational organised crime at sea is a growing international concern. However, and despite its importance, the concept remains uncertain and contested. This ambiguity has led to a tendency to focus on individual challenges such as piracy or illegal fishing, rather than convergencies and synergies between and across issues, and has stymied a concerted international policy response. Debate continues over the term itself, what illicit activities it incorporates and excludes, and how these can be meaningfully conceptualised in ways that both recognise the diverse nature of the concept yet also provide a basis for an integrated response to the challenges it presents. In this paper, we address this lacuna by providing a systemic conceptualisation and analysis of transnational organised crime at sea. Our goal is to provide a firm basis for future enquiries on the different types of blue crime, to trace their distinct characteristics and identify how they intersect, and to consider what kinds of synergies can be built to respond to them. In so doing, we organise the nascent academic and policy discourse on blue criminology and maritime security to provide a new framework for navigating this complex issue for practitioners and analysts alike.
This article examines the rise of maritime security in concept and practice. We argue that developments in the maritime arena have flown beneath the radar of much mainstream international relations and security studies scholarship, and that a new agenda for maritime security studies is required. In this article we outline the contours of such an agenda, with the intention of providing orientation and direction for future research. Our discussion is structured into three main sections, each of which outlines a core dimension of the maritime security problem space. We begin with a discussion of the issues and themes that comprise the maritime security agenda, including how it has been theorized in security studies to date. Our argument is that the marine environment needs to be understood as part of an interlinked security complex, which also incorporates strong connections between land and sea. Second, we examine the ways in which maritime security actors have responded to these challenges in practice, focusing on issues of maritime domain awareness, coordination of action, and operations in the field. Third, we turn to the mechanisms through which the new maritime security agenda is being disseminated to local actors through a process of devolved security governance. We focus particularly on efforts to distribute knowledge and skills to local actors through capacity building and security sector reform. In the conclusion, we outline the future challenges for maritime security studies that follow from these observations.
The question of when and how international orders change remains a pertinent issue of International Relations theory. This article develops the model of pragmatic ordering to conceptualise change. The model of pragmatic ordering synthesises recent theoretical arguments for a focus on ordering advanced in-practice theory, pragmatist philosophy, and related approaches. It also integrates evidence from recent global governance research. We propose a five-stage model. According to the model, once a new problem emerges (problematisation), informality allows for experimenting with new practices and developing new knowledge (informalisation and experimentation). Once these experimental practices become codified, and survive contestation, they increasingly settle (codification) and are spread through learning and translation processes (consolidation). We draw on the rise of the maritime security agenda as a paradigmatic case and examine developments in the Western Indian Ocean region to illustrate each of these stages. The article draws attention to the substantial reorganisation of maritime space occurring over the past decade and offers an innovative approach for the study of orders and change.