Why should we look to the past to understand privacy and the ways we can protect it? Privacy, as a contemporary concept, already seems to be challenging to define and regulate enough. With the ever-speeding technological developments we face today, it is hard to catch up with all the different ways in which our privacy can be breached. In the case of the maritime context, the complexity increases. Issues of jurisdiction, as well as the maritime control of the mobility of goods, information, and people, make tackling ‘privacy at sea’ a difficult task. Regulating forces, such as the European Maritime Safety Agency, need to be clear on their security measures, which must include a balance between surveillance for safety and personal data protection on the one hand and general privacy for people in vessels on the other.1 Looking back to history could, therefore, appear counterproductive, adding intricacies to an already convoluted issue. However, shifting perspectives to understand the historical roots of how such issues developed and to pay heed to what people continuously try to protect when advocating for privacy helps us break those dichotomies that make the balance between public safety and privacy harder to reach.
The agenda of objectual International Relations has shown why object matters, how they arise and with what effects. Far less attention has been paid to how objects are maintained and stabilized over time and how their coherence is achieved. To add this dimension to the debate, we suggest turning to the infrastructures of object maintenance. Infrastructures are social material arrangements that maintain objects and enable their use. We introduce a framework for the study of object infrastructures and illustrate it by drawing on the case of "maritime piracy". Providing a historical reconstruction of the infrastructures that produce piracy as an international object, we show that the growing proliferation of these infrastructures does not lead to an internal coherence of the object over time, but rather objectual fracturing and instability. We reveal how objects are often multiple rather than unitary. The article adds an important new dimension to the study of objects in International Relations.
Offshore wind energy production has seen a significant expansion in recent years. With technologies rapidly improving and prices dropping, it is now one of the key instruments in the green energy transition. The implications of offshore wind farm expansion for maritime security and ocean governance have, so far, received sparse attention in the literature. This article offers one of the first thorough analyses of the security of offshore wind farms and related installations, such as underwater electricity cables, energy islands, and hydrogen plants. The technical vulnerabilities of wind farm systems is reviewed and threats from terrorism, crime and State hostilities, including physical and cyber risk scenarios, are discussed. The expansion of green offshore energy production must keep pace with the changing threat landscape that follows from it. Prospective solutions for the protection of wind farms systems, including surveillance, patrols and self-protection are discussed. The current repertoire of maritime security solutions is in many ways capable of dealing with the threats and risks effectively if adjusted accordingly. The analysis builds important new bridges between debates in energy security and maritime security, as well as the implications of climate change adaption and mitigation for security at sea.
Illicit maritime activities generate significant scholarly and policy attention. While diverse in nature, governance responses share many regulatory features. This introduction advances the notion of maritime justice, a socio‐legal research agenda. Different from broader maritime security studies, it places law at the centre of the inquiry, studying maritime governance practices through the lens of regulation. Empirically, it covers operational, spatial, and structural junctions between illicit maritime activity and regulatory responses deriving from international and domestic law. Analytically, it is heterogeneous but holds a methodological commitment to studying everyday law enforcement practices of maritime security governance to disentangle its meanings and effects. The introduction posits the junction between illicit maritime activities and regulatory responses as a productive space to study the varied norms that shape order‐making at sea, and vice versa.
Offshore wind energy production has seen a significant expansion in the past decade and has become one of the most important maritime activities. However, the implications of offshore wind farm expansion for maritime security have, so far, received sparse attention in the literature. In this article we conduct one of the first thorough analyses of the security of offshore wind farms and related installations, such as underwater electricity cables, energy islands, and hydrogen plants.
The European Union (EU) seeks to become a global maritime-security actor, yet strategic challenges influence its maritime-security strategy process. Is there a distinctive and coherent EU approach to global maritime security, and how should the EU address the growing range of maritime challenges, including the intensification of militarized competition in the Indo-Pacific?
The protection of critical maritime infrastructures has become a top political priority, since the September 2022 attacks on the Nord Stream pipelines in the Baltic Sea. This contribution reveals why the protection of infrastructures at sea is a difficult task. Reviewing the spectrum of maritime infrastructures (transport, energy, data, fishing, ecosystems) and the potential threats to them (accidents, terrorism, blue crime, grey zone tactics) demonstrates that designating infrastructures as critical and worthy of special protection measures is a political choice. The analysis moreover shows the need of protective instruments that are tailored to the specificities of maritime space, and the need for integrating diverse policy fields, including defense, diplomacy, marine safety, maritime security and cyber security. Cooperation with the infrastructure industry, enhanced surveillance and investments in repair capacities are also required.
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.
In a new book, senior researcher Jessica Larsen analyses how relevant anti-piracy legislation was enforced when international ship contributions and regional coastal states cooperated on anti-piracy off the coast of Somalia in 2008-2016.
The book is a socio-legal study based on both clause analyses and ethnographic fieldwork. The book takes the reader on board a warship patrolling the Indian Ocean and into the courtrooms of the island nation of Seychelles, which conducted 17 piracy cases. Through interviews and observations, the book uncovers how anti-piracy legislation works in practice. Existing studies have primarily examined existing law. This book goes out into the field to also uncover applied law.
The analysis shows examples of ambiguity about which legal sources should be applied at sea. It identifies practices in court that show cases of impunity and questions legal certainty. The implications of this should be considered as counter-piracy off Somalia has been used as a model for counter-piracy elsewhere, such as in the Gulf of Guinea.