Knowledge

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 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.

Satellite imagery has become a fundamental part for maritime monitoring and safety. Correctly estimating a ship's identity is a vital tool. We present a method based on facial recognition for identifying ships in satellite images. A large ship dataset is constructed from Sentinel-2 multispectral images and annotated by matching to the Automatic Identification System. Our dataset contains 7.000 unique ships, for which a total of 16.000 images are acquired. The method uses a convolutional neural network to extract a feature vector from the ship images and embed it on a hypersphere. Distances between ships can then be calculated via the embedding vectors. The network is trained using a triplet loss function, such that minimum distances are achieved for identical ships and maximum distances to different ships. Comparing a ship image to a reference set of ship images yields a set of distances. Ranking the distances provides a list of the most similar ships. The method correctly identifies a ship on average 60 % of the time as the first in the list. Larger ships are easier to identify than small ships, where the image resolution is a limitation.

Taking seriously debates in IR about the significance of materiality and noticing the prominence of materiality in contemporary counterpiracy interventions, this article combines insights from Science and Technology Studies (STS) with insights from the poststructuralist intervention literature. Both literatures highlight the importance of “constitutive effects.” Poststructuralists do so with attention to the effects of intervention in constituting, temporarily, the meaning of sovereignty, and STS scholars do so with attention to constitutive effects that processes at the level of materiality give rise to. By combining these two literatures, this article asks: how might we think about the constitutive effects of material aspects of counterpiracy interventions? This question is explored through a focus on two donor-funded pirate prisons in Somalia. By operationalizing the STS notions of coproduction (Jasanoff 2004c) and solution/problem-framings (Beck et al. 2016), the article broadens the study of how intervention practices give rise to constitutive effects by explicitly attending to processes at the level of materiality. This approach enables the article to highlight an important tension in contemporary intervention practices: a tension between donor's desire to delimit intervention contributions and the risk that such contributions (including presumably more easily delineated material aspects) give rise to effects that challenge this faith in neatly delimited forms of intervention. This tension is not only relevant in relation to Somali counterpiracy, but also in other intervention contexts. The article thus illustrates how STS insights can help advance our appreciation of the manifold dimensions and effects of contemporary interventionism.

Maritime security capacity-building is a growing field of international activity. It is an area that requires further study, as a field in its own right, but also as an archetype to develop insights for capacity-building and security sector reform in other arenas. This article is one of the first to analyse this field of activity. Our empirical focus is on the Western Indian Ocean (WIO) region. Here, international actors have launched multiple capacity-building projects, initially in response to Somali piracy. We document the significance, extent and variety of capacity-building activities in this region and examine the ways in which capacity-building at sea has incorporated innovative characteristics that develop and expand the capacity-building agenda as traditionally understood. Our conclusion highlights the need to pay more attention to the maritime domain in international security and development studies and considers ways in which the maritime capacity-building experience may offer important lessons for other fields of international policy.

In this video, Professor Christian Bueger (University of Copenhagen) presents the insights of a research project from the SafeSeas network. The presentation builds on a study of capacity building to fight piracy in the Western Indian Ocean.

A recently signed memorandum of understanding (MoU) between Ethiopia and Somaliland to develop the Port of Berbera and establish a naval base has sparked tensions and fears of conflict with Somalia. The MoU grants Ethiopia commercial access to Somaliland ports and a 20-kilometer lease for a naval base in exchange for Ethiopia's recognition of Somaliland's independence, drawing strong criticism from Somalia, which considers Somaliland part of its territory.

The article, ‘Logistics, Politics and Berbera in the Eye of an International Storm’ examines how the pursuit of economic development through logistics infrastructure can exacerbate political tensions and reignite historical conflicts. The Berbera corridor, envisioned as a pathway to peace, stability, and prosperity through economic interdependence, now underscores the potential for violent conflict inherent in modern logistics and infrastructure development. The case furthermore brings out the complex interplay of local, regional, and international interests at play in the Horn of Africa. Thus, the port's upgrade, intended to attract foreign investment and transform the area into a major trade hub, has intensified competition among Somaliland's clan lineages, inflamed historical tensions between Somalia and Ethiopia, and challenged the security and logistic interests of regional and global powers in the Red Sea and Western Indian Ocean.

The article is part of a special issue of Politique Africaine about the current armed conflicts in the Horn of Africa.

The cybersecurity landscape is evolving, driven by a reinforcing feedback loop of increasingly sophisticated attacks and defences. Threat actors, long benefitting from the asymmetrical “attacker’s advantage” of focused targeting, have now matured their organizational structures to facilitate tactical information sharing, technique specialization, the establishment of markets for buying and selling exploit and vulnerability information, and providing training on how to circumvent detection and defence systems.

This chapter provides first a discussion of how maritime security has been conceptualized and theorized and how the field has evolved. It discusses the more particular debates on dedicated maritime security issues: piracy, terrorism, smuggling, environmental crimes and the protection of critical maritime infrastructure. Although the oceans have featured occasionally in the literature on security, peace and development, it is fair to say that for decades scholars were suffering from what some have referred to as collective ‘seablindness’. A range of maritime insecurities have been extensively analysed. These include piracy; terrorism; various forms of smuggling; environmental crimes, hereunder illegal fishing; as well as a nascent literature on maritime critical infrastructures. With ongoing crises in different parts of the world’s oceans, maritime insecurity will continue to be recognized as one of the core dimensions of violence and insecurity. Maritime security also needs to be seen in the context of other international policy areas.