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.
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.
ABSTRACT: Climate change provides for improved conditions for maritime navigation and results in increased activity in the Arctic. Those increased activities influence the safety at sea and risk of accidents. A disaster as the Costa Concordia incident would have far more serious consequences in Greenlandic waters than it had in Italy, therefore the question of prevention and disaster-preparedness is crucial. One approach to avoid risks is to create specific legislation. The legal system guiding safe navigation of cruise ships in/around Greenlandic waters is complex: the legal regime for navigation is set in different general and specific international, regional and national legal acts, partly non-binding, therefore issues of effectiveness arise. Safety is also influenced by practical issues, e.g. the lack of sufficient nautical charts for Greenlandic waters and “preparedness” at land to handle potential disasters, such as the SAR-system and preparedness of different actors, for example hospitals.
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 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?
Long considered a cultural contact zone, the Mediterranean has become a weaponised border zone keeping refugees from Africa and the MiddleEast away from ‘Fortress Europe’. The Mediterranean has become excessively dangerous to cross, leading many commentators to call this maritime space a ‘massive graveyard’. The widespread indifference and enmity towards migrants in Europe is, amongst other things, countered by documentary and commemorative projects by artists drawing attention to the suffering of drowned refugees. In this paper, I zoom in on documentary and memorial artistic projects by Mimmo Paladino, Jason deCaires Taylor, Christoph Büchel, Ai Weiwei and Đỉnh Q. Lê. In the frequent absence of dead bodies and specific grave sites on the ‘high seas’, they make claims regarding the humanity, singularity and memorability of the human lives of refugees drowned at sea. Based on a description of the artworks and their public, I make two interlinked theoretical arguments. First, the commemorative materialisations by contemporary artists are temporal claims to constitute the cultural heritage of the future. Second, given the sea’s aquatic materiality, the commemorative claims of these art projects require that commemorative materialisations must spatially move from the flux of the sea to the fixity of the land.
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.
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.