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.
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.
The 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) has for four decades been considered by many to be one of the most important legislative achievements of international law. It is revered as a “constitution of the oceans”, providing the legal framework for the governance of the oceans. This volume explores how the UNCLOS is functioning in various complex settings, how it adapts to new, emerging developments, as well as how it interacts with other regulations, both within the law of the sea regime and outside. Engaging in themes such as law and order at sea, UNCLOS' interaction with human rights and the role of private actors, the book raises complex questions in the application, understanding, and enforcement of the convention and how it can be envisaged, interpreted, and used in a dynamic world. The volume also raises methodological questions, the answers to which may enhance the predictability and coherence of the law under UNCLOS and thus secure its role as the predominant and relevant system for legal governance at sea for many decades to come. As a contribution to ensuring the future relevance of UNCLOS, the book will be a valuable resource for scholars, diplomats, judges and other practitioners who are working with and interpreting the law of the sea and related issues of maritime law, migration law, human rights law and humanitarian law.
Recent advances, especially in deep learning, allow to effectively detect ship targets in surveillance videos. However, the translation of these detections to the real-world locations of ships has not been sufficiently explored. The common approach in the literature is using a transformation matrix to convert a pixel to a real-world coordinate. However, this approach has three shortcomings: first, a set of reference point pairs has to be manually prepared to establish the matrix; second, the matrix always maps a pixel to the same real-world coordinate, ignoring that there is no one-to-one correspondence between discrete pixel coordinates and continuous real-world coordinates; third, this approach can only work with one camera. In light of this, we propose a technique PixelToRegion that explicitly takes into account the uncertainty in coordinate conversion by mapping each pixel to a spatial polygon. Next, we propose a new algorithm MCbSLE that can estimate ship locations using pixel sets from multiple cameras. The precision of location estimation by MCbSLE is enhanced through spatial intersection between polygons from different cameras. Experiments are conducted under 16 carefully designed multi-camera settings to evaluate MCbSLE wrt four factors: different ports, the number of cameras, the distance between cameras, and camera headings. Results on one-day ship trajectory data show that (1) an 79.8% accuracy in the number of coordinates can be achieved by MCbSLE when there are no more than 10 ships in camera views; (2) using multiple cameras can improve the precision of location estimation by one order of magnitude compared with using one camera.
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.