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.
The oceans have received extraordinary international attention in global policy and research. New insecurities and uncertainties, ranging from intensifying interstate disputes to persistent piracy and overfishing as well as to pollution, deoxygenation and climate change imply that the oceans are increasingly seen as being in crisis. This revolution in thinking about and addressing the oceans is driven by new ideas of why the oceans need political attention and care. In this article we demonstrate how four key new ‘blue paradigms’—maritime security, blue economy, ocean health and blue justice—have evolved and turned the oceans into a new area of priority. Each of these paradigms drives global ocean politics in different directions, which implies risks of fragmentation and conflicts. We work out the key differences between paradigms, investigating their underlying problematization, priorities and communities of practices involved. This provides a new map for navigating the complexity of global ocean politics useful for policy-makers and scholars. Thinking through paradigms also establishes a new analytical framework that allows for identifying conflicting priorities, tensions between ocean communities of practice, and ideas of how these can be managed. We conclude with a call for creative thinking of how synergies between the blue paradigms can be achieved in strategy, planning and research.
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.
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 introduction to a special section of the September 2019 issue of International Affairs, we revisit the main themes and arguments of our article ‘Beyond seablindness: a new agenda for maritime security studies’, published in this journal in November 2017. We reiterate our call for more scholarly attention to be paid to the maritime environment in international relations and security studies. We argue that the contemporary maritime security agenda should be understood as an interlinked set of challenges of growing global, regional and national significance, and comprising issues of national, environmental, economic and human security. We suggest that maritime security is characterized by four main characteristics, including its interconnected nature, its transnationality, its liminality—in the sense of implicating both land and sea—and its national and institutional cross-jurisdictionality. Each of the five articles in the special section explores aspects of the contemporary maritime security agenda, including themes of geopolitics, international law, interconnectivity, maritime security governance and the changing spatial order at sea.
Maritime medicine deals with the health of seafarers, fishermen, and offshore employees and, more specifically, with their employment, working and living conditions, and their health and safety at sea. Maritime doctors should have the appropriate training and competencies to provide the equivalent service as would be found on land. This review discusses a) the required skills and competencies of maritime doctors and b) explores the associated ongoing discussions for the establishment of a global accredited Masters programme in maritime health. A literature review was conducted using 2 databases: PubMed and Google scholar. Search terms included: maritime doctors, maritime medicine, occupational health, and skills and competencies. Literature published between 1990 and 2018 was prioritised. Thirty-five articles that discussed the skills, competencies, and education of maritime doctors and health professionals were retrieved, reviewed, and discussed, plus 8 reports and documents from relevant International Organisations webpages. We explored policies in relation to training using i) the health triangle and ii) the Kingdon model. Doctors who serve in the sector should have extensive knowledge about medical practice, but also about the environment of seafaring. The complexity of their roles, coupled with the provision of a high quality of services in global shipping, call for high quality accredited training and harmonisation of maritime health practices. The analysis of policy, using 2 policy models, showed that a window of opportunity appears to be in favour of a policy regarding the recognition of maritime medicine as a medical specialisation. International stakeholders, together with the International Maritime Health Association, should actively advocate such a perspective which will be in favour of seafarers, who will enjoy better health and wellbeing, with higher income while avoiding ill-health, as well as the shipping industry, which will employ satisfied and loyal employees, and will enjoy a higher reputation.
Aims and objectives: Seagoing employees must undergo medical examinations every second year. Even though International Organisations issued guidelines for these pre-employment medical examinations there is a lack of an internationally accepted continuous training programme for the maritime doctors who perform these examinations. The aim of this survey was to examine the Danish maritime doctors perceived training needs as part of a planned comprehensive maritime occupational health prevention programme.
Methods: A questionnaire based on international standards was distributed to all the maritime doctors (110) electronically in May 2017. The completed questionnaires were 46.4%. STATA was used for the statistical analysis of the data and correlations among the self-rated needs as dependent variables and the doctors characteristics were performed with Fisher exact test, with significance level at α=0.05%.
Results: The maritime doctors considered very important to receive training in “Fitness evaluation and medical examinations guidelines” (76.47%) followed by “Rules and regulations within maritime medicine” (68.63%) and “Working conditions and health risks on board” (62.75%). The number of examinations influenced their preference with those with more than 20 patients to express a more pressing need for training. Age, gender and years of practice did not have any influence in their self-rated needs. Furthermore, they pointed out flexible ways of training including distance learning and
the establishment of a webpage by the respective Authorities as one stop-shop.
Conclusion: Maritime doctors are in favour of continuous education and training. The survey may help the respective Authorities to organise such short courses on targeted topics in the country.
An adaptive spectral/hp discontinuous Galerkin method for the two-dimensional shallow water equations is presented. The model uses an orthogonal modal basis of arbitrary polynomial order p defined on unstructured, possibly non-conforming, triangular elements for the spatial discretization. Based on a simple error indicator constructed by the solutions of approximation order p and p-1, we allow both for the mesh size, h, and polynomial approximation order to dynamically change during the simulation. For the h-type refinement, the parent element is subdivided into four similar sibling elements. The time-stepping is performed using a third-order Runge-Kutta scheme. The performance of the hp-adaptivity is illustrated for several test cases. It is found that for the case of smooth flows, p-adaptivity is more efficient than h-adaptivity with respect to degrees of freedom and computational time.