Maritime Insecurities

Introduction (400)

In March 2019 the UN Security Council held its first open debate on transnational organized crime at sea. It was the first official general debate the Security Council held on maritime insecurity, yet, it was a reflection of the degree to which questions of maritime insecurity in different parts of the world had increasingly occupied the Council's agenda since the late 2000s. According to Wilson (2018), who has conducted a systematic analysis of all UN Security Council resolutions, in the past decade the Council has issued an unprecedent number of resolutions, amounting to no less than one published every two and a half months. The issues discussed in the Council include piracy in the Gulf of Aden and the Gulf of Guinea, the smuggling of narcotics and weapons and the violation of sanctions, illegal fishing and other maritime crimes, as well as inter-state disputes at sea. Such maritime insecurities are now widely seen as a threat to peace and security, and as a challenge to reach the UN Sustainable Development Goals, in particular goal fourteen addressing life below water.

The UN Security Council agenda is a good representation of the general trajectory that maritime security has taken. Until the 2000s, maritime security was primarily seen as a minor issue on the international agenda of ocean governance and as a problem which could be dealt with by the specialized UN agencies, such as the International Maritime Organization in charge of the regulation of shipping or the Food and Agricultural Organisation and its work on fishery. This has substantially changed. Many states and major international security organizations have started to address questions of maritime security. An initial trigger was concerns over terrorism at sea following the terrorist attacks of 2001 in the US, but it was severe difficulties in containing piracy off the coast of Somalia from 2008 which raised the profile of maritime insecurities as an issue of policy and strategy as well as an academic field of study.

This chapter provides firstly a discussion of how maritime security has been conceptualized and theorized and the field has evolved. We then proceed in discussing the more particular debates on dedicated maritime security issues, in particular piracy, terrorism, smuggling, environmental crimes and the protection of critical maritime infrastructure. We end in discussing a range of avenues for research that will strengthen our understanding of maritime insecurities and their relation to development and security. state conflicts and naval strategy. The field was opened by area studies scholars who were interested in regional manifestations of violence at sea, in particular piracy in Southeast Asia and its relation to extremist violent groups, as well as the patterns of regional cooperation emerging in response to it (e.g. Vagg 1995;Renwick and Abbott 1999;Liss 2010). The field was significantly broadened with the rise of terrorism studies in the post-2000 era. Scholars were interested in the potential of maritime terrorism and means of preventing it (Murphy 2010;Luft and Korin 2004;Young and Valencia 2003). This also brought a significant first wave of legal scholarship on security issues at sea and how the institutions created by the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea and other legal regimes could respond to these (e.g. Guilfoyle 2009). The escalation of piracy off the coast of Somalia and the substantial international response widened the legal debate (e.g. Geis and Petrig 2011; Guilfoyle 2013), but also brought in a range of scholars interested in international interventions and the security and development nexus Gilmer 2014) and the relation to state failure (Hastings 2009;Shortland and Varese 2015), but also international relations theorists (e.g. Struett et al. 2013;Lobo Guerrero 2008, Wirth 2016. The migration crisis in the Mediterranean and the security response to it opened a dialogue with security scholars that had studied migration and borders for decades (e.g. Andersson 2015;Rjipma and Vermeulen 2015;Tazzioli 2016). Increasingly, Maritime Security Studies has formed as a subfield of security studies in dialogue with various intersections to international law, criminology, geography as well as other social sciences.

Comparable to other security conceptions (Jackson, this volume), maritime security remains a widely used but weakly defined concept (Bueger 2015). Several IR scholars, in particular constructivists, have in the meantime offered theoretical frameworks for the study of maritime security and the contours of the field. In her overview of the literature, Percy (2018) for instance argues to define maritime security studies via the issues that form part of the agenda and how these challenge international rule and order. She identifies three types of issues: firstly, conventional security issues that "center around issues of geostrategic importance, such as access to natural resources, or freedom of transit across the oceans" (Percy 2018: 607); secondly, security problems caused by breaking the rules, that is expressions of maritime crime such as piracy and smuggling (Percy 2018: 613); and, thirdly, security problems caused by inappropriate or unclear rules, such as the problem of flags of convenience or inappropriate fishing regulations (Percy 2018: 615). Bueger (2015) argues for the productivity of two types of approaches: Firstly, a semiotic approach that investigates how different actors build relations between maritime security and other more established concepts, such as seapower, naval strategy, marine safety, economic development or human security. This calls for studies on how actors relate these concepts to each other, situate particular issues such as piracy or migration at sea in the spectrum and thereby define the concept. Secondly, a practice theoretical approach which investigates the kind of activities security actors engage in under the banner of maritime security. This includes practices such as security governance, operations at sea, or knowledge production about threats at sea. Other theory-oriented works have focused on cooperation and institution building that emerge in the response to maritime security issues (Percy 2016;Bueger 2013), or employed the securitization approach to understand the new salience for maritime security (e.g. Malcolm 2016). Part of the field is also constituted by substantial research on different actors and how they have engaged in maritime security (e.g. on the European Union by Germond 2015 andRiddervold 2018). Throughout such work the perspective has increasingly become more and more holistic, acknowledging the breadth of maritime security issues and how they are interconnected, a trend that is also visible in international law (Klein 2011;Kraska and Pedrozo 2013). As we discuss in the next section, the field however continues to be characterized by debates around particular maritime insecurities, their manifestations in different locales, the institutional responses to these and the meaning of these for larger theoretical questions of violence and international order.

Issue-specific debates on maritime insecurities (3060 words)

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.

Piracy

Piracy has been a risk to seafarers through history but became particularly urgent as a global governance issue with the rise (and fall) of Somali piracy around 2008. Other major geographical hotspots include the Malacca Straits in Southeast Asia since the 1990s, thus pre-dating the surge of Somali piracy, and later also the Gulf of Guinea off the West African coast from the 2010s.

In Southeast Asia, piracy and regional counter-piracy measures have been scrutinized comprehensively in the literature, not least through several edited volumes (Ong-Webb 2006;Lehr 2007;Beckman and Roach 2012). The Gulf of Guinea has more recently been examined, introducing the specific Nigerian version of piracy and its surrounding conditions (Murphy 2013;Onouha 2013;Ezirim 2018). However, it was with the surge of Somali piracy that a wealth of studies was published, arguably dominating thematically the academic field of maritime security for a while.

Firstly, much effort has been put into clarifying the nature of piracy. This includes its root causes (e.g. Joyner 2009; Pham 2010), its enabling factors and motivations (Lucas 2013;Percy and Shortland 2013;Klein 2013) and its practices and organizational structures (Hansen 2009(Hansen , 2012Dua and Menckhaus 2012;Dua 2013). Broadly drawing on the state failure debate, this literature suggests that piracy flourishes in environments with weak institutional capacity and insecurity. However, Hastings and Philips (2018) recently provided a competing explanation. The success of piracy has been also argued as a cyclical rise and fall, where piracy's demise is contained within its own success -a progression, where an increase in the actual threat sparks international response and intra-criminal group conflicts, leading to a 'web of criminality', whereby piracy groups latch on to other types of crime (Nincic 2013).

Secondly, discussions abound on an appropriate response to piracy. If weak law enforcement and poverty are considered main drivers of piracy, the rule of law and socio-economic development in the affected regions are broadly assumed as the appropriate response. In consequence studies aim to assess the law enforcement operations taking place at sea and the capacity-building of regional security sectors on land, again particularly in the western Indian Ocean region (Roach 2010;Bueger 2011). A substantial sub-branch analyses the nature and challenges of the relevant legal regimes, which enables responses to piracy (e.g. Art and Kontorovich 2010; Treves 2009; Guilfoyle 2013a). Some of the more specific engagement with the legal regimes governing piracy show the innovative governance mechanisms characteristic of counter-piracy. For instance, while UNCLOS dedicates a whole eight articles to piracy, the UN Security Council played an important legislative role in providing a sufficient mandate and legitimacy to operations (Guilfoyle 2008;Wilson 2018). Likewise, it gave rise to new flexible modes of cooperation (Bueger 2013b;Percy 2016). Counter-piracy law enforcement is exemplary for broader global governance challenges in the way it sits in the complex interface between international and domestic law (Larsen 2015, but it also creates significant practical challenges and legal problems of inter-state cooperation and legal oversight (Gathii 2010;Petrig 2014;Lorenz and Paradis 2015). Finally, the role of the private sector has been scrutinised, as the introduction of private armed security companies brought its own set of challenges (Liss 2013;Guilfoyle and Kraska 2013;Spearin 2014).

Piracy studies is a wide-reaching strand in maritime security studies. Insights from piracy studies may thus provide the analytical pointers for which to deepen the understanding other types of maritime insecurities, or other regions. While piracy in Somalia and Southeast Asia has largely been curbed for now, the Gulf of Guinea is posing a growing threat to seafarers. As a topic, its relevance thus continues, but similarities between regions and methods should not be assumed and rather require researchers to move from deskwork to fieldwork to uncover to what extent relations can be made. Also, broader sociocultural questions of, for instance status and becoming in Sub-Saharan Africa (e.g. Vigh 2006), are perspectives that could help illuminate the nature and motivations of piracy and which could bring the field further, both in the study of piracy studies and broader maritime insecurities.

Terrorism and extremist violence at sea

The potential use of the sea by extremist violent groups became an initial concern when the Palestinian Liberation Front hijacked the cruise liner Achille Lauro in 1985. Yet, extremist violence at sea only became a pertinent issue with the rise of the transnational terrorism discourse in the early 2000s.

Studies started to explore vulnerabilities and the potential of maritime terrorist attacks (Farrell 2007;Bateman 2007;Murphy 2010). Empirically oriented studies focused primarily on Southeast Asia, analysing organisational and strategic dimensions of groups (Banlaoi 2005) and region-specific suggestions on how to combat the threat (Young and Valencia 2003).

As Somali piracy rose, maritime terrorism often became conflated with piracy in academic literature. In the context of maritime insecurities in the western Indian Ocean, analytical connections are thus assumed between Somalis conducting piratical attacks on the one hand and Islamist fundamentalists on the other, for instance militant groups like the Somali Al Ittihad Al Islamiya and al Shabaab (Murphy 2011;Stevenson 2010;Joyner 2009). Its regulatory regimes are sometimes analysed together (Burgess 2006;Kontorovich 2010). Murphy (2010) investigates the connections between terrorism and piracy in more general terms. Finding that the one allows the other to persist, the argument echoes that of Nincic's cyclical understanding above of maritime insecurities as webs of criminality.

However, by way of sociological observations, some scholars point to the opposite of the above claims, namely that Islamist groups have to date been the most successful in countering piracy on the ground (Beri 2011: 459;Pham 2010: 329;145;Nincic 2009: 10). Yet the alleged link persists, thus also prompting discourse analysis to document a legitimation of militarised responses to Somali piracy, arguing that the terrorist framing allows states with interests in international trade to respond with force (Rothe and Collins 2011).

While the actual extent of the connection is still unclear in a Somali context, the link is decidedly stronger in other areas. In Southeast Asia, the Philippine radical Islamic Abu Sayyaf group have undertaken kidnapping and hijackings, thus performing what may be defined as piracy (Gunaratna 2003). Likewise, the militant group Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta have conducted sabotage and hijackings in Nigerian waters under claims of economic and environmental exploitation by multinational oil companies (Murphy 2013).

Due to the conflation, there is an opportunity to decouple maritime terrorism studies and flesh out more the specificities in their own right vis à vis on-going events. Both the connections, similarities and dissimilarities require further attention, as they hold both policy and conceptual implications. More recently, an emerging debate is shaping around maritime terrorism in the West African region, again with a focus on how to combat it (Suh 2019). But a decade of counter-terrorism operations in the Indian Ocean, as well as events in the Red Sea and Strait of Hormuz between 2017 and 2019, provide an empirical base for studying extremist violence at sea.

Smuggling by sea

In this strand of literature, the smuggling of people and goods have taken centre stage. While happening all over the world, it is particularly irregular migration in the Mediterranean Sea that has caused concern for a number of years. Human trafficking also continues to mar certain communities in developing countries, feeding transnational criminal networks with money and forced labour, hereunder for prostitution. The UN Convention on Transnational Crime (UNTOC 2000) has protocols dedicated to human smuggling and trafficking respectively, seeking to curb the plight of each, not least in so far as it takes place at sea.

The literature on smuggling tends to move on a certain level of abstraction vis à vis the plight of the protagonists. As a security issue, the implementation of laws and conventions has been reflected upon in substantial volume by scrutinizing for instance the adequacy of the international legal framework (Klein 2014;Attard 2015) and the political dynamics of implementing them (Aalberts and Gammeltoft-Hansen 2018). Taking a securitised perspective on humanitarianism, human smuggling has also been studied from the perspective of border control. They span the treatment of 'boat people' and asylum seekers in the 2000s (Barnes 2004;Pugh 2004), to the legality and accountability of naval responses in the Mediterranean in the 2010s (Coppens 2012; Cusumano 2019; Ghezelbash et al 2018). Other regions, for instance the dubbed 'hot spot' of the Malacca Strait, have been subject to investigations on the root causes of human smuggling on both state and regional levels (Stanslas 2011;Amri 2015), and with private sector involvement (Ford and Lyons 2013).

Human-centred approaches to studying human smuggling at sea are few. In the broader migration studies there is an established literature on the risks of transborder movement, tightening policy responses and their humanitarian and socio-economic implications, hereunder also the perils and conditions of human trafficking. Yet less illuminated stand contributions specifically revolving around the maritime dimension of the smuggling of people, with few important exceptions that explore from a bottom-up perspective the meaning of migration by sea (e.g. Lucht 2010), and social and political dynamics of (maritime) borderlands in human trafficking (Munro 2012).

Based on these insights gained in the literature on maritime smuggling and trafficking, a criminal typology across regions could push an understanding of some of the more general mechanisms at play around organized crime and how forms of smuggling at sea interrelate, also leading to conceptual frameworks for the analysis of maritime insecurities. Likewise, attention to micro-processes of implementing convention-based frameworks and the collaborative practices it produces is a gap ready to be filled to better understand the effects of policy. While human-centred studies are perhaps few, the protagonists may be reachable in containment camps and diaspora, whereas it is more challenging from a practical perspective to study the inner workings of actual smuggling activities and their networks. This access is an obvious inroad to study further the maritime dimension of smuggling.

Environmental crime and illegal fishing

In the context of maritime insecurities, environmental crimes cover activities that relate directly or indirectly to a diverse range of the issues such as depletion of natural resources, illegal fishing, smuggling of coal, oil theft, as well as wildlife crime such as poaching. In and of themselves, they have significant and deep overlaps with other types of maritime crime.

A central debate is on illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. IUU fishing contributes to the depletion of livestock, degradation of the marine ecosystem and the disruption of traditional livelihoods. It therefore has major environmental, economic and social impacts on many littoral communities, as well as on the international fishing industry. Studies on illegal fishing are not least nested in the fisheries and environmental management literature. Often taking a regional perspective, it addresses problematic issues along the value chain related to the extraction of marine resources, for instance examining the effectiveness of the multilateral administrative bodies set up to monitor transboundary fishing activities in Southeast Asia (Williams 2013), or the capacity of fisheries management systems and frameworks to curb illegal fishery in South Africa (Raemaekers et al 2011). It also analyses specific measures within the toolbox of regional fisheries management organisations, for instance the problem of flags of convenience (Reffell 2005), the attributes of technology, such as satellite identification systems in marine protected areas (Fournier et al 2018) and improvements to economic and regulatory frameworks (Le Gallic and Cox 2006;Erceg 2006). In so doing, IUU is approached as a fisheries management issue, sometimes from a legal perspective but focusing on procedural and institutional processes to curb the problem.

However, there is an increasing understanding of environmental crimes not as a management issue but as one of transnational organised crime. This has been put forth as a broad-based argument, pointing to the links between environmental crime and transnational criminals and terrorist organisations (Bergenas and Knight 2015). Again, in particular the topic of IUU fishing has been a major focus: as a UN Office on Drugs and Crime study found, illegal fishing activities are interlinked with other forms of maritime crimes, such as human trafficking and drugs and weapons smuggling (UNODC 2011). While suggesting illegal fishing as a crime is not new in itself, the marriage of fisheries and security in an international context has brought an important perspective, which establishes a criminological approach to IUU, for instance analysing the drivers of, and conditions conducive to, IUU fishing (Osterblom et al. 2011;Liddick 2014). This has important policy implications in so far as IUU fishing is still inadequately addressed and ill-defined as an illegal activity in international law, straddling elements of transnational organised crime and environmental crime and enjoying no uniformity across domestic jurisdictions (see Palma-Robles 2015).

The introduction of a crime-focused perspective on IUU fishing has also made possible a framing of the question of illegal fishing by way of security discourses. It gives voice to the impact of illegal fishing on small island states and coastal communities (Haenlein 2017;Malcolm 2017). This relates not least to the global policy agenda of the Blue Economy and, in turn, opens up for securitisation perspectives. Here, Ferreira (2018) has argued that the increased presence of military forces, enhanced law enforcement infrastructure and surveillance mechanisms at sea may give rise to an escalation of tensions and conflict in regional maritime domains. It could, however, be countered that improved regulatory structures and collaborative governance can not only prevent securitisation tendencies but also increase efficiency in countering environmental crime. But this is a point worth further investigation from both practical and theoretical perspectives.

Critical infrastructure and ports

A final issue central to maritime insecurities is the protection of critical infrastructure, hereunder sea lines of communication, chokepoints and maritime installations such as data cables, ports and naval bases. As the maritime security debates above, the academic debates around this spring from events unfolding on the ground, as rising tensions in the maritime domain play out, e.g. through territorial disputes in the South China Sea and the increasing appropriation of maritime infrastructures in the Indian Ocean.

Leaving port safety, efficiency measures and the more technical -and technological -literature on supply chain management aside, studies focus on measures taken to protect critical infrastructures. Terrorism and smuggling are seen as central for port security (Gunasekaran 2012;Watts 2005;Eski 2011), thus interlacing multiple maritime insecurities into port spaces and practices. Accordingly, the approaches recommended draw on conventional understandings of state-centric security measures in the operations of ports (Romero 2003), international standards, such as the International Ship and Port Security Code (see Nurduhan and Kuleyin 2018), or the extent to which armed security contributes to port security (Sciascia 2013).

A number of works highlight the political and security dynamics around maritime infrastructures. Malcolm (2016) investigates the securitization of ports in the UK and how these are increasingly subject to surveillance and other security practices. Critical logistics have studies conceptualised ports as one example of how critical infrastructure gives material and symbolic expression to practical configurations authority and power (Campling and Colas 2017;Chalfin 2018;Gregson et al 2017;Lobo-Guerrero and Stobbe 2016) and as expressions of new forms of governance in which public and private actors converge (Cowen 2014). Another line of enquiry approaches ports as an exponent of broader geopolitical developments. The case of the western Indian Ocean and Red Sea stands prominent here, where authorities in the Horn of Africa currently partnering with shifting constellations of external public-private actors to pursue policy goals close to the state apparatus, such as the construction of deep-water ports or hosting new military bases. Analysis is emerging on the political dynamics and security effects of these developments, either from the perspective of Gulf states (Meester et al. 2018), China (Huang 2018), or the regional host states (Amin 2018;Gebreegzabhere 2018;Cannon & Rossiter 2017). A larger debate surrounding this evolving problem complex is the question of states' increasing geostrategic claims to global maritime domains (Wang 2016) The more experiential dimensions of port security, be it from the perspective of perpetrators or port security actors are limited. Important exceptions include Eski (2016), who in a European context has explored operational port police officers' construction of self in the face of the seemingly 'absent terrorist other', taking a critical stance on the ritual measures of global security. Also, Dua (2017) has studied the role of ports across the Horn of Africa and how developing states are catapulted into the international economy through global circulation, linking state formation to different modes of portmaking. What seems a next step in this emerging literature is dedicated attention to the range of transnational organised crime in and around critical infrastructure, and the modes and changing spaces of governance that they produce in practice.

Summary

Much literature focuses on maritime insecurities as threats to the global commons on a general level of policy and study responses. Few studies seem to systematically analyse the root causes, criminal practices and socio-economic repercussions related to the maritime insecurities from the bottom up, i.e. not drawing on primary data from affected regions. There are practical factors of course limiting empirical studies of maritime insecurities, thus shaping the existing narratives, e.g. conflating piracy and terrorism (which from a legal standpoint is highly problematic), or simply restricting the extent to which scholars are able to understand maritime insecurities properly. Indeed, Liss (2013a) highlights the difficulty of conducting research on maritime security issues. These include reliability of, and access to, data; the sensitivity of the issue hampering the localisation of both informants willing to talk and shipping industry representatives willing to share; and the complexity of actors and networks on both sides of the law. However, the empirical entanglements, combined with the gravity of the subject, are precisely what could make the continued quest for ethnographically based research a fruitful avenue going forward.

There is a fruitful space of analysis in the exchange between IR scholarship with its express focus on countering maritime insecurities with anthropology, criminology and area studies, which seek to understand better the ecology of maritime crime. In this space, relevant perspectives may in turn emerge that allow the assessment of how to address it in the most relevant fashion.