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"Maritime security"
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The rule of law and maritime security
Does the rule of law matter to maritime security? One way into the question is to examine whether states show a discursive commitment that maritime security practices must comply with international law. International law thus provides tools for argument for or against the validity of certain practices. The proposition is thus not only that international law matters to maritime security, but legal argument does too. In this article, these claims will be explored in relation to the South China Sea dispute. The dispute involves Chinese claims to enjoy special rights within the ‘nine-dash line’ on official maps which appears to lay claim to much of the South China Sea. Within this area sovereignty remains disputed over numerous islands and other maritime features. Many of the claimant states have engaged in island-building activities, although none on the scale of China. Ideas matter in such contests, affecting perceptions of reality and of what is possible. International law provides one such set of ideas. Law may be a useful tool in consolidating gains or defeating a rival’s claims. For China, law is a key domain in which it is seeking to consolidate control over the South China Sea. The article places the relevant Chinese legal arguments in the context of China’s historic engagement with the law of the sea. It argues that the flaw in China’s approach has been to underestimate the extent to which it impinges on other states’ national interests in the maritime domain, interests they conceptualize in legal terms.
Journal Article
Maritime security
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.
Journal Article
The disciplined sea
This article details the evolution of maritime security from the perspective of its impact on the historical architecture of sea space. It argues that, as the fundamental unit of governance, zoning provides keen insight into the mechanics of maritime security. The article observes that Britain’s Hovering Acts in the late eighteenth century represent the earliest example of modern zonation at sea and that they exhibit a shift from early modern territorial claims based on imperium and dominium. The article explores the way these hovering zones shaped the rationale underlying contemporary maritime security. It finds that maritime security has effectively relegated national security to a minor spatial belt of state power, while elevating non-traditional understandings of security to the level of global existential threat. The future of maritime security is under construction. Increasingly segmented by interconnecting, overlapping, multi-functional zones that seek to regulate all free movement and usage of the sea, security developments are reorganizing the maritime sphere. Nonetheless, the article argues, despite the novelty of this development, a historical military logic persists in new formations of security-oriented practices of maritime governance.
Journal Article
Piracy studies coming of age
How, as a sub-set of maritime security, can piracy studies contribute with conceptual insights of relevance to the field of international security governance and international politics more broadly? To answer this question the article examines, with reference to critical intervention studies, how responses to Somali piracy have had constitutive effects, notably ‘back onto’ the intervening actors themselves. More specifically, three themes are examined: regulation (law), structures (institutions) and practices (actors), each of which highlights a distinct sense of contingency, which both characterizes contemporary security governance at sea and makes ‘the maritime’ an interesting domain for the study of constitutive effects related to the making of intervention actors. In light of this, the article argues that studying ‘the maritime’ can offer conceptual insights to the constitutive effects of counterpiracy interventions that may prove relevant to broader debates about governance and security in a changing world order.
Journal Article
AI in Maritime Security: Applications, Challenges, Future Directions, and Key Data Sources
The growth and sustainability of today’s global economy heavily relies on smooth maritime operations. The increasing security concerns to marine environments pose complex security challenges, such as smuggling, illegal fishing, human trafficking, and environmental threats, for traditional surveillance methods due to their limitations. Artificial intelligence (AI), particularly deep learning, has offered strong capabilities for automating object detection, anomaly identification, and situational awareness in maritime environments. In this paper, we have reviewed the state-of-the-art deep learning models mainly proposed in recent literature (2020–2025), including convolutional neural networks, recurrent neural networks, Transformers, and multimodal fusion architectures. We have highlighted their success in processing diverse data sources such as satellite imagery, AIS, SAR, radar, and sensor inputs from UxVs. Additionally, multimodal data fusion techniques enhance robustness by integrating complementary data, yielding more detection accuracy. There still exist challenges in detecting small or occluded objects, handling cluttered scenes, and interpreting unusual vessel behaviours, especially under adverse sea conditions. Additionally, explainability and real-time deployment of AI models in operational settings are open research areas. Overall, the review of existing maritime literature suggests that deep learning is rapidly transforming maritime domain awareness and response, with significant potential to improve global maritime security and operational efficiency. We have also provided key datasets for deep learning models in the maritime security domain.
Journal Article
Regional maritime security in the eastern Mediterranean
Recent developments in the eastern Mediterranean, such as significant gas finds; disagreements over the demarcation of maritime boundaries; large-scale violence and political instability following the Arab Spring; mass migration via sea routes; Great Power dynamics in the region; and environmental hazards, make the political entities along the shores of the eastern Mediterranean part of a regional security complex and create strong incentives for regional coordination on maritime security. Material international relations theories predict that growing security challenges (realism) coupled with expected gains (liberalism) will facilitate regional cooperation. Yet, the political entities in the region rely mainly on unilateral actions, or limited quasi-alliances in response to these challenges. The article shows the puzzling gap between the theoretical expectation and practical outcome in the region and explains why regional cooperation in the maritime domain fails to occur. It argues that cooperation on a regional scale fails to take place due to three complementing reasons: 1) lack of shared ideational features like cultural traits, set of values and regime type; 2) enduring rivalries between political entities in the region (Israel–Palestine; Turkey–Greece–Cyprus) coupled with internal strife within other regional political entities (Libya; Syria); and unequal political standing and lack of sovereignty of some of the political entities in the region (Northern Cyprus; the Palestinian Authority and the Gaza Strip).
Journal Article