Introduction
Maritime security has become one of the core concerns of the international community in recent years. Driving this interest has been the rise of a series of new or newly resurgent security challenges and forms of disorder at sea. These include the growth of piracy off the coast of Somalia and elsewhere, but also a series of other issues including the impact of illegal fishing activities, the trafficking of people, narcotics and weapons at sea, and the potential for maritime terrorism. In response, increasing attention has been paid to building capacity to provide maritime security in national waters as well as to protect the global commons. This book analyses and compares the different attempts of countries to develop responses to maritime security, as well as the work of the international community in assisting them in this process. The focus of analysis is the Western Indian Ocean region. This region presents a paradigmatic case of the contemporary maritime security environment. It has also become an international laboratory for testing ideas of how to organize responses to maritime security and how to provide international assistance through capacity building. Capacity building, while a contested term (Bueger and Tholens, this volume), concerns the building of new institutions, forms of coordination, writing of laws, creating of new forces, or training and enhancing existing ones, or the investment in new equipment, buildings, or vessels.
These maritime security activities represent a relatively novel field of national and international activity. Over the past two decades, countries have gradually recognized the importance of understanding the broader security challenges at sea and the potential instabilities they cause. However, even resource-rich western nations often struggle with how to organize their maritime security responses effectively. A recognition of these challenges is evidenced by the recent proliferation of maritime security strategies as a means to provide coherence and better organizational structures for such tasks. Countries like the United States (US), United Kingdom (UK), Spain, or France have developed such strategies, as has the European Union (EU).
The focus of this book is on the Western Indian Ocean region. In this region the majority of countries lack the resources available to the United States or European States, and often have less initial capacity to draw on in the first place. Coastal countries like Kenya or small island states, such as the Seychelles, face significant maritime security challenges, and also see new opportunities for economic development at sea. Yet, because for decades these countries have focused on security and development issues on land, their capacities to meet the challenges and exploit the opportunities presented by the maritime arena have been limited. Their maritime governance structures are often not well organized, while their capacities for enforcing maritime laws, deterring crime at sea and monitoring maritime activities remain limited. Against this background, this volume addresses two core questions. First, how can maritime security be organized under such conditions? And, second, how can states be supported effectively through international assistance?
In this introduction, we set out the context and explore the character of maritime security. We discuss the novelty of the agenda, and the complexity of the various challenges it presents. We then set out the framework used in the succeeding chapters. We develop a layered analytical framework through which to study and compare maritime security capacity building experiences. These layers comprise: first, the problematization of maritime space, including how in each country the maritime has been turned into a problem requiring political action, such as the redesign of governance structures and the creation of new capacities for maritime security. Second, we investigate the institutional and maritime security governance structures each country has developed to deal with the identified problems. In a third layer, we study the projects, reform processes and capacity building initiatives through which the selected countries aim to improve their maritime security governance structures and practical responses. We continue by discussing why the Western Indian Ocean is a particularly interesting region in which to study these challenges, and briefly introduce the seven country cases that this book studies in detail. We end in an overview of the organization of the volume.
Maritime Security and the Blue Economy: Complexity and Challenges
Over the past two decades, some significant changes have occurred in thinking about the maritime space. The rise of a new maritime security discourse has drawn attention to the dangers posed by disorder at sea, while a thriving blue economy discourse points to the economic and developmental potential of the maritime arena, as well as the environmental and sustainability challenges it faces. In the following sections, we discuss the rise of the maritime security agenda and how it is linked to blue economy discussions. We go on to examine the complex security governance challenges that are presented by the contemporary maritime environment and their implications for capacity building.
Reproblematizing the Sea and the Rise of Maritime Security
Expanded notions of security in the maritime sphere began to gain substantive intellectual and policy traction around the turn of the millennium. Of particular significance was the 1998 report of the Independent World Commission on the Oceans (IWCO). Published to coincide with the UNās International Year of the Oceans, this considered a range of military and non-military threats to international order at sea, as well as the manner in which maritime security governance should be reconfigured to address them (IWCO 1998, 17).
This process gathered further momentum in the wake of the attack on the USS Cole in the port of Aden by an extremist group in 2000 and the rise of piracy off the coast of Somalia from the mid-2000s onwards. It led to a flurry of international interest and activity in these areas. This had two main aspects. The first was the development of a series of novel-counter piracy responses in the Western Indian Ocean region and elsewhere (see Bueger 2013, McCabe, this volume). These included multilateral naval missions, new governance and coordination mechanisms, the development of best practice guidelines and secured transit zones for shippers, the establishment of a new transnational legal system for the prosecution of suspected pirates, and an explosion of international maritime security capacity building efforts targeted at littoral states in the region (Bueger and Edmunds 2017; Bueger et al. 2020). These responses were distinguished by their novelty and multinational character, but also by the ways in which they endured after the decline of Somali piracy in 2012. They have broadened to include maritime security issues beyond piracy such as drug trafficking and have been reproduced in other maritime regions such as the Gulf of Guinea.
Second, these operational responses were accompanied by the development of maritime security strategies by states and international organizations with the purpose of delineating the maritime security challenge and identifying the ways and means to respond to it. They include documents from the US (2005), NATO (2011), Spain (2013), the UK (2014), the EU (2014), France (2015), the Group of Seven (G7) (2015), and the African Union (AU) (2014, 2016), among others. While such strategies problematize the maritime space in security and economic terms in different ways, the overall thrust of each of these approaches is essentially holistic. The EU Maritime Security Strategy (2014, 3) for example conceptualizes maritime security as āa state of affairs of the global maritime domain, in which international law and national law are enforced, freedom of navigation is guaranteed and citizens, infrastructure, transport, the environment and marine resources are protectedā. The AUās 2050 AIM Strategy emphasizes the importance of maritime resources and trade to economic security and development in the continent, with a focus on capacity building in areas including coastguard capabilities and port facilities (African Union 2012, 8ā10).
These approaches represent an attempt to understand and engage with the maritime arena as an interlinked complex, comprising multiple different though often related security challenges, and incorporating themes of law enforcement, criminal justice, economic (blue) development, and...