Territoriality, sovereignty and accumulation strategies in the global ocean
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
No booking required
Dr Liam Campling, Senior Lecturer in Political Economy at Queen Mary University of London, and Alex Colas, Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Birkbeck College.
This paper explores territoriality in the sea as it is articulated with and by processes and actors in dynamics of capitalist development, with particular reference to the Law of the Sea. Oceanic territoriality in the shape of borders, jurisdictions and other spatial delimitation is only ever a legal form (there are no fences in the seas) but it profoundly shapes the accumulation strategies of extractive industries, the rent capture and regulatory potential of states, and the possibilities of employment conditions and labour organising. The paper will explore the contradictory expressions of maritime territoriality and development through three case studies.
Flags of convenience produce a mobile 'border within a border' on boats, so that despite falling under a state's 'static' domain of sovereign rights, boat owners are subject only to the labour and environmental regulations of the flag state.
For state-property in the oceans, exclusive economic zones are a moment of (contested) state formation and a resource for government revenue capture from moving mechanisms of accumulation (fishing boats), but simultaneously EEZs are a space of corporate 'ocean grabbing' that is often bitterly contested by coastal communities.
And finally, interstate tension over the jurisdiction of oceanic territory - shaped by claims to sovereignty over isolated uninhabited rocks in the sea - bleeds from and into geo-political struggles around resource (and other forms of) nationalism.
Through this prism of territoriality, delimitation, jurisdiction and development, we seek to make sense of these three cases of socio-political conflict and suggest connections among them. Finally and more generally, we argue that far from being an atypical, lawless or exceptional space, the oceans are typical of the problem of property and the contested nature of territorial sovereignty on land.
Contact name:
Jasmine Gideon