"Since 1898," "Little Boats" and "Sovereignty" (original) (raw)

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This article explores a seaborne genealogy of sovereignty and governmentality by drawing on the case of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt. It argues that a particular form of totalizing sovereignty emerged through the Levant Crisis and its resolution in 1841 when the Mediterranean became mare clausum. Subsequently, it demonstrates how a rivaling seaborne genealogy of sovereignty and governmentality complicates the standard Foucauldian narrative of the emergence of governmentality. In contrast to the classic land-based history of sovereignty and governmentality, a seaborne story can point to a different and earlier periodization of colonization that involves the acquisition of naval stations, outposts, and customs houses hidden under the veneer of naval science.

As nations determine how to best balance their use of scarce national resources in today’s complex, interconnected and sometimes troubled global economy, it is vitally important that they make the correct security and economic decisions for their citizens and national economic, political and social institutions and interests. Decisions made today to husband national resources will have follow-on repercussions on the future stream of those very same resources. It is costly to invest in naval and military capability; in the long run, it may also be costlier not to. This paper will define the freedom of the high seas and why these freedoms are important to a nation’s security, diplomatic, social and economic goals. While it may not be possible to reduce the value of naval and supporting military capability and infrastructure required to ensure these goals are met to concrete transactional costs and benefits; objective and subjective benefits will be hypothesized – economic, diplomatic, political, and military value. It will explore the need for strategic alliances between nations as each determines the price it is able or willing to pay for a maritime force to safeguard those goals. Finally, it will make strategic recommendations on how to best protect those freedoms.

How do mobilities associated with oceans and the resources inside of them shape the spatial and temporal dimen- sions of state sovereignty? As an entry point into this question, this article explores the fifty-year, multistate strug- gle over access to, and control over, highly migratory tuna stocks in the Pacific Ocean, focusing on the historical relationship among Pacific Island states, the United States, and the United States–flagged tuna fishing fleet. The analysis corroborates scholarship in resource geography and political geography that demonstrates that sover- eignty is neither inherently territorial nor exclusively organized on a state-by-state basis, enhancing it to show that the lively nature of oceans and mobile global capital extracting resources from them create a wide range of political possibilities for state influence. The findings reveal that to gain control over, or access to, mobile ocean resources, states construct and express sovereignty in relation to each other and the interests of global capital. At times, multiple and conflicting legal institutions and definitions of sovereignty over the same set of resources can simultaneously be in play. The result is temporally and spatially dynamic sovereignty that is continuously negoti- ated among “foreign” and “national” interests forced together by fluid ocean materialities and the mobile nature of transnational fishing capital vying for extraction privileges. This analysis reveals mobilities as generative of more-than-territorial institutional innovations that continuously remake the spatial contours of state sovereignty over resources. Key Words: mobility, oceans, region, sovereignty, territory, tuna.

Reseña del libro "poder Naval y Modernización del Estado: política de construcción naval española (siglos XVI-XVIII). Bonilla Artigas/Iberoamericana Vervuert, 2011.

Recent concern over criminality and perceived impunity at sea (including inter alia piracy, IUU fishing, environmental crime) has resulted in a popular image of the high seas as a lawless space. Whilst there is clearly a considerable body of law that actually applies to the high seas under UNCLOS 1982 and elsewhere, if we instead focus on the freedom of the seas (mare liberum) and its regulatory consequences as encoded and perpetuated through UNCLOS, especially through the principle of exclusive flag state jurisdiction (EFSJ), the imagery of lawlessness has a great deal more resonance. Nevertheless, in this chapter I show how the EFSJ principle is far more limited, both conceptually and practically, than is often presumed. Indeed, despite the evident disincentives to effective enforcement that it arguably creates, it still leaves a great deal of room for proactive legislative and policy measures from port, coastal and flag states alike.

In 1908–1909, maritime commerce, fishing and traffic in the Sulu Archipelago in the southern Philippines almost came to a standstill due to a surge in piracy and coastal raids that challenged US colonial rule in the area. The leader of the outlaws was a renegade subject of the Sultan of Sulu, a Samal named Jikiri. Together with his followers, Jikiri was responsible for the murders of at least 40 people in numerous raids on small trading vessels, pearl fishers, coastal settlements and towns throughout the archipelago. In spite of the concerted efforts of the US Army, the Philippine Constabulary and private bounty hunters, Jikiri was able to avoid defeat for more than one and half years, before he was eventually killed in July 1909. His decision to take to piracy was triggered by the failure of the US authorities to pay compensation for the loss of the traditional claims that many families in the Sulu Archipelago had to the pearl beds of the region, as stipulated by a law on pearl fishing adopted in 1904. The law was in several respects disadvantageous to the native population of Sulu and this – together with the high-handed behaviour of the local officers in charge of the Sulu district from 1906 – fuelled widespread discontent with colonial rule and led several of the leading headmen of Sulu covertly to sympathize with, and protect, Jikiri and his followers. This sponsorship combined with the general reluctance of the population to cooperate with the US military explains why Jikiri was able to defy the vastly superior US forces for so long. American officers at the time tended to attribute the depredations to the allegedly piratical nature of the Sulus, but this article argues that the so-called 'decay theory', first proposed by Raffles a century earlier, is a more appropriate explanation of this surge in piracy.

In 1908–1909, maritime commerce, fishing and traffic in the Sulu Archipelago in the southern Philippines almost came to a standstill due to a surge in piracy and coastal raids that challenged US colonial rule in the area. The leader of the outlaws was a renegade subject of the Sultan of Sulu, a Samal named Jikiri. Together with his followers, Jikiri was responsible for the murders of at least 40 people in numerous raids on small trading vessels, pearl fishers, coastal settlements and towns throughout the archipelago. In spite of the concerted efforts of the US Army, the Philippine Constabulary and private bounty hunters, Jikiri was able to avoid defeat for more than one and half years, before he was eventually killed in July 1909. His decision to take to piracy was triggered by the failure of the US authorities to pay compensation for the loss of the traditional claims that many families in the Sulu Archipelago had to the pearl beds of the region, as stipulated by a law on pearl fishing adopted in 1904. The law was in several respects disadvantageous to the native population of Sulu and this – together with the high-handed behaviour of the local officers in charge of the Sulu district from 1906 – fuelled widespread discontent with colonial rule and led several of the leading headmen of Sulu covertly to sympathize with, and protect, Jikiri and his followers. This sponsorship combined with the general reluctance of the population to cooperate with the US military explains why Jikiri was able to defy the vastly superior US forces for so long. American officers at the time tended to attribute the depredations to the allegedly piratical nature of the Sulus, but this article argues that the so-called 'decay theory', first proposed by Raffles a century earlier, is a more appropriate explanation of this surge in piracy.

This chapter discusses the historical practice of privateering, in particular its role in the making and breaking of empires. Focusing on privateering allows us to highlight both the persistence of past institutions and the extent to which the present breaks with the past. Privateering disrupts tidy dichotomies, such as between mediaeval and modern, public and private and state and empire. Today, privateering is most obviously present through its absence. The Treaty of Paris of 1856, which abolished privateering, helped normalizing the idea of a modern state with a monopoly on legitimate violence and the oceans as a global common under the control of benign hegemons. Ambiguities between private and public violence at sea were forgotten, as was the extensive ‘peripheral’ agency, obvious in how privateering was used time and again to oppose the leading powers of the day.