Panel

Maritime Security in Southeast Asia:
Old Rivalries, New Challenges
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Panel Proposal for the 6th EuroSEAS Conference,
Gothenburg, Sweden, 26–28 August 2010

In recent decades a number of unsolved traditional and non-traditional maritime security issues have come to the fore in and around Southeast Asia, involving both regional and extra-regional states and other actors. Some of the important issues are:

• maritime pollution, debris and other environmental problems;
• competition over maritime energy and seabed resources;
• illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing;
• smuggling by sea of arms, drugs and other contraband;
• trafficking and smuggling of migrants and refugees by sea;
• piracy and armed robbery against ships;
• maritime terrorism
• conflicting claims over maritime and littoral regions (e. g. the Paracel, Spratley, Sipadan and Litigan islands and Sabah);
• naval arms build-up in the region and controversies over the presence of extra-regional sea powers such as China, India, Japan and the United States;
• conflicting claims based on the Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZ) according to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea;
• the privatization of maritime security in the hands of private security companies.

All of these issues – many of which are closely related or interlinked – have transnational, regional and even global dimensions, making international cooperation imperative in order to tackle them. At the same time, for a number of historical and geopolitical reasons, international cooperation in the field of maritime security has been slow to develop, although some encouraging signs can be noticed in recent years, for example in the suppression of piracy in the Malacca Straits.

The panel proposes to provide an open forum in which these and other maritime security issues in Southeast Asia can be discussed from a comparative, historical, interdisciplinary and intersectional perspective.

For more information, please contact:
Stefan Eklöf Amirell
(Stefan.Amirell@ui.se)

Research Fellow
Associate professor
Utrikespolitiska institutet (UI)
/Swedish Institute of International Affairs (SIIA)
Drottning Kristinas väg 37
P. O. Box 270 35
SE-102 51 Stockholm, Sweden

Tfn/Ph: 46-(0) 8 511 768 21
Fax: 46-(0) 8 511 768 99

http://www.ui.se/
http://www.historisktidskrift.se/