Palgrave Studies in Maritime Politics and Security

This edited volume examines the political and security issues influencing and shaping the developing maritime order in the Indo Pacific. If focuses specifically on the impact of China’s maritime expansion upon the policies and strategies of the regional states as well as the major players. The chapters examine the interaction of these players, paying particular attention to Japan, as the originator of the Indo Pacific idea and promoter of security cooperation and regionalism. It also covers the responses of the ASEAN claimants, Vietnam, Malaysia, the Philippines as well as Indonesia, alongside the key players, India, the US and also the EU.

This open access book seeks to provide a survey of historical, geopolitical, economic, and environmental developments in the last 150 years and to highlight future challenges it faces as it pertains to the areas mentioned earlier. It argues that the centrality of the canal—geo-strategically and otherwise—requires a shift in scholarly focus to study the various aspects from an interdisciplinary perspective. This book addresses several gaps in the literature—the first being a lack of a systematic examination of historical aspects in the development of the canal in 150 years. The second is a careful study of the canal’s geostrategic importance. The third is a combination of several disciplines that examine the centrality of the Suez Canal.

This book explores the significance of Turkey’s Blue Homeland (Mavi Vatan) naval concept, which defines its maritime rights and interests in the surrounding seas – Aegean Sea, Black Sea, and the Mediterranean. The concept has a powerful socialized definition and a popular appeal across the political spectrum in Turkey with important implications for security in the wider Middle East. The book investigates the impact of geopolitics and domestic-political factors on the concept and uncovers motivations behind its trajectory since 2004 with a particular focus on the last several years, the period when Turkey’s naval assertiveness reached its peak following the failed coup attempt in 2016. Based on in-depth interviews with diplomats, naval officers, academics, and researchers in the field, the book takes the reader through a journey on how the Turkish government has reinforced an activist policy since 2016 due to pressures of regional insecurity, domestic coalition logrolling, and nationalist sentiment.

Great power competition is the watermark of the current global scenario. In this regard, the maritime and naval dimension have a particular relevance on the struggle for regional and global hegemony. This book has the potential to engage with multiple audiences, since develops an analytic approach to understand naval great power competition in the maritime spaces of the Global South. It is set within a neoclassical realism approach, while engaging literature from international relations, international security, and studies on the Indo-Pacific and the South Atlantic security dynamics. The book offers a unique conceptual framework to understand how great powers select their maritime strategies, presents a series of regional and global maritime strategies by the United States, China, Russia and India, while assess their impact in the Southern Oceans, focusing in the Indo-Pacific realm and the South Atlantic.

This book charts new waters in the study of European naval power. It explores the evolution of Europe’s navies from the final days of the Cold War to a period of hybrid wars and renewed strategic competition, manifest in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s increasingly aggressive behavior in the Asia-Pacific Region. The study compares and contrasts the development of maritime forces across the continent during a period of fundamental change within the global security environment. By applying a novel methodology that links strategies, force structures, and operations, the book determines when, why, and to what degree each navy either continued to focus on competitive and state-centric missions, aimed at the defense of national territory and interests, or rather embraced an entirely new naval paradigm, based on collaborative and system-centric understanding of shared maritime security. The author highlights how inconsistencies and shortsighted naval policies have led to dangerouscapability shortfalls and offers several recommendations for navies to navigate successfully the future maritime environment. This book provides an invaluable resource for policymakers, practitioners, scholars, and students interested in European security, transatlantic defense cooperation, and global maritime security issues.

As technological development and diffusion have greatly increased the resources states can recover from maritime space, the stakes of these conflicts have grown. Nowhere is this clearer than in East Asia. This book examines how technological change and diffusion impact East Asian maritime conflicts, and approaches for conflict management and resolution.

The book analyzes the environmental regulation of upstream marine exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons, at the international, regional MERCOSUR and Argentine national level. It uses the concept of normative integration as a methodological approach, critically assessing the interaction between the law of the sea, maritime law, environmental law and human rights law in the field of study. The book analyses the legal framework in a timeline, giving context to the evolution of the different branches of international law with sparkles of history. In this sense, the book also analyses international conventions’ bills on the subject that have not entered into force. The manuscript focuses on the reports from two marine pollution events (Deepwater Horizon and Montara oil spills) to analyse the lessons learnt and the normative and institutional framework needed to ensure environmental safety in the marine exploration and exploitation of hydrocarbons. The book critically analyses marine platform accidents’ official reports comprehensively in order to assess existing normative and institutional frameworks and to give a way forward regarding policies. The manuscript contributes to rethinking the governance of the ocean at the time of environmental challenges. In that context, it refers to the concept of normative integration and effectiveness. It takes the existing scholarship further by introducing the notion of “marine platforms” instead of “offshore platforms” to rethink the relationship between land and sea and to develop a functional approach to enhance existing regulations. This is an open access book.

The book examines India’s involvement in the Polar regions, focusing on its historical evolution and current scientific and political efforts. It also offers suggestions for enhancing India’s Polar policies, which primarily revolve around climate change and scientific research. The book highlights that India's extensive coastline may be at risk due to the effects of global warming caused by the melting of the Arctic and other ice sheets. As a significant international player, India is well set up to have substantial influence on shaping the policies of Arctic nations to promote sustainable development projects, as well as play a crucial role in the sustainable development of the Arctic, particularly in light of the geopolitical changes resulting from the Ukraine conflict. This timely book also delves into key topics such as Arctic geopolitics, shipping, and energy security. This analysis will be valuable for policymakers, diplomats, political scientists, academics, and students with an interest in these areas.

This book argues that the transformation of Japan’s defense since 2012 has been triggered by the emergence of the first threat to Japan’s territorial integrity since 1945, namely China’s continual challenging of Japan’s control of the Senkaku Islands. It shows how this threat led to Japan building its own version of an A2/AD strategy and contributed to the demise of the prohibition on not procuring long-range missiles. It argues that the new security documents of 2022 that mandate increasing defense spending to 2% of GDP, is the culmination of this Senkaku-driven post-2012 defense transformation. Nonetheless, Japan’s defense transformation faces significant challenges, including geographic and demographic, base-community relations, and limited SDF capacity. This book analyzes the implications of Japan’s defense transformation for its involvement in a military conflict over Taiwan between China and the USA. It argues that the attitudinal defensive realism of the Japanese public and many elites explain why the confrontation over the small and remote Senkaku islands led to a transformation of Japanese defense, and why this transformation has been limited to territorial defense and is not leading Japan to play a military role beyond its borders.

This book introduces a novel model to explain how the co-design and co-delivery of ocean science knowledge and solutions is influenced by ocean stakeholders with asymmetric power and resources, policy incentives and ocean conflict, ocean narratives, different knowledge systems, security concerns, principles, formal and informal rules, and communication competences. Using the International Collaboration in Ocean Science model as a basis, the book advances with three lines of inquiry: ontological security of ocean science participants, the Ocean Decade and human well-being, and strategic narratives about international collaboration in ocean science. Through these, Carolijn van Noort shows the enabling and constraining conditions of co-creating ocean knowledge and solutions. Theoretically novel, the book provides a compelling framework for scholars to study ocean science collaboration

China seeks geopolitical space in the Western Pacific . The spearhead of China's expansion is the navy which is now the world's largest with an expanding carrier force to enforce its maritime claims in the South China Sea and elsewhere.   The geopolitical pivot for China is Southeast Asia.  In view of China's constricted maritime geography, Southeast Asia is the one place that can provide access for  its expanding navy allowing China to expand in different directions.  Control of this region would deprive the US of a positional advantage in the Western Pacific,  It would divide the Indo Pacific into two sections, the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific., separating Japan from India and nullifying  the Quad grouping which brought together the US, Japan, Australia and India to counter Chinese expansionism. Because of its strategic value, Southeast Asia has become a key region in the rivalry between China and the US with its partners in the Quad.  However, Southeast Asia is a region of great diversity and some countries would side with China while others would resist it. Whether China can achieve control of this region is of great concern to the US and the Quad as it relates to Chinese long term ambitions and its challenge not just to the region but to the global order.