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Coast Guards and Ocean Politics in the Arctic pp 11–24Cite as

Maritime Sovereignty, Rights, and Cooperation

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Abstract

Maritime issues have been climbing the political agendas since the early 2000s. This chapter explores the foundational background for how and why states acquired rights at sea in the first place, and how this fit with various conceptualisations of the maritime domain. It maps how states’ rights at sea came about more generally, and how the ocean differs from land in terms of sovereign rights and legal institutionalisation throughout the twentieth century. Concepts such as ocean governance, territorial waters, the EEZ and the continental shelf, as well as UNCLOS (Law of the Sea), are explained and discussed. Finally, this chapter turns to examine how and why states cooperate at sea, based on theories from the field of international relations.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See Paine (2013) The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World and Steinberg (1999) Navigating to multiple horizons: Toward a geography of ocean-space.

  2. 2.

    Keohane and Nye (2012, 75) performed the same task in Power and Interdependence from 1977, highlighting all the various ways society’s utilisation of the ocean had changed from the 1940s until the 1970s: ‘By 1970, however, technology had increased mankind’s ability to exploit the oceans’ space and resources, thus raising questions of scarcity and stimulating countries’ efforts to widen the area under their jurisdiction in order to exclude other countries from the resources.’

  3. 3.

    See Baker’s (2013) instructive thesis on the norm of territorial integrity in the maritime domain.

  4. 4.

    See https://www.un.org/depts/los/reference_files/chronological_lists_of_ratifications.htm.

  5. 5.

    See for example Neffenger (2014) and Norwegian Government and Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs (2014).

  6. 6.

    The alternative formulation is ‘under what conditions can we expect war’.

  7. 7.

    See for example Fearon (1995), Keohane (1984), Keohane and Nye (2012), Krasner (1983), Mearsheimer (2001), Moravcsik (1997), and Waltz (1979, 1959).

  8. 8.

    See for example (Vasquez 1995; Hensel et al. 2008).

  9. 9.

    Or ‘liberal institutionalism’. As a strand of IR theorising often lumped in under the umbrella of ‘neoliberalism’.

  10. 10.

    Krasner’s characterisation of a regime from 1982 has become the go-to definition of it in studies of international cooperation. He defined a regime as ‘a set of implicit or explicit principles, norms, rules, and decision-making procedures around which actor expectations converge in a given area of international relations’ (Krasner 1982, 2). Regimes tend to—by most definitions—be more specific than international organisations and their related policy areas. Regimes are thus issue-specific, such as ‘clean water’, ‘indigenous rights’ or ‘sustainable fisheries.’

  11. 11.

    As outlined by Checkel (2008, 52–53).

  12. 12.

    See Adler and Barnett (1998), Campbell (1998), Checkel (2005), Hopf (2002), Johnston (2001), and Wendt (1994, 1999).

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  1. Fridtjof Nansen Institute, Lysaker, Norway

    Andreas Østhagen

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  1. Andreas Østhagen
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Østhagen, A. (2020). Maritime Sovereignty, Rights, and Cooperation. In: Coast Guards and Ocean Politics in the Arctic. Palgrave Pivot, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0754-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-0754-0_2

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