On the 26th and 27th of May, I had the pleasure to attend the 2nd expert meeting of the EU and China on maritime security organized by the European External Action Service in collaboration with the National Institute for South CHina Sea Studies.

The first session centered on different interpretations of the Indo-Pacific as a recent regional construct and how the EU is planning to engage with the region in the framework of its new Indo-Pacific strategy. The second session focused on the Indian Ocean and the challenges linked to blue crime. In my contribution to this session, I stressed the importance of taking a holistic understanding and paying attention to the inter-linkages between blue crimes and the associated problem of institutional proliferation in the region. I also flagged climate change and submarine data cable protection as two vital future issues on the maritime security agenda, and new fields for EU-China collaboration.

The second day focused on the South China Sea and on identifying pathways for better collaboration in the area.

What the root causes of maritime piracy are and how they can be addressed through external assistance remains one of the most pertinent questions of maritime security policy. This was the core problem that we addressed in a recent SafeSeas webinar.

The event centered around the recently published book “Piratelands. Governance and Maritime Piracy” by Ursula Daxecker and Brandon Prins (Oxford University Press). In addition to the authors, four commentators contributed to the debate: Stig Jarle Hansen, Anja Shortland, Jessica Larsen, and myself.

In my contribution, I stressed the importance of thinking local and paying more attention to the sub-national level of root causes, the need to better understand the inter-linkages of blue crimes, as well as working towards predictive models that can tell us what to do now to prevent the rise of the pirates of tomorrow.

A video recording of the event is available on the SafeSeas Youtube Channel. Follow the channel for future events.

On the 22nd of April I had the pleasure to give a presentation together with Tim Edmunds at the UK Maritime Threat Group. In the presentation we introduced the work and main findings of SafeSeas. In my part of the presentation I particularly flagged questions of the impact of climate change on maritime security as well as the importance of submarine data cables drawing on our recently published article.

A summary and discussion of the presentation is available on the SafeSeas website.

From the 6th to the 9th of April I am attending the annual conference of the ISA. The conference which continues to be the main meeting place for scholars in International Relations is fully virtual this year. I am giving short presentations at three different roundtables which concern key themes that I am concerned about theoretically at the moment.

The first roundtable, organised by Simon Pratt from the (U Bristol) and Rebecca Adler-NIssen (U Copenhagen) discusses how we can better study implicit and tacit knowledge and how the concept of “folk theory” might be useful to do so.

The second roundtable is a discussion on the potential of international political design. Design is here understood as redirecting social science towards the making of a diverse range of objects, and going beyond written text. Given my interests in working with practitioners, co-production, the design discourse provides interesting new directions. The roundtable is organized by Jon Austin and Anna Leander (Graduate Institute, Geneva).

The third roundtable that Filippo Costa Brunelli (St Andrews) and I have organized concerns the informalization of world politics. Scholars from different corners of International Relations will reflect on their work on informality, when and how global governors and statesmen turn to informal forums, such as the G groups, or world conferences, and what the consequences of this shift is. At the roundtable I will talk about my long term research with the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS), which is a paradigmatic case of a contemporary informal governance mechanism.

On the 24th of February I am giving a talk on Maritime Domain Awareness and its effects at the MARIPOLDATA Ocean Seminar Series organized by the University of Vienna.

The speaker series is organized by the ERC funded research project MARIPOLDATA that studies the power and influence of marine biodiversity data on ocean governance.

My talk draws on my recent book chapter that summarized the historical development of a global network of MDA centers. I theorize these developments through the conceptual framework of “epistemic infrastructures” that I developed in a 2015 article. The framework invites to study the practices through which MDA is designed, maintained and repaired. Contact me to receive the draft paper.

What are the current gaps and trends in international practice research? This is the core question that we will investigate at an upcoming online workshop on February 18th and 19th.

Co-organized by the EISA Section on International Practices, the Department of Political Science, University of Copenhagen, and the Center for Global Cooperation Research, University of Duisburg-Essen, we will discuss in two afternoons the state of practice research, future themes, as well as a set of ongoing projects from new voices in the debate. Davide Nicolini will provide the keynote address titled “Revisiting the Relationship between Practice and (Academic) Theory from a Praxeological Perspective”.

Find the detailed program and registration link here.

This week the most important informal governance forum addressing piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, the G7++ Friends of the Gulf of Guinea, is holding its meeting. A recording of the event is available here.

Upon invitation of the current chair, the US Department of State, I am giving a joint presentation with the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. We were invited to speak about how academic research might inform counter-piracy efforts.

The background is our research project AMARIS which is funded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. AMARIS analyses maritime insecurity in Ghana, and aims at informing policy by studying a paradigmatic case in the region. Our questions are: What can be learned from Ghana for the region? How can maritime security governance be reformed and what is the role of international assistance?

In the presentation I argue that academics can inform responses, on three levels:

1. Providing a better understanding of what the problem of piracy actually is by contextualising it, comparing it, and offering insights on structures, change and root causes.
2. By analysing what works and what doesn’t and laying out new alternative actions not previously considered.
3. In being directly part of the response, through awareness raising measures, science diplomacy or training and education activities.

With the presentation I hope to address some of the misunderstandings in terms of what academics can do and what not, but also ensure a more productive dialogue.

Contact me, if you are interested in a copy of the presentation or want to watch the video.

Why do we need blue criminology and what are its objectives? That was the key question we discussed at an event hosted by the University of Plymouth’s Center for Blue Governance.

Held on November 25th, Tim Edmunds and I presented our understanding of the concept of blue crime, based on a recently published paper. The concept of blue crime is an invitation to think across disciplines how organised crime plays out at sea. It also has the objective to investigate how different responses interrelate and what could be done about the fragmentation of the response.

The Information Fusion Centre (IFC) based in Singapore is one of the most important international hubs for sharing information on the maritime domain. It enhances the global understanding what issues at sea need attention.

One element of this work are frequent events for maritime stakeholders and an interested public. On the 25th of November I had the pleasure to contribute to the 2020 Maritime Security Webinar.

At the seminar I provided an overview of maritime information sharing initiatives and discussed the numerous challenges these face drawing on my recent article on the subject.