When the African Union concluded the negotiations on its African Integrated Maritime Strategy earlier this year it received much appraisal. The continent had finally woken up and recognized the importance of the sea, its economic potential but also what needs to be done to secure it. The strategy foregrounds the economic development potential of the sea, and as Jan Stockbruegger argued on piracy-studies.org reflects “a particular ‘African’ understanding and experience”. The conclusion of AIMS sparked some excitement across the continent and spurred debate on how the many challenges of governing the sea efficiently can be managed. Critical voices were skeptical whether the document is actually a “strategy” or should be rather seen as wishlist, pointing to ubiquitous parts of AIMS, such as the construction of giant aquariums or kick-starting a shipbuilding industry. The more critical issue is however what the relation between the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and the African Union will be in implementing the strategy. How to implement the strategy, distribute roles and responsibilities, and how to fund the actions that the strategy foresees. At present AIMS is a sensitive sprout that will require much care and indeed some fertilizers to grow into a strong tree. By summer the implementation task forces that was created within the AU legal office did not had an independent budget and an action plan and budget proposal hadn’t left the draft stage. A main hindrance for the work of the task force was that by the finalization of AIMS the bi-annual budget negotiations had already been concluded leaving little wiggle room for an AIMS budget.

What’s the state of AIMS now? To find out I met with the Taskforce in Addis Ababa. The taskforce within the African Commission remains a small team of four staff members. Its current main activity concerns the preparation of the work of a new strategic task forces. The new task force will consist of about 19 seconded representatives from regional organizations and member states working in a network structure. The task forces will lead the implementation strategy, prepare the budget as well make proposals concerning the organizational design what will eventually become a department of maritime affairs within the African Union Commission.
AIMS has had a slow start and not much of what the strategy has outlined has so far been translated into concrete projects. The first timelines of the AIMS action plan end in 2018. AIMS needs to catch up speed. 2015 will be the start of the African maritime decade. This might become a further incentive to make more efforts to translate AIMS into action.
One of the most important initial steps will be to follow the European Union account and to start developing overviews and mappings of who is doing what on the continent and what is the state of maritime governance, laws and institutions on the continent. A next step might be then to start developing a shared communication infrastructure, to ensure that the right people communicate to each other. Perhaps one solution in this regards could be a Mercury type infrastructure for the African continent. Given such a platform could be implemented relatively easily it might be a plausible step not only to ensure better continent-wide communication but to develop shared maritime situation awareness. The AU and the REC’s moreover will have to start claiming ownership and authority over maritime policy and start to orchestrate the diverse capacity building projects already going on, including those in place as part of the counter-piracy infrastructure in West and East Africa. Claiming such ownership will imply to scale up the involvement and indeed leadership in international fora such as the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia.

The AU can draw on much support in implementing the strategy. The EU has announced close collaboration between the EU Maritime Strategy and AIMS. That also NATO is willing to step up its support, was one of the outcomes of an academic seminar taking place in Addis Ababa on 20th of November. The seminar titled “AU-NATO Collaboration: Towards a strategic partnership” was organized by the research division of the NATO Defense College and the Royal Norwegian Embassy in Ethiopia. If the conference’s main focus were issues such as how to fix the estrangement between both organization stemming from the Lybia intervention, the support for the African Standby Forces, or training and capacity building more broadly, maritime security and AIMS was a theme that was continuously referred to as one of the areas in which more collaboration appears promising. And indeed representatives from the AU highlighted the vitality of the maritime domain, and threats such as illegal fishing, migration and piracy.
For AIMS to swim with the cleverness, agility and smartness of a dolphin, more will have to be invested in terms of political capital, but also financial resources. The African states do not stand alone in attempting to tackle such challenges. It might be time to think about the roles different actors, and organizations, including academia and think tanks can play in supporting AIMS. Perhaps it is time to create a Group of Friends of the African Integrated Maritime Strategy.

Capacity building is one of the most important responses to curb piracy and other forms of maritime crime. The international community has long recognized this. If the majority of capacity building projects were initially concerned about the prosecution and detention of piracy suspects the emphasis has gradually shifted towards maritime security sector reforms, and developing regional integration mechanisms in information sharing and developing collective responses. Two important missions in this regards are the EU’s MARSIC project and the civilian CSDP mission EUCAP Nestor both headquartered in Djibouti City. Both form part of a complex thicket of projects and programs, many of which are on a bilateral level. Today I had the opportunity to learn more about both of these missions.

Together with the Project Implementation Unit of the International Maritime Organization MARSIC is the backbone of the training programme of the Djibouti Code of Conduct (DCoC), a regional agreement concerned about developing a joint response to piracy. MARSIC, one of the least known EU capacity-building projects, assists the DCoC countries in developing and delivering their training program. If the building of the Djibouti Regional Training Centre (DRTC), which is supposed to become the core regional facility where training is conducted, is, after four years, still under construction, MARSIC has brought the training programme to life. MARSIC’s training consultant explained to me today, how course contents are selected through a prioritization procedure with national training coordinators, course content is developed with partners such as the World Maritime University based in Sweden, and how they are delivered. Courses usually take place in local hotels, are run 5 days, and are comprised of morning lectures as well as a practical day. MARSIC also runs regular piracy exercises together with the national focal points using the VENUS platform, a training version of MERCURY. Together the aim of the project is to develop a community of skilled counter-piracy practitioners. To do so MARSIC also has plans to establish a research facility, a library and online resources, although implantation suffers from technical difficulties (such as internet access) and a lack of funding, for instance for library resources. How the DRTC will be run, once construction is completed also remains an open question. This concerns not only intellectual support but also long term funding. With the closure of the Project Implementation Unit of the IMO and MARSIC ending in summer 2015 the question remains how the centre will be supported in the long run. If IMO continues its everyday support through its Maritime Security division, in the long run the centre will require a permanent donor. Yet, there are also some good news. Training coordination will be soon taken over by a local staff member and there are many indications that the training and exercises show effect. Maritime crime is a transnational problem, it is hence pivotal that DCoC as the main project emphasizing a regional responses receives ongoing support.

My second meeting was with EUCAP Nestor. Nestor is a mission that runs since 2012 and was supposed to prep up the level of capacity-building provided. As I wrote in an earlier blog it was long a mission in “search of a mission” as it faced staffing problems and it was unclear what gaps Nestor was supposed to fill. Capacity building is, as I wrote in my last lessons learned paper, one of the areas in which coordination has more or less failed so far. When Nestor was introduced this enforced the multiplicity of activities, and, one is tempted to say, the chaos and over-activity in the area. During my meeting with a representative from Nestor I was re-assured that the mission is increasingly finding its place. Nestor conducts a rich training program and following a strategic review in 2013, Nestor has a new mandate and is increasingly focused on Somalia. Offices in Mogadishu and Hargeisa will soon be opened and seven weeks training courses are run for the different coast guards of the regional entities and the Federal government. The emphasis of Nestor has shifted to a 60:20:20 formula. 60% of the activities devoted to Somalia, 20% to Djibouti, the Seychelles, and Tanzania, and the last 20% for support to the region, e.g. in the frame of DCoC. Discussing the coast guarding course revealed the many practical challenges capacity building faces. My interlocutor described the course as a “basic one”. And basic indeed it is, as part of the course content are skills such as swimming, marching or handling cameras for evidence collection.

Capacity building is one of the areas that will require ongoing investments, not only to stop piracy, but also to fight other maritime crimes. Getting the region to act together, and making nations realize what economic potential the blue economy holds and why they should care about the maritime domain will be important objectives. The coordination of capacity building is a failure. And one does not have to be a pessimist to state that it will continue to be a mess. But perhaps coordination is not the biggest issue. As Michel Soula from NATO highlighted at this week’s maritime security workshop in Geneva, duplication under the conditions of the scarcity of resources can be a virtue. Then the true issue is that the diverse capacity building missions start to learn from each other, including practical lessons, such as how to implement courses, or share facilities. Rather than coordination, the second issue might be seen in contradiction, that is, in trying to avoid that the content of training and the support in institution building and law drafting do not contradict each other.

The 17th plenary of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS) and its working group meetings will take place in Dubai from the 26th to the 28th of October. At the plenary I will give a short talk that provides an overview over the key results of the Lessons Learned Project on the group. The future of the CGPCS and the current counter-piracy architecture will be a key issue on the agenda, as will be questions such as how to improve capacity building coordination, how to re-shape the High Risk Area and to ensure high alert of the shipping community. The meeting will be followed by the high level conference “Securing State Recovery: Sustaining Momentum at Sea, Confronting Instability on Land” during which I will be moderating the plenary panel on “Lessons Learned from Maritime Piracy in the Horn of
Africa and a Framework for Future Cooperation”.

On the 19.9. I met with Marcieji Popowski, Deputy Secretary General of the EU’s European External Action Service to discuss the initial outcomes of the Lessons Learned Project of the Contact Group on Piracy off the Coast of Somalia (CGPCS) and prepare for the 2014 counter-piracy week in Dubai.

Yesterday I met with representatives from the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to discuss the future of counter-piracy and lessons learned from it. A core issue was the  IMO-run Djibouti Code of Conduct Process (DCoC). DCoC is one of the major responses to Somali piracy that conducts capacity building in the region in order to ensure the building of institutions that can prevent a long term solution to piracy. The management of DCoC will be re-organized in the coming months, the specific Project Implementation Unit shut down and the work transferred to normal IMO desks. This is on the one hand a clear signal of  how mature the DCoC project has become, with one of the final steps, the opening of the training center in Djibouti to be completed this year. On the other hand this development questions whether in future sufficient attention and energy will be invested by the IMO to go further steps in the implementation of DCoC. The visit also allowed for a longer lessons learned interview with Phil Holihead of IMO which is forthcoming with the Lessons Learned Project of the CGPCS.  

African Union building

The African Union is increasingly become a lead actor in African Maritime Security. With the conclusion of the African Integrated Maritime Strategy (AIMS) the core challenge is now to implement the ambitious project of strengthening Africa’s blue economy and addressing maritime instability. To discuss the implementation and how the international community can assist the AU, I am travelling to Addis Ababa from the 12th to the 18th of June, for a range of consultations and conversations. I am also attending a workshop organized by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation on the 16th and 17th which deals with the same manner. The workshop titled “African Approaches to Maritime Security: The AU and Continental Perspective” includes contributions by a range of African maritime security scholars and aims at evaluating the state of maritime security on the continent and identifying priorities.