Showing papers by "Christian Bueger published in 2019"

Maritime security: The uncharted politics of the global sea

Abstract: In this introduction to a special section of the September 2019 issue of International Affairs, we revisit the main themes and arguments of our article ‘Beyond seablindness: a new agenda for maritime security studies’, published in this journal in November 2017. We reiterate our call for more scholarly attention to be paid to the maritime environment in international relations and security studies. We argue that the contemporary maritime security agenda should be understood as an interlinked set of challenges of growing global, regional and national significance, and comprising issues of national, environmental, economic and human security. We suggest that maritime security is characterized by four main characteristics, including its interconnected nature, its transnationality, its liminality—in the sense of implicating both land and sea—and its national and institutional cross-jurisdictionality. Each of the five articles in the special section explores aspects of the contemporary maritime security agenda, including themes of geopolitics, international law, interconnectivity, maritime security governance and the changing spatial order at sea.

Performing piracy: a note on the multiplicity of agency

Abstract: This is a study of pirate agency. Starting from an understanding of agency as an effect of ‘agencements’, I offer a reconstruction of six of such formations. Relying on different experiences with Somali piracy, ranging from watching movies, playing computer games, participating as an observer in various meetings, taking field notes, talking to interlocutors to reading academic literature, I show how different agencements produce different forms of agency. Throughout this reconstruction, we meet different pirates, moral bandits, enemies and villains, criminals, entrepreneurs, pirates as ‘symptoms’ and the pirate in denial. These are forms of agency that are the effects of the relations and practices of distinct agencements. Various ‘actors’, ‘objects’ and ‘practices’ produce these relations: journalists, moviemaker, game developer, diplomats, military officers and international bureaucrats, as well as various scientists across the disciplinary spectrum are all in the business of producing pirate agency. They engage in a diverse set of rhetorical and material activities, such as calculating, modelling, negotiating, writing or history telling and engage with a broad host of artefacts, and inscriptions, such as movies, games, policy documents, or legal texts. The analysis presents a primer for the study of the multiplicity of agency and its production.